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This IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card asks you to talk about a city you want to visit, covering which city it is; how you know about it; what you would do there; and explain why you want to visit it.. Below is a band 9 sample answer with tips on structuring a two-minute talk.
Describe a city you would like to visit in the future.
You should say:
You have one minute to prepare and may make notes. Then speak for one to two minutes; the examiner may ask one or two short follow-up questions.
The city at the top of my travel list is Kyoto in Japan. My fascination began in university, when a documentary about Japanese craftsmanship showed artisans there who have made tea whisks or temple carpentry for twenty generations, and since then I have read travel blogs and watched countless videos about the city. If I visit, I have a fairly clear plan. I want to see the famous sights, of course — the golden pavilion, the thousands of red gates at Fushimi Inari, and the bamboo grove at Arashiyama, ideally at dawn before the crowds. But what I most want to experience is the ordinary texture of the city: staying in a traditional wooden guesthouse, attending a proper tea ceremony, eating at tiny family-run restaurants, and simply walking the old lanes in the evening when the lanterns come on. Kyoto attracts me because it seems to solve a problem my own country struggles with — how to modernise without erasing yourself. It is a functioning modern city that has kept seventeen centuries of temples, rituals and aesthetics alive and dignified, not as museum pieces but as daily life. I also admire the Japanese attention to small details, and I suspect a week there would quietly change my standards for how carefully things can be done.
After your talk, the examiner moves to more abstract questions linked to this cue card.
Famous cities compress a country's best into a manageable area — history, food, architecture and atmosphere within a metro ride. There is also a social element: visiting Paris or Kyoto means stepping into a shared human story, seeing with your own eyes what millions have described. Familiarity from films makes arrival feel like recognition.
Often, yes — the phenomenon even has a name, overtourism. Crowds wear down monuments, rents push locals out of old quarters, and neighbourhoods reshape themselves into souvenir stages, losing the authenticity visitors came for. Managed well, though, tourism funds the very preservation it threatens, so the answer is regulation rather than avoidance.
I would say explore your own country first. It is cheaper, so you travel more often; it builds understanding of your own society; and most people have astonishing places within a day's journey that they postpone forever. Foreign travel then becomes richer, because you have something solid to compare it with.
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