IELTS Speaking Part 2: IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card

Describe your favourite colour

: You should say

 what is it
what is the significance of this colour
how you started liking it

and explain why do you like this colour

: Sample Answer

I’m not sure I have just one favourite colour, but if you insist on making me choose I know which one it would be. I’m going to tell you what it is, why it is significant and as far as I can how it is I started to like it. I’ll try and explain why I like the colour so much, but that might be hard to do – liking a particular colour is, after all, a very personal thing

My favourite colour is blue! That doesn’t seem quite enough to say. There are so very many variants of the colour. Sky blue; sea blue; azure blue; navy blue; royal airforce blue; midnight blue; cobalt to name but a few. Then there are all those colours that are sort of blue, but tip over into green as well like turquoise or teal. To make it even more complicated there are rich blues that might almost be purple like the colour of the iris flower in my country. If you go to a DIY store and pick up a colour chart for different paints I expect there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to describe the colour blue – and I don’t even know if we all see the colour in the same way. It is mind boggling

I don’t know quite what the significance of the colour is, but I find it a really attractive hue. In nature, I love a clear blue sea, or the complex blues of a sky. Moody grey blue before a storm, dark midnight blue at dusk or bright blue littered with fluffy white clouds on a summer day. As a child, I pronounced at an early age that blue was my absolute favourite colour. I think I did it partly to be different, most girls were expected to like pink but I wanted to dissociate myself from that and stubbornly declared a preference for blue, traditionally a boy’s colour. We used to go for walks from my first school in a big crocodile of children. We each held on to a coloured ribbon that was attached to a long piece of rope, accompanied by two teachers, one leading at the front of the rope and a second walking at the back of the line to keep us all safe. My classmates would fight for the pink ribbon, but ‘my’ blue one was always free. That helped me feel an affinity for the colour from when I was very young

As an adult I think the colour blue suits me to wear, particularly dark blues, I look positively ill in paler colours for some reason. I don’t know if that goes anyway to explain why I still like the colour so much, perhaps vanity is part of it. However, I think the main reason has to be that I associate blue with huge spaces, be that a great sea stretching out to the horizon or the sky opening away to infinity. Looking at that gives a sense of perspective, we are such tiny beings in a vast universe, what could be more impressive a colour than one that reminds us of that