BỘ ĐỀ DỰ ĐOÁN IELTS Speaking Part 2 - Tháng 9-12/2019 (describe a past event)

A month ago I planned to buy for myself a new smartphone as my current one started acting up. At that time, I was considering between an Iphone and a Samsung smartphone, so I visited some technology websites to read user reviews and made comparisons between the two phones. I needed have a careful research before coming to the decision.

I accidentally browsed in a website called "dienmayxanh" which is the biggest mobile retail shopping site in Vietnam. I can tell that this website has done a very good job in providing useful information and visuals to help customers make their purchase decision.

To give a brief description about it, the site presents customers with details about specifications, functions and features of numerous smartphones. In addition to simple images about the phones like many other websites normally have, this website includes 3D visual illustrations of the phone. This has improved the friendliness of the website's user interface, capturing viewers' attention. Furthermore, the convenience of one-click ordering and rapid delivery to the customer's doorstep is pushing the online shopping experience in this website to new a height.

Eventually, I had a new smartphone in my hand just after 3 hours since I made the order and paid for the phone. That was incredibly fast as compared with other delivery I used to have with other commercial websites. 

For the reasons I just mentioned, I find my experience while shopping through "dienmayxanh" website enjoyable.  

It was a month ago when I took a day off from work after a long time working. I was really in need of relaxation, so on that day I did some activities to refresh myself and find balance in my soul. 

In the morning, I spent time reading books. Books never fail to offer me new insights into things and I lost myself hours in the imagination world created by the book I read. I remember reading a detective story and a fictional book about children.

In the late morning, I started making something healthy to eat and drink. Vegetarian food was what I made, including salad, pumpkin soup, apple pie and fruit juice. During weekdays, I usually eat ready-made food from convenient stores at lunch when I go to work. Therefore, I wanted to have a detox diet whenever possible. 

In the afternoon, when the sunlight was less strong, I visited a public park near my home to go jogging. This kind of exercise helped me to keep fit and refresh my mind after a stressful time period. To be more specific, I have experienced the positive effects of jogging after 30 minutes.

In general, I’d like get myself relaxed and comfortable by something gentle and easy like the activities I just mentioned and that’s all about an ideal free day of mine. 

I first read about this healthy lifestyle on a magazine during a flight to Singapore. This healthy lifestyle engages three main activities to strengthen your mental and physical health, including reading books, having healthy food and doing physical exercise. 

First, in order to live healthily, the article in the magazine suggests that people should spend around 1 hour every day reading books. The reason is that by losing oneself in the imagination world created by the book they read, people can temporarily and positively get distracted from the stressful world they are living. 

Second, people should eat something healthy at least one day a week. Vegetarian food is the best option, such as salad or pumpkin soup or vegetable pizza or apple pie and fruit juice. The fast-paced and busy life usually makes people choose ready-made food from convenient stores. However, they should try to have a detox diet whenever possible in order to to find nutritional balance for their body. 

Last but not least, people have to do physical exercise. Needless to say, it helps people to keep fit and refresh their mind after a stressful time period. By doing exercise regularly, they can have positive feelings and reduce the high risk of numerous unwanted diseases and improve their health conditions. 

And that's all I want to talk about a healthy lifestyle that I have read by chance.  

Several weeks ago I was shopping in a very popular bag store in Hanoi when I saw this cute leather bag. I was told that, if I’m not satisfied with the product, I can bring it back within a week for an immediate exchange or a full refund. I was generally quite happy with the deal. However, during the first week that I had it, I realized the bag was a little bit too small to fit my textbooks, so I took it back to the store, hoping that I could have something bigger.

To my surprise, the girls working at the store refused to grant my request for an exchange. Apparently in order to be returned, the bag must still be in the unopened packaging with original tags and tickets attached. It came to me as a huge shock and disappointment. They should have made it clear to me in the first place, then I would have considered it before purchasing the item. I mean, if you don’t take the thing out and really use it, how can you tell if you have any problem with it or not.

Anyway, the lesson learnt was, if something sounds too good to be true, it’s probably not true. Next time I should ask carefully about the exchanges and refunds policy to find out what the catch is so that any negative feelings can be avoided later.

Ms Tố Linh - IELTS Tố Linh (nguồn) 

Normally there aren't any occasions in my life making me wake up early in the morning. My full-time job starts at around 9:30 AM so I have plenty of time in the morning to get ready before getting out of my house. But today is immensely different because of the IELTS test. It starts at exactly 8:00 AM, so it is understandable that I have to get up at around 6:00 AM to get ready. In order to get up that early, I went to bed at around 10 p.m. the night before. However, an incident happened the next morning since my alarm clock on the smartphone didn't go off so I quite overslept. I intended to get up at 6 a.m. but it turned out to be an hour later that I got out of bed. 

