IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 26
Describe a time when you needed to use imagination.
You should say:
- what the situation was
- why you needed to use your imagination
- what the difficulties were about it
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:
Some great people with their “fertile brains” have great imagination powers no matter what the circumstances are. I am no great person, and my average “brain” doesn’t exactly function very well even under the best of the circumstances when it comes to the imagination! I would like to thank you for the opportunity you have given me to talk about a time when I relied on my imagination power.
So, the other day, when my psychology teacher asked a very average psychology -related question to me to imagine and describe a situation where my aeroplane is hijacked to an island, full of tribal people speaking in a completely alien language, far, far away from my home country, my little “brain” decided to just “freeze” on me without any notice in advance. I needed an escape from this “unwarranted” situation, so I just kept imploring to my brain buddy to help me out of my “misery” as I never really encountered such a horrible situation in my life ever before, nor did I ever manage to get a full “account” of such terrible incident from anybody before.
Perhaps, it would help me a little had I ever imagined myself in such a terrible situation, but why would I ever imagine such a horrible thing!? After all, I was no movie scriptwriter! Besides, let’s say for the sake of debate, even if I was able to imagine myself in such a dreadful situation, it would be even more difficult for me to present my imaginations in some coherent manner for others to actually understand and appreciate. However, my poor brain did assist me, though it took a while to process the situation, and I finally answered this question. I was quite taken aback when my teacher praised my imagination power. And it was a part of creativity and a part of deliberate fabrication to visualise the situation in my mind.
Anyway, up until that little “brain freeze” episode, I never really understood that being able to imagine things and then presenting them in a coherent manner within a very short period of time could be such difficult of a task. After being challenged with this assignment in my class on that day, I felt that some people were just born with this great gift and thus developing even greater respect for people such as poets, novelists and movie scriptwriters.
Finally, this little “imagination challenge” has taught me that our human minds/brains aren’t just programmed to imagine “negative” things, and perhaps that’s exactly why we fail to anticipate “bad” events even when things don’t look very promising for us. Now I know that I will have to push myself harder to do better in such situations.