Speaking Part 2 · PeopleIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Person You Only Met Once and Want to Know More About
In short
“Describe a Person You Only Met Once and Want to Know More About” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Person You Only Met Once and Want to Know More About. You should say:
- •Who this person is
- •When and where you met them
- •What you talked about
- •And explain why you would like to know more about them
Band 9 model answer
The person I'll describe is a man I sat next to on a train about eight months ago, whose name I know was Piotr and about whom I know almost nothing else, which is precisely the problem.
It was a four-hour journey and I had every intention of working. He was in his sixties, I'd guess, with an enormous canvas bag he had real trouble getting onto the rack, and I helped him with it, which is how the conversation started at all. Ordinarily that would have been the end of it.
What we talked about took an unexpected turn about twenty minutes in. He asked what I did, I told him, and then I asked the same, and he said he'd spent thirty years as a conservator restoring damaged paintings — and then, almost as an aside, that most of his work had been on pieces that had been looted during the war and were being returned to families who often hadn't known they existed. He talked about that for the better part of two hours. He described a painting he'd worked on for fourteen months, and the afternoon a woman in her nineties came to see it and recognised the room in the background as her grandmother's house. He was not remotely dramatic about any of it; he described it the way someone describes a job.
We exchanged no contact details. I have thought about this roughly once a month since. He got off two stops before me, said it had been a pleasure, and that was that. I didn't ask because it felt like it would have turned a conversation into a transaction, and by the time I'd reconsidered he was on the platform.
Why I'd like to know more is partly the obvious reason — he had a career I didn't know existed and clearly a great many more stories in it. But it's also that he was the least self-important interesting person I have ever met. He asked me questions the whole way and seemed genuinely more curious about my extremely ordinary job than about telling me any of this. I've met plenty of people with a tenth of that to say who made sure I heard all of it.
So I suppose what I actually want to know is how someone gets like that. I'd settle for the rest of the stories, but that's the real question.
Make it your own: three angles
A stranger on a journey
The strongest structure — the fixed, finite encounter explains why you never followed up, which is otherwise the hardest thing to justify.
Someone you met at an event or a wedding
Good if the setting gives you context, and it lets you describe the atmosphere as well as the person.
A guide, host or worker you met while travelling
Lets you bring in a place as well as a person, and it makes the language barrier or brevity a natural part of the story.
What the examiner is listening for
The hardest bullet is the last one, because 'they seemed interesting' says nothing. Name the specific thing you would ask them and why. Note also that this card rewards past perfect and reported speech heavily — 'he said he'd spent thirty years…', 'he told me that…' — and those forms are exactly what a Band 8 answer is expected to produce without effort.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Is it easy to make new friends where you live?
- Do you enjoy meeting new people?
- Do you usually talk to strangers when you travel?
- Have you ever stayed in touch with someone you met by chance?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do people find it easy to talk to strangers?
Precisely because there are no consequences — you'll never see them again, so nothing you say gets carried into the rest of your life. People will tell a stranger on a train things they haven't told their family. There's also no accumulated history to manage, so the conversation can go straight to what's interesting rather than working through the usual updates.
Are first impressions usually accurate?
They're fast and they're confident, which we mistake for accurate. Research suggests we do pick up some genuine signals quickly, but we also over-weight appearance, accent and manner, and then look for evidence confirming what we've already decided. I'd say first impressions are reasonably good at reading mood and quite poor at reading character.
Has technology made it easier or harder to meet new people?
Easier to find people, harder to meet them by accident. If you want to meet someone who shares a specific interest, that's never been simpler. But the chance encounters — the ones with someone you'd never have sought out — are shrinking, partly because we now fill every gap with a phone rather than talking to whoever is next to us.
Why do some people stay in touch and others do not?
Mostly circumstance rather than intention. Friendships need repeated, low-effort contact, and once that stops, keeping them alive takes deliberate work that most people don't sustain. There's also a curious threshold effect: past a certain gap, getting back in touch starts to feel like it requires an explanation, and that's often enough to stop someone doing it.
Is it important to be curious about other people?
I'd say it's one of the more useful traits a person can have. Practically, it's how you learn things no book would tell you. Socially, people respond enormously well to being genuinely asked about — most conversations are two people waiting to talk. And it tends to make you less certain about your own assumptions, which is usually an improvement.
Do people share too much personal information nowadays?
With strangers online, probably yes — a great deal is published to an audience people haven't really pictured, and it's permanent in a way conversation isn't. Face to face I'd argue the opposite: people are more guarded than they used to be, partly because everything feels recordable now. So we've become simultaneously more exposed and less open, which is an odd combination.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to strike up a conversation | to start talking to someone |
| to hit it off | to get on well immediately |
| a chance encounter | an unplanned meeting |
| to lose touch | to stop communicating with someone |
| unassuming | modest, not trying to impress |
| to pick someone’s brains | to ask for their knowledge |
| small talk | polite conversation about unimportant things |
| to come across as | to give a particular impression |
| a fleeting meeting | a very brief encounter |
| self-important | having an exaggerated sense of one’s own worth |
More cue cards
Describe a Time You Talked With a Foreigner
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