IELTS Speaking – Part 2

o get some teaching experience during the long university winter break. Erm, how did I prepare for it? I looked at all my notes again from lectures at university to remind myself of the important things to do with primary school children. I also went to the school’s website to get as much information as I could about the place before I went. It was quite a modern primary school with good computer rooms, so I planned to talked about my computer knowledge and how I could use that with the children. What else? Erm, I made a few notes to take with me into the interview in case I got nervous and forgot everything.
So what did they ask me? I can’t remember everything they asked. It was quite a long interview, but I remember they asked me about my qualifications and experience with children. They wanted to know why I was applying for the job, of course. One difficult they asked was about my strengths and weaknesses, which is a very tricky one to answer without saying too many negative things about yourself.
I’m going to talk about being a musician, which I think would be enjoyable, even though in reality I wouldn’t want this job personally.
There are many attractive aspects to this job, I think. First of all, if you are a rock star or pop artist, you’d get to travel a lot, possibly in a private jet if you were really successful. Fans would go crazy about you everywhere you went, although that could become a disadvantage eventually. On top of that, there would be all the financial advantages: enough money to buy anything you wanted, such as property, cars, clothes or whatever you were interested in as well as free gifts or maybe even contracts with companies in return for advertising or endorsing their product. In my opinion, the biggest attraction is of course that you would be doing something you really enjoyed, making music and performing it which is a dream come true for many amateur musicians.
What about qualifications? Well, I don’t think there are any specific requirements as far as qualifications are concerned, but you do need some talent, or luck, or both. And finally, what qualities would you need to do this job? Let me think. I suppose you would need to be an extrovert. It isn’t easy to go out on stage in front of thousands of people or to read negative reviews in magazines about your work, for example. Yes, I think the most important thing is not to be too sensitive. And you should be passionate about the music you write or sing as well.
Ok, erm, I’m going to talk bout the meal we usually eat at Christmas in my country. We call it Christmas Dinner and it is eaten either on Christmas Eve or on Christmas Day. It depends on the family. It is a really important family occasion so we generally eat it at home or at the home of a close relation such as our grandparents. Some families celebrate it with just the close family but some have the extended family there as well, so there can be many people at the table.
I’ll explain the details of the meal to you. It takes many hours to prepare and so everyone helps, for example to prepare vegetables or to lay the table. We decorate the table with Christmas things and maybe some paper hats to wear as well. The main dish usually consists of turkey with stuffing, though I think some families eat other meats such as pork, duck or goose. At my house Mum is in charge of the turkey because she’s so good at it. She roasts the whole turkey in the oven for several hours and the smell is really good. We also have lots of vegetables with the turkey, especially potatoes and then we do carrots and broccoli and lots of gravy to go with it. We carry the whole cooked turkey to the dinner table and someone carves it at the table and then we help ourselves to all the other food. It is a very heavy meal so we always feel very full afterward and need a rest before we have dessert. The traditional dessert is Christmas pudding or plum pudding which is made with dried fruit several weeks before. Then we can’t move for a few hours because we’ve eaten too much, so owe watch TV and chat. I love Christmas dinner. It’s my favourite meal of the whole year.
I’d like to tell you about something special we eat in Germany although it isn’t exactly a meal or a dish. We eat these at Easter and they are called ‘ostereiser’ which in English means Easter eggs.
First we boil the eggs until they are hard and then leave them to go cold. Then we colour them with food dye and paint them. If you like, you can buy decorations for the eggs at some shops as well. When they are finished, parents hide them in the garden before the children get up. The children go into the garden with a basket and collect the eggs and then the whole family eat them for breakfast. These days, some families buy chocolate eggs to hide but traditionally we use real eggs. Eggs are important at Ester because they symbolize spring and a new life.
Another thing we do with the eggs at Easter is to make an Easter tree and decorate the tree with painted eggs. To do this, we make to small holes in a fresh egg and blow out the inside. We rinse the eggs and then paint them with all sorts of colorful designs. We hang these eggs on the osterbaum or Easter tree. I love Easter eggs as they remind me of happy times with my family when I was young.
I’d like to talk about my memory stick, a small stick that stores electronic files. It’s about 8 centimetres long and one centimetre wide, so it’s very convenient to carry from place to place. It’s better than a floppy disc or CD because it holds so much information for its size, and its really flexible. The other advantage of memory sticks is that they can be used in all computers whereas floppy discs can’t. If you are a university student like me, you need to take information from university to home and back again easily, for example, so I used it every day. I also like to save digital photos and these can be very big files, so again it’s the best way of storing and carrying them. I’m not really sure how memory sticks might change in the future. After all, they have large memories and they’re a convenient size already, but I’m sure that floppy discs will disappear completely in the near future.
I’m going to talk about watching television. I used to watch more than I do now, but I don’t really have a lot of time for TV at the moment. That’s because I’m studying full time. But when I was at senior high school, I watched a lot more, probably several hours every day. I really liked drama series and game shows. In my country dramas are really popular and I like them too, as long as the storyline is sad. I don’t know why I like emotional types of programs. I used to watch one series every day because I loved the characters and the story but I think another reason was that everyone used to talk about it at school.
