Describe the city or town you live in

How to approach this cue card

Unlike “a city you’d like to live in,” this card asks about the place you already live in, so the strongest answers lean on real, everyday knowledge rather than researched facts — the shops you actually walk past, the transport you actually use, the things that genuinely annoy or please you about the place. That familiarity is an advantage if you use it, since it’s much easier to sound natural describing somewhere you know from daily life than somewhere you’ve only read about.

The four parts move from basic geography, to general character, to what’s actually available there, to your own opinion, so a simple structure is to give the location in a sentence or two, describe the general feel of the place, mention one or two concrete things people can do there, and finish with an honest, reasoned opinion rather than a generic “I love my city.”

If you genuinely have mixed feelings about where you live, it’s fine to say so — a balanced answer that mentions one real drawback alongside the positives usually sounds more credible than blanket praise, and examiners are assessing your language, not your loyalty to your hometown.

Vocabulary that lifts this answer

A one-minute plan

• location: country or region, size
• character: general feel or atmosphere
• what people can do: two or three concrete examples
• opinion: honest, balanced view

Sample answer

This is one example of how to shape a full answer here, meant to illustrate structure and level rather than to be repeated exactly.

I live in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which sits roughly in the east of the country, in a fairly green, relatively flat part of the region. It’s a big, fairly bustling city by local standards, though it doesn’t feel overwhelming the way some capitals do, partly because a lot of the older neighbourhoods still have quite a relaxed, close-knit feel even though the newer parts of the city keep expanding outward. In terms of what people can actually do here, there’s a decent mix — plenty of parks and open squares if you want somewhere calm, a fairly lively café and restaurant scene that’s grown a lot over the last decade, and reasonable public transport, including a metro system that makes getting around the centre much easier than relying on cars. What I like most is probably that balance: it’s developed enough that you’re rarely bored, but it hasn’t lost every trace of the slower, more community-minded atmosphere that older residents talk about from years ago. If I’m honest, the traffic can get genuinely congested during rush hour, and some areas still don’t have enough green spaces considering how quickly they’ve been built up, so it isn’t perfect. But overall I’d say it’s a pretty liveable city, and I probably wouldn’t swap it for somewhere else at this stage of my life, mainly because my whole support network — family, friends, familiar routines — is here, which matters more to me day to day than any single feature the city itself offers.

Common mistakes on this card

• Describing the city in purely touristic terms instead of how it functions for someone actually living there.
• Giving only praise with no real, specific opinion, which can sound rehearsed rather than genuine.
• Spending too long on geography and running out of time for the “what people can do” bullet.
• Confusing this card with “a city you’d like to live in” and describing somewhere you don’t actually live.