Speaking Part 2 · ObjectsIn the May–Aug 2026 forecast
Describe Something You Lost
In short
“Describe Something You Lost” 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 Something You Lost. You should say:
- •What you lost
- •When and where you lost it
- •What you did about it
- •And explain how you felt when you lost it
Band 9 model answer
The thing I'm going to talk about is a watch I lost a few years back — and not just any watch, but an old mechanical one that had belonged to my grandfather. It wasn't worth a fortune in money terms, but it meant an enormous amount to me, so losing it was genuinely one of those little disasters that stick with you.
It happened on a fairly ordinary weekday, actually. I was commuting home on a packed train after work, and I remember the strap had been feeling a bit loose for a while — I'd been meaning to get it fixed for ages and, typically, kept putting it off. At some point I must have taken my coat off, and I think the watch slipped off my wrist and either into the gap between the seats or onto the floor. The awful thing is I didn't even notice until I got home and went to take it off, and my wrist was just... bare.
I was in a complete panic, as you can imagine. The first thing I did was ring the railway's lost property office, and they told me to fill in an online form describing the item, which I did in ridiculous detail — I described the little scratch on the back and everything. After that it was just a waiting game. I honestly didn't hold out much hope, because let's face it, a nice watch on a busy train is exactly the kind of thing that tends to disappear.
As for how I felt — honestly, it hit me much harder than I'd have expected over what's essentially a small object. The overwhelming feeling was guilt, more than anything. It felt like I'd been careless with something irreplaceable, something my grandfather had worn every single day for decades and had specifically passed on to me. I kept replaying that train journey in my head, kicking myself for never getting the strap fixed. For a good week I felt this dull ache of loss whenever I glanced at my bare wrist out of habit. It really brought home to me how objects can carry a person's memory — it wasn't the watch I was mourning so much as the connection to him.
As it happens, there's a happy ending — some honest soul had handed it in to a station guard, and I got it back about ten days later. But that horrible sinking feeling has stayed with me, and I can tell you the strap got fixed the very next morning.
Make it your own: three angles
A sentimental item or heirloom
The 'how you felt' bullet almost writes itself, and it invites rich, emotional vocabulary.
An essential everyday item like a phone or wallet
Great for describing the practical panic and the concrete steps you took to find it.
Something lost while travelling
Adds a vivid setting and naturally pulls in plenty of past narrative tenses.
What the examiner is listening for
This card lives or dies on the fourth bullet, so narrate the loss quickly and save your best evaluative and emotional language for how it made you feel. Use past narrative tenses accurately — past continuous for the setting, past perfect for what had happened before — to show grammatical range.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Do you often lose things?
- What kinds of things do people lose most often?
- Do you do anything to help yourself remember where you put things?
- Have you ever found something that someone else had lost?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do you think some people are more forgetful than others?
I think a lot of it comes down to how much they've got on their plate. When your mind is cluttered with a hundred things, small details like where you left your keys are the first to slip. Some people are also just naturally more scatterbrained, whereas others are methodical by nature and always put things in the same place.
Do you think people are more careless with their belongings these days?
There might be something in that, mainly because so many of our things are cheap and easily replaced. If you lose a cheap pair of earphones, you just buy another pair, so there's less incentive to be careful. Things that are expensive or hard to replace, though, people still tend to guard closely.
What could public places do to help people recover lost items?
A well-organised lost property system makes a huge difference — somewhere central where staff log everything that's handed in. A lot of places are going digital now too, letting you report a lost item online and get a notification if it turns up, which is far more efficient than ringing round different offices.
Are people generally honest about returning things they find?
I'm probably more optimistic than most on this — my own experience is that the majority will hand something in if it's easy to do so. It obviously depends on the value; a lost banknote is far less likely to come back than a phone with someone's details on it. But on the whole I think there's more honesty out there than the news would have us believe.
Do you think we own too many possessions nowadays?
Definitely. Most of us have accumulated far more than we could ever really need, and a lot of it just sits in cupboards gathering dust. That's partly why the whole minimalist, decluttering movement has taken off — people are realising that owning less can actually be quite freeing.
How do people usually feel when they lose something valuable?
It tends to trigger a real mix of emotions — frustration and panic first, and then often guilt if they feel it was their own fault. If the item has sentimental value, the loss can hit surprisingly hard, because you're not really mourning the object so much as the memories attached to it.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| worth a fortune | extremely valuable or expensive |
| to put something off | to delay or postpone doing something |
| a waiting game | a situation in which you can only wait to see what happens |
| to not hold out much hope | to not expect a good outcome |
| to kick oneself | to be annoyed with yourself for a mistake |
| irreplaceable | impossible to replace with anything of the same value |
| to bring something home to someone | to make someone realise something clearly and strongly |
| a sinking feeling | a sudden, unpleasant sense that something is wrong |
| an heirloom | a valuable object passed down through generations of a family |
| lost property | an office or system that holds items people have lost in public places |
More cue cards
Describe a Mistake You Learned From
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