Speaking Part 2 · Media & abstractIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Time When You Needed to Use Your Imagination
In short
“Describe a Time When You Needed to Use Your Imagination” 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 Time When You Needed to Use Your Imagination. You should say:
- •What the situation was
- •Why you needed to use your imagination
- •What you came up with
- •And explain how you felt about the result
Band 9 model answer
The situation was a week I spent looking after my niece and nephew, aged six and four, during a power cut that lasted the better part of two days — which is the most sustained demand on my imagination I have ever faced.
Why it was needed was simple arithmetic. Everything I'd been relying on ran on electricity. No television, no tablets, no lights after four in the afternoon in November, and a six-year-old who announced she was bored roughly every eleven minutes. I had two children, a torch, a dark house and about thirty hours to fill, and no possibility of stepping outside because it was raining continuously.
What I came up with was mostly improvised badly and then refined. The first thing was a shadow theatre against the living room wall with the torch, which I'd meant as a five-minute distraction and which became the organising activity of the whole two days — they made the characters out of cardboard from a cereal box, and by the second evening there was an ongoing story with about nine characters and a plot I couldn't follow. The second was a game where the sofa was a boat and the carpet was water, which is not original and which I recommend to anyone, because it is entirely self-sustaining. And the third, which I was proudest of, was persuading the four-year-old that the reason it was dark was that the house was 'sleeping' and we had to be quiet so as not to wake it, which turned the frightening part into a game and bought me a genuinely peaceful hour.
How I felt about the result was, first, enormous relief, and then something more interesting. The relief was that nobody cried, which had been my actual target.
The more interesting part was noticing that the two days were far better than the weekends where I'd had everything available. With a tablet in the room I'd have handed it over inside ten minutes and they'd have been quiet and I'd have felt vaguely bad about it. The constraint forced the invention, and the invention was the thing they actually remembered — my niece still asks about the shadow story, and she has never once asked about anything she watched at my house.
It's made me slightly suspicious of having everything to hand. I don't think I'm any more imaginative than I was; I just had no option but to use what I already had.
Make it your own: three angles
Entertaining children with no resources
The clearest structure — a real constraint, an invented solution, and a measurable result. Easy to make specific and funny.
Solving a practical problem with what was available
Good for improvisation vocabulary. Works well if the obvious solution was unavailable and you had to substitute.
A creative task — writing, designing, planning something original
Valid, but say where the idea came from and what you rejected, or the answer becomes a description of the finished thing.
What the examiner is listening for
Abstract cards make candidates vague, and vague is where bands are lost. Anchor it to ONE occasion with a real constraint and describe what you actually did, in sequence. The fourth bullet wants a judgement on the result — the model goes past 'it worked' to a genuine observation about constraint and invention, which is the kind of reflection that opens Part 3 rather than closing it.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Do you think you are a creative person?
- Did you invent games when you were a child?
- Do you enjoy stories or films with unusual ideas?
- Is imagination important in your work or studies?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Is imagination important for adults as well as children?
Very much so, though adults rarely call it that. Every plan involves imagining a situation that doesn't exist yet, and empathy is essentially imagining another person's position. What adults lose isn't the capacity but the practice — children are given unstructured time in which imagining is the only thing to do, and most adults have arranged their lives so that no such time exists.
Do you think technology reduces children’s imagination?
It's less the technology than what it displaces. A game that supplies the world, the characters and the rules leaves less for a child to invent than a stick and an afternoon. But plenty of digital play is genuinely creative — building games are a good example — so the useful distinction is between consuming something finished and making something, not between screens and everything else.
Can imagination be taught?
Taught directly, probably not. But it can be made more likely, and the conditions are fairly well understood: unstructured time, materials with no fixed purpose, and permission for the result to be bad. What reliably suppresses it is filling every hour and evaluating everything, which unfortunately describes a fair amount of modern schooling.
Why do some jobs require more creativity than others?
Because some problems have known solutions and others don't. Where the task is defined and repeatable, reliability matters far more than invention, and creativity can actively be a liability. Where the problem is novel — design, research, anything responding to people — someone has to produce an option that wasn't on the list. I'd say most jobs contain more of the second than their descriptions suggest.
Are people more imaginative when they have fewer resources?
There's decent evidence that constraint helps, and it matches my own experience — unlimited options tend to produce paralysis rather than invention, while a limit forces a decision. I'd add the obvious caveat that this is a claim about mild constraint. Real scarcity mostly produces exhaustion, and romanticising it is something people do from a comfortable distance.
Should schools give more time to creative subjects?
I'd argue yes, and not on the usual grounds that art is good for you. Creative subjects are among the few places where a student produces something original and is judged on the work rather than on recall, which is closer to how most adult work functions. They're also the first thing cut when budgets tighten, which tells you how they're valued rather than how useful they are.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to come up with something | to think of an idea |
| to improvise | to create something without preparation |
| to make do with | to manage with what is available |
| resourceful | good at finding solutions with limited means |
| to think outside the box | to think in an unconventional way |
| a constraint | a limit on what you can do |
| from scratch | from nothing, with no starting material |
| to keep someone entertained | to stop them getting bored |
| inventive | good at creating new things or ideas |
| to have everything to hand | to have everything easily available |
More cue cards
Describe a Game You Played in Childhood
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