Describing a Scene

Overview

Describing a Scene is the first of the two picture tasks. The image shows an ordinary situation - a park, a street corner, a family kitchen, a busy shop - with several people doing several things at once.

Your listener cannot see it, so the test of a good answer is simple: could they rebuild the scene from what you said? That rewards order and detail over speed and coverage.

Structure

• Thirty seconds of preparation with the picture on screen.
• Sixty seconds of recorded description.
• One everyday scene containing several people or actions.
• The same picture returns in Task 4, which asks what happens next.

What to expect

The scenes are deliberately unremarkable and nothing in them is hard to name. The difficulty is organisation: there is always more in the picture than a minute can hold.

• A public space - a park, a beach, a bus stop, a market.
• A household scene - a kitchen, a garden, a family moving house.
• A workplace or shop with staff and customers.
• A community event - a fair, a class, a neighbourhood clean-up.

Suggested steps and timing

Spend the first 10 seconds of preparation deciding your one-sentence overview - what is this a picture of - and the next 20 splitting the image into foreground, middle and background, naming the two or three things in each you can genuinely describe well. Note what looks about to happen while you are there; Task 4 asks exactly that about this picture.

Then run the 60 seconds in that same order: about 8 seconds on the overview, 25 on the main people and what they are doing, 17 on the surroundings, and the last 10 on the detail that fixes the scene - the weather, the mood, the time of day.

Key strategies

• Give the overview first. One sentence of context makes every detail afterwards easier to place.
• Stay in the present: present continuous for actions, simple present for states.
• Use position language - in the foreground, on the left, behind, next to - as the spine of the answer.
• Describe two or three areas fully rather than naming ten objects in a rush.
• Hedge where you are unsure. "It looks like" and "they seem to be" are accurate and they sound fluent.

Common pitfalls

• Darting around the picture, so the listener cannot assemble it into one scene.
• Slipping into the past tense, which is the most common grammar error on this task.
• Predicting what happens next, which belongs to Task 4 and is off-task here.
• Naming objects with no verbs, so the answer becomes a list of nouns rather than a description.

Final advice

Practise with ordinary photographs, one minute each, describing them to someone in another room until they can sketch what you said. That test is harsher than any checklist and it trains the one habit this task rewards: a fixed order, held all the way through, even when something interesting catches your eye in the corner of the frame.