I don’t agree that television is bad for you, actually. I think that if people choose carefully, there wouldn’t be a problem. After all you can switch to another channel if you don’t like what you’re watching, can’t you? TV can be educational on the one hand and pure entertainment on the other, but in my view, that doesn’t make it a bad thing. Entertainment is an important part of our free time.
I would like to talk about a machine, a machine I have. It’s mine. It’s a computer. This computer is very special to me. My parents gave it to me. It is a really good computer, also it looks really cool. It has a slimline tower and I have some really powerful loudspeakers. I kind of wanted a notebook, you say notebook or laptop? But I need a lot of power sometimes and if you want a lot of power in a notebook, that’s very very expensive, so I talked about it with my parents, what we could afford, and I decided a PC, like for my desk, would be better because with this I can do many different things. 
I like to do many many things with this computer. I like to go online and I spend a lot of my free time online. It’s good because you can go in chat rooms and you can talk to friends. Maybe some of these friends are really friends, you know, like people you know in your studies or in your university, but also other friends who may be I have never met in my life because they live in different parts of the world, like sometimes I play chess with a guy in Russia. I mean, like I’ve never been to Russia, and maybe I’ll never go, but I have a friend there and that’s cool. But you can do a lot of other games on the internet, I mean like online gaming, and that’s really cool, like you can be playing in this environment with different people at the same time and they can be anywhere you know. Sometimes I like to try out new games too like on CDs and I have some friends. We get a lot of these CDs and we swap them, so you can try a lot of good programs and games without you know need to buy them all and you see which one you like. Also I like very much to download music and I have an ipod so I like to use my computer in this way too, and it’s a bit the same with movies. I like to make a video films and I can edit them with my computer.
I love Lone Pine. It’s near Brisbane in Australia, actually just outside Brisbane, I think. I visited some friends who live in Brisbane and they suggested I could go there. I got a bus from the city and it took half an hour. It’s a big park or something like that. There are many different kinds of animals. They are interesting animals, too. I saw so many different kinds. There were koalas and kangaroos, and I think maybe the other kind – what’s that called? Wall. Wallabies. Also there were snakes and I have a picture of me holding a snake. I liked the lorikeets best. It made an impression on me because there were so many kinds of animal I had never seen anywhere before.
Actually, I’d like to talk about my favourite place in England, which is York Minster – that’s the Cathedral in the city of York. I never heard of this work, Minster, before I went there. I thought maybe it was some special kind of minister but I soon found this was wrong. I know about York Minster because I was studying English near there in Harrogate and they told me in the language academy I must visit the Minster in York. So I took the train, which was just half an hour, and then to reach the Minster from the station is easy, only ten minutes on foot. And I can say this Cathedral is really one of the great buildings of Europe. It’s a very special piece of architecture, so beautiful with such fine lines, so tall. I have seen many wonderful buildings, and many of the great Gothic Cathedrals, and this is absolutely my favourite. So I walked around this cathedral and enjoyed the arches, the sculptures and the ceiling especially, until I came to the east end. And here something quite unexpected for me happened. There is a place, just behind the, I can say, the formal part of the cathedral, where you can sit. It’s very impressing, astonishing, not so much because of what it looks like but because of how it makes you fee. There is a space between where you can sit and look at the final, east wall, which is only a few metres from you, perhaps three or four, and most of this east wall is in fact windows, wonderful stained glass windows. So I sat down and looked up at the windows and slowly something unexpected happened to me. There is a kind of quiet, a hush, which slowly comes into you as you sit there. And soon you can feel the peace of the place, and how people have come here for hundreds of years to sit and be silent and peaceful, thousands and thousands of people, for hundreds and hundreds of years. This is something truly special. I have found such a feeling only in a few places but this is one of those places, where just to be there can give you this silence inside.
I want to talk about my favourite place, it is Whitby, you know this is where I am living now that I am living in the UK, having come here by plane from my country. I cam here have come here for my job, so I am working now in Whitby. Whitby is in Yorkshire and it is very find because you know there we are having the sea of course and at home we are having the sea also, so this is wonderful for me because it is like a little, I mean, like a glimpse of home. I have lived there now for three months. I will tell you now why er it is my favorite place. I like this town because you know it looks very fine, quite romantic. There are many good things you can do and the er habour is so beautiful. Also the hill next to the habour, they are so steep. You can climb up many steps to the top where there is a building, er, you know, church, er, abbey. It’s empty, you know the walls are broken and now nobody lives there but it looks like you know something from a horror movie or something like that. This is something I never saw in my life and I am liking this so much, like I feel this is the real England, also because you know the people, they are so kind, so very kind, almost I feel kike I am in my home in this place and it is exciting because here is beginning a new, er new part of my life and so now this is my most favourite, so if I would have the same choice again you know I will make the same decision.
