Describe a friend you have known for a long time

How to approach this cue card

Examiners use this card to check whether you can narrate a relationship over time, which naturally pulls in past tenses, present habits, and a bit of reflection — a good range of grammar if you let the story actually develop rather than staying in one tense throughout. The “how you became friends” bullet is often the richest one, because origin stories tend to have specific, memorable details that are easy to speak about at length.

Pick a friendship you can genuinely picture in detail: a specific place you met, a specific activity you still do together, rather than a generic “we are very close” description. If your closest friendships are more recent, it’s completely fine to choose one that has lasted several years rather than since childhood — length is relative, and the quality of detail matters far more than the exact number of years.

Spread your two minutes with a little more weight on “how you became friends” and “what you usually do together,” since those naturally generate specific stories, then close with a short, honest reflection for “why it has lasted,” which often comes down to something simple like shared humour, trust, or just consistent effort from both sides.

Vocabulary that lifts this answer

A one-minute plan

• Who: name, how long known, rough age when we met
• How we met: specific place/situation, first impression
• What we do together: one or two regular activities, recent example
• Why it’s lasted: honest reason — humour, trust, effort despite distance

Sample answer

This is one way to structure a full answer on this topic — treat it as an example of shape and level, not a script to copy word for word.

I’ll talk about my friend Diyor, who I’ve known for around fifteen years now, since we were both about ten years old. We actually became friends almost by accident — we were seated next to each other on the first day of a new school and just started talking about a football match from the night before, and somehow that turned into being practically inseparable for the rest of primary school. What we usually do together has changed a fair bit over the years, obviously; back then it was mostly just playing outside after school, whereas now, since he lives in a different city for work, we mostly catch up over video calls every couple of weeks, and we still make a point of meeting up in person a few times a year, usually around football, actually — we’ll go to a match together if we can manage it. What I think has kept this friendship going for so long, honestly, is that it’s fairly low-maintenance; we can go a month without properly talking and then pick the conversation back up as if no time had passed at all, which I don’t think happens with every friendship. There’s also a shared sense of humour that’s stayed exactly the same since we were kids, which sounds like a small thing, but I genuinely think it’s the main reason we haven’t grown apart the way a lot of my other school friendships eventually did.

Common mistakes on this card

• Describing the friend’s personality in general adjectives (“kind,” “funny,” “nice”) without ever narrating how you actually met or what you do together.
• Switching tense inconsistently when moving between the past (how you met) and present (what you do now).
• Treating “why it has lasted” as an afterthought instead of giving it a genuine, specific reason.
• Choosing a friend you can’t actually say much concrete about, which causes the answer to run out well before two minutes.