Part 2 Practice: Describe an Object

Card 1 > Describe an item of clothing you wear often. > > You should say:

• what it is > - when you got it > - when you wear it > > and explain why it is important to you.

Card 2 > Describe a gift that was meaningful to you. > > You should say:

• what it was > - who gave it to you > - when you received it > > and explain why it was meaningful.

Card 3 > Describe a piece of technology you use every day. > > You should say:

• what it is > - what you use it for > - how long you have had it > > and explain how it has changed your life.

The trick with object cards is to treat the object as a pretext for a story. Pure description runs dry at 45 seconds. An object linked to a relationship or an experience gives you 2 minutes of material.

1. Introduce the object (15s) — what it is, physically.
2. Origin story (30s) — how it came into your life.
3. A specific moment (30s) — one incident involving the object.
4. What it represents (30s) — the emotional or symbolic weight.
5. Final thought (15s) — why it matters now.

I'd like to describe a fountain pen that my father gave me when I finished my undergraduate degree. It's a German brand — a Lamy 2000 — with this beautiful matte black body and a gold nib. It doesn't look extravagant, but it writes incredibly well.

He gave it to me on graduation day in 2019. What made it meaningful wasn't the pen itself, really — it was the fact that he'd bought the same model for himself when he finished his own studies back in the 1980s, and he'd been using that one ever since. He handed me the box and said, essentially, "Now we match." > > One moment I remember vividly is when I used it to sign my first real employment contract a few months later. I was quite nervous — it was a job in a city I'd never lived in — and pulling the pen out of my bag and signing with it felt symbolic. Like I was stepping into the same kind of adult life my father had stepped into at my age.
What the pen represents for me is a quiet kind of continuity. It's not a flashy object, but it's probably the one thing I own that I'll still have in 40 years. I use it to sign anything important — contracts, cards, letters — because every time I do, it feels like a small acknowledgment of where I've come from.

• Pure catalogue. "It's black. It's small. It's plastic. It has buttons." — this scores low on Lexical Resource because the vocabulary is basic. Combine features into evocative phrases: "It's a compact black device, small enough to fit in any pocket."
• No emotional anchor. An object without a relationship or story is a product review. Always find the "who gave it to you" or "when did it matter" angle.
• Technical jargon. If your object is a phone or a camera, avoid specs-heavy language. "It has 128GB and a triple-lens array" is not the vocabulary the examiner is testing for.

Pick Card 3. Plan it in 1 minute. Notice: if your object is something everyone owns (like a smartphone), what story can you tell that isn't generic? Everyone uses a phone — but only you sent a particular message, or took a particular photo, or relied on it for a particular event. Mine that specificity.