Cue Card # 19: An interesting discussion you had

IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 19

Describe an interesting discussion you had as part of your work or studies.

You should say:

• what the subject of the discussion was
• who you discussed the subject with
• what opinions were expressed

and explain why you found the discussion interesting.

[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:

They say that time is money. Even though I don’t exactly subscribe to this kind of “capitalistic” view of time, I have always maintained that “proper time management” (depending on how we spend it) probably is the most important and sole determining factor of how much we can accomplish in our lives. So, the other day, when our communication teacher asked me to discuss how we should manage our time with my classmates as a part of a monthly discussion topic, I immediately decided to join the discussion in order to offer my “2-cent-worth” of opinion.

Having more of a traditional frame of mind, I understandably was in favour of managing our times wisely, doing everything on time according to a pre-set schedule while others were not so “conventional” in their opinions. They said that they would rather prefer more of a “spontaneous” approach, taking care of things randomly as they would come. Some even argued that we didn’t really need to worry about time management as whatever was meant to happen in life would happen anyway. I guess they wanted to give “uncle destiny” more credit than what it actually deserved.

Anyway, I found the discussion on proper time management to be really stimulating and interesting because it helped me revisit the priorities of my life which I didn’t really get to do often because of my busy schedule. This “timely” discussion also was an eye-opener for me when I figured out the fact once again that we don’t necessarily need to spend all of our times to chase material success of this world in order to remain happy. At the end of our discussion and from valuable input from our teacher, I realized that with proper time management, we could actually become trend-setters instead of remaining some random followers of the trends.