Cue Card # 43: An accident you saw or witnessed

IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 43

Describe an accident you saw or witnessed.

You should say:

• where the accident occurred
• where you were then
• who were affected by the accident

and explain how you felt about it.

[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]

Model Answer:

An accident is, well, is just an “accident’, and it can happen anytime and anywhere no matter how hard we try to avoid them. Of course, that’s easy to say but, watching an accident from close proximity or becoming a “helpless and unwilling” witness to it is totally different. But, that’s exactly what happened to me when I had to witness such a horrific and sad incident in my home city.

It was one rainy morning about 5 years ago when I was driving back to my own place after dropping my friend at a local airport. By the way, it was a two-lane highway with slow access roads connecting the highway from both sides of the highway. The road was busy as usual with a lot of traffics, but most of the vehicles were running slowly due to the unexpected heavy rain.

So, everything was going fine on the road until, suddenly, a fast-approaching 8-wheeled large truck tried to access the highway from my left side. I got a little scared just for a moment, but, I thought that the driver would come back to his sense and slow down his vehicle in order to avoid a terrible accident.

But, I am afraid that it was only wishful thinking as, unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened as I feared. The driver had to finally press his break really hard because that’s all he could do at that crunch moment (either because he was a new driver or just underestimated the risk or the speed) forcing his vehicle to “skid” from the access road and then eventually hitting few cars on the highway real badly, not only wrecking the cars but also injuring a couple of people seriously in the process.

I never really saw such an accident from such a close distance until that incident, and I felt really sad and scared after that for a while. I felt like it was bad enough to witness or learn about an accident when you were far away from it, but it was even worse when you knew that accident was about to take place, and yet, you just couldn’t do anything to stop it ahead of the time.