The animal that I want to talk about is the beaver. It’s a mammal and it lives around water. It lives in North America and northern Europe as well. It’s a very attractive little animal. It’s the size of a small dog, but quite fat. It’s got thick, brown fur which keeps it warm, and particularly when it swims around the water, because it spends a lot of time diving. What the beaver does is – it lives in social groups of several families and it builds dams across streams to form lakes and ponds. So to make the dams it cuts down trees. It’s got very sharp front teeth, and so it chops the trees down, braches, drags them down to the stream and block it. And then it makes its house in the dam. The entrance to the house is under water and so they are very safe from any predators that might try to attack them. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen beavers on TV but I think they’re very interesting because they’re social, and because they’re good for the environment.
I find the wolf very interesting. I know that it has to communicate with others and that they always hunt in packs. And the alpha male normally gets the first bit of what they kill. I’ve seen it in zoos. I find it particularly interesting because of the way it hunts and the way it travels in packs. The way that wolves actually talk to each other. They hunt in a team and each one knows what to do. And I find it very interesting how they do it. I also find the way it looks at you very interesting. The way it just likes to stare at you. There’s a wolf at Paignton Zoo, but I can’t remember what type of wolf it was. It was a reddish color and its name meant something like ‘fox on stilts’. It had very long, thin legs.
The animal I find interesting is the elephant. Elephants aren’t found in the wild in this country, in fact they’re only found it two places in Africa and Asia. There are two different kinds of elephant – the African and the Asian. They ‘re now endangered because a lot of them were killed for their tusks to make ivory products. But ivory’s now banned so that has hopefully stopped. Erm, they tend to live to about a hundred years and tend to stay in groups I think. And they enjoy having a mud bath and a swim in the river as well. I know about elephants from books and films. And I saw elephants in my childhood, when we were in Thailand. I’ve actually ridden on the top of one with somebody. I just find them particularly interesting because I think they’re wise and quiet and very majestic creatures, I suppose.
My favourite way of relaxing is to go down to a local beach near my house, called Horseshoe Beach. I just sit on the beach, you can get a chair there, and I usually take a book with me to read, one of my favorite books. Or sometimes I might just take some binoculars and look at the ships that go past. And sometimes I take my swimming things with me and have a swim. I usually do this in the summer time, I probably do it once or twice a week. Usually I try to get down there in the early morning when I’m not working to get a good position on the beach before everyone else arrives. And I enjoy doing this because I find it helps me to unwind, it helps me to get rid of my stress. And I also enjoy watching the people go by, the children and families who come down to swim. If I go for a swim, it’s very refreshing and I enjoy being in warm water, and if there are any waves, I try body surfing. And that’s my favorite way of relaxing.
A public building I really like is the old railway station in Kuala Lumpur. It’s right in the centre of the city. It’s a very striking building. It stands out from the others around it because of its architecture. It looks sort of middle-eastern. It has a lot of pillars and arches. But it’s not a modern building. I think it’s about a hundred years old. And of course, it’s used for trains. It used to be the main station for the whole of Malaysia, and there were trains passing through it to all parts of the country, and to Singapore and Thailand as well. But now there’s new station, so the older station building is just used for local, commuter trains. But it’s still a big tourist attraction too, so we get lots of visitors just coming to have a look at it. And the reason why I like the building so much is well, I just like its appearance, its’ a beautiful building I think. And it’s also nice to have some historic buildings in a modern city. It gives variety.
Well, the person I’m going to tell you about is our local doctor. In fact, he’s um, also a friend of mine, quite a good friend, in fact. I met him in the very first week we moved to the area, because we’d been living in the north before and had to move because of our jobs and that’s about six years ago, and well, I went along to register at the health centre, and he happened to be there, so he introduced himself as the doctor and we started chatting and well, we became good friends straight away, really. Um, I think what I liked about him in the first place was his calm. He’s, um, quite a small person, with big brown eyes and he has this wonderfully quiet, gentle way of speaking. I think this is really why he is such a good doctor, and he’s very supportive when you’re ill and things, which is very important of course, but he also has this great sense of humor, he can always makes people laugh, even when they’re not feeling well, so they start to fell better right away.
So, um, I suppose the reason why I think he is so popular is because he’s a really good doctor, and he’s appreciated for it, in the whole neighbourhood, really. I think everybody knows he’s a very kind, caring person, so they all trust him, and feel lucky to have him as their doctor, like I do really.
Well, the place that I’d like to talk about is in Crete – you know, the big island that belongs to Greece. And this is a small village, it’s located in the southwest of the island, and it’s surrounded by mountains the whole landscape is very mountainous. If you stand in the village and look around, you can see the White Mountains in the background and the sea in front, that’s the Libyan Sea, stretching out in front of you. The very first time I went, I loved this place, and what attracted me to it was how beautiful it is. It gets good weather practically all the year round, and the mountains look fantastic, you know changing the colours all the time according to the time of day and the season and so on. The hillsides look quite dry, but they always have lots of wild flowers and herbs for a lot of the yea, and er, it’s one of my favourite places, actually. The first time I went there was when I was a college student a long time ago now, and er, I was with a friend and we were traveling around the island and went there by accident, really. But we just fell in love with it. And