Family and Friends
Practise talking about your family and closest friendships, describe a friend who matters to you, and discuss how relationships change across generations.
Easy · 1 attempt
Part 1 · Interview
4–5 minShort questions about you and your daily life. Pick a question to see the strategy and a sample answer.
Can you tell me a little about your family?
How to answer
Use the present simple for a quick overview — how many people, who they are — then add one personal detail so it doesn't sound like a list.
Sample answer
There are five of us — my parents, my older brother, my younger sister and me. We're a fairly noisy household, to be honest. My dad's quite reserved, but my mum more than makes up for it, and my brother and I bicker constantly, in a friendly way.
Part 2 · Cue card
3–4 minCue card
Describe a friend who is important to you.
You should say:
Who this person is and how you met
What kind of person he or she is
What you usually do together
And explain why this friend is important to you
Strategy
Pick the friend you can talk about most easily, not the most impressive one — fluency matters far more than how dramatic the story is.
During the one-minute preparation, jot a single keyword for each bullet point so you cover all four without drying up halfway through.
Bring the person to life with two or three personality adjectives, each backed up by a tiny real-life example rather than left as a bare list.
Save one short, specific anecdote for the final bullet — a concrete memory proves the friendship matters far better than general praise does.
Model answer
I'd like to talk about my friend Amara, who I've known for about eight years now. We met at a part-time job in a bookshop when we were students — we were both hopeless at working the till, and bonding over our shared incompetence turned out to be a brilliant start to a friendship. As a person, she's one of the most genuinely curious people I know. She'll strike up a conversation with absolutely anyone, and she remembers tiny details — she once turned up at my door with soup because I'd mentioned, in passing, a week earlier, that I felt a cold coming on. She's also brutally honest, which I didn't always appreciate at first, but these days it's one of the things I value most about her. We live in different cities now, so what we do together has changed. We have a standing video call every Sunday evening, and a couple of times a year one of us gets on a train and we spend a weekend doing very ordinary things — cooking, walking, arguing about films. Oddly enough, doing nothing special together is my favourite part of the friendship. She's important to me because she's seen every version of me — the broke