Needless to say, I had little time to do personal hygiene. I remember I brushed my teeth quickly, washed my face with water only, instead of with cleanser as usual. Then, I combed my hair carelessly, changed my clothes as fast as I could, grabbed my stuff and raced out the door. I didn't even check appearance before a mirror like I normally do. Obviously I had to skip the breakfast and totally ignored the feeling of hunger in my stomach. I rode my scooter way too fast to get to the venue where the test was going to take place. I was completely breathless and my heart was beating to fast when I arrived. Fortunately, I got to the test room in time so the coordinators allowed to let me in the room. 

Waking up early like what I did today is such an interesting yet not really desirable experience.

Normally I need to have an 8-hour sleep at night so that I can be fully awake in the next morning. However, in the evening before the IELTS test, I was flooded with emails and phone calls from my company's clients and suppliers. Due to the huge amount of workload, it was not until 2.00 AM that I went to bed. The IELTS Test started at exactly 8:00 AM in the next morning, so it is understandable that I had to get up at around 6:00 AM to get ready. This means that I slept only 4 hours. Needless to say, not getting enough sleep made me suffer from sleepiness and fatigue. 

In order to stay awake and focus on the test, I drank a large cup of black coffee before entering the test room. I hoped that caffeine would be a magic saving me from the terrible mental condition. However, as opposed to my expectation, I suffered from greater tiredness since my body didn't respond well with this kind of stimulant. I could clearly tell that I had trouble with thinking and concentration during the test since I found it harder to focus and understand the texts. I tried to use all of my skills and knowledge to answer the questions. Eventually, I completed all the test but I wasn't really confident of my answers. That was rather disappointing.   

And that's all I want to say.

After receiving my first month's salary, I decided to treat my family members to a dinner at a famous restaurant by Saigon River. All of my aunts, uncles and cousins attended the birthday party, and what made me happy the most about is the very presence of the uncle who is an overseas Vietnamese living in Australia. He tried his best to arrange time to fly to Vietnam to join with us so I felt extremely grateful.

As far as I remember, this happened a year ago. My mother is a woman from the baby boomer generation so she got used to using the ordinary cell phone - Nokia - for years. However, at that time, her Nokia phone acted up and didn't function well as it should be, causing her a lot of problems while making phone calls or texting messages. Besides, in addition to basic needs in terms of using a mobile phone, she also wanted to read online news or searched for new cooking recipes on the internet without much dependence on the desktop. The time to buy her a new phone came and I bought a brand new smartphone for my mom the next day.   

Proceeding with that is the challenge of teaching my mom how to use the smartphone. I call it " a challenge" because my mom is not a fast learner regarding technological product usage and she is not really comfortable with modern devices. I showed my mom very carefully and in the most understandable way how to operate basic functions of the phone. First, I changed the language of the phone into Vietnamese since she understands nothing else than her mother tongue. Second, I wrote down everything single step-by-step instruction so that she could refer to it in case she forgot. Finally, I showed my mom how to make phone calls, text messages, activate Google Chrome to surf the internet and operate Youtube application to watch cooking videos. I taught my mom only things related to her basic needs, nothing more. I remember that I had to be really patient with her during her learning process since she kept asking me the same things that I had already taught her. However, I didn't get mad or lose patience at my mom, and was very proud of her when she successfully made a video call to me. 

Now, my mom uses the smartphone on her daily basis and I feel very happy and delighted for that.  

Hoi An is a small ancient town, around 40 km away from Da Nang city, and located in central Vietnam. This place is extremely famous for its distinct cultural and historical characters, so my family and I decided to have a 2-day trip there last year. However, the trip was not as exciting as I expected. The weather forecast told us that the weather conditions in Hoi An on that day would be nice, but everything was so different. I remember on the day we came to Hoi An, the weather was so terrible with the sky being changeable and heavy, together with cold winds. There were some problems with the hotel where we stayed, in which the staff were not supportive and the food was awful. Because of these reasons, my parents blamed me for choosing the destination, the hotel and so on. On the next day when we paid a visit to some historical sites in Hoi An, they kept complaining about everything from the weather, to the local people, the scenery and something else. They criticised that there was nothing special about Hoi An and spending money to visit there was such a waste. I got sick of their constant nagging and had to bear with it until the end of the trip. It was a luck that the trip only lasted 2 days.

Anyway, the lesson learnt was, it is better not to choose your parents as your travel companion, otherwise your trip would become a disaster. 

Sample answer 1

I am going to talk about The Werewolf as one of my favourite indoor games. I think The Werewolf is probably the most popular group role-playing game in HCMC.

This game is composed of two teams: werewolf and villager. The aim of the werewolves is to hunt all of the villagers at nighttime without themselves being killed. On the other hand, the objective of the villagers is to find out who the werewolves are and kill them off before the whole village becomes food for the beasts. Because werewolves are able to kill people at the nighttime, therefore, among the group of villagers, besides ordinary people, there are some who have superpower. The villagers win if all the beasts are eliminated. Meanwhile, the werewolves win if there is an equal number between werewolves and humans.

I remember that it was a classmate of mine at high school who first taught me to play this game. Because this is the team game so we had to gather other friends whenever we want to play. When I was in high school, my friends and I enjoyed this game at lunch and break times in our classroom or outside on the school playground. Now we usually play at a spacious coffee shop whenever we go out for a drink.

I like this game because I enjoyed the challenge of analyzing and being analyzed, deceiving and being deceived, controlling and being controlled, and thinking creatively. This is an intriguing and intellectual game which requires various wise strategies involved for each particular role. As for me, there is nothing better than this game for groups of people to have fun. 

Giáo viên BE READY IELTS

Sample answer 2

As a child, I enjoyed playing chess. I think chess is probably the best-known board game in the world. It’s a game for two players, and the aim is to defeat the other player by taking his or her pieces and eventually trapping his King. This final move is called checkmate.

I remember that it was a classmate of mine at primary school who first taught me to play chess. He had a small, portable chess set, and once I knew how each piece moved, we started playing at break and lunch times; we played in our classroom or outside on the school playground. Later my parents bought me my own chess set as a birthday present so that I could play at home.

I taught my younger brother to play, and at some point, I joined the school chess club. There I had the chance to hone my skills against some of the older pupils, and in my final year of primary school, I made it onto the school team. There were five of us on the team, and we competed against children from other primary schools in the same town.

I liked playing chess because I enjoyed the challenge of thinking ahead and trying to outwit my opponent. I was probably seven or eight years old when I started playing, and it seemed like a very mysterious and intellectual game at that time. Also, although I loved winning, chess taught me to learn from my losses and to congratulate the person who had beaten me.

Câu trả lời Mr Simon, nguồn: https://ielts-simon.com/ielts-help-and-english-pr/2014/10/ielts-speaking-part-2-indoor-game-answer.html

I remember it was an incident of a year ago during my trip to Hoi An. It was summer and I wanted to make a quick escape from the stressful world of work so I decided to take a 2-day trip to Hoi An, which is a popular tourist destination located in Central Vietnam. I has longed for paying a visit to this place so I spent all day to walk around the town, enjoy the local food and visit a lot of historical sites. During my journey, I didn't notice that I had dropped my purse somewhere until I needed money to buy souvenirs. I still vividly remember how panic I was at that time because in addition to money, there were some important personal documents I put in the purse.

I was worriedly in a rush to re-visit to all the places I travelled to during the day in order to find my purse but it was still nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, at that time, I received a call from a strange phone number. To my surprise, it was from a young man. He said that he happened to pick up my purse lying on the ground on a pedestrian street, and he had managed to find my phone number from one of my cards. I can tell that he was truly a gentleman since he asked me where I was standing and then he found his way to get to my place to return me the purse. Needless to say, I felt extremely lucky because I did not lose my money and, more important, other personal documents. It was such a valuable and unforgettable call from a stranger.

My little cousin is the only child of my uncle and she's just turned 6 this year. As far as I remember, last year, her english school held a Halloween party for students and obviously all participants must wear costumes if they want to join the party. Since my aunt and uncle were so busy with their business at that time, I did them a favour by preparing the halloween costume for my little cousin.

I asked her what fictional character she wanted to cosplay so that I could help her get ready accordingly, and she told me she wanted to become a scary mummy. You know, a kind of a dead body in ancient Egypt tombs. I can tell that she came up with that idea under the influence of the cartoon movie she had watched a few days before.  

I found a lot of instructional videos showing how to make the mummy costume on Youtube and I followed them step by step. After several hours, I accomplished my mission and put the costume on my little cousin to see how she felt about it. I can tell that I did a very excellent job in creating a scary mummy because my little cousin was so frightened when she looked at her own reflection in a mirror. At first, she looked so excited when putting on the costume. A few seconds later, her facial expressions changed to fright and scare and she started to cry. I couldn't stop myself from laughing while witnessing the whole process of her emotion change. She looked so scared in all of her innocence and that was so amusing. After that, I helped my crying baby calm down by taking off the costume and told her some funny stories. In the end, I changed her cosplay into queen Elsa from "Frozen" cartoon movie, which is also one of her favourite movie characters.  

And that's all I want to talk about how my little cousin made me laugh so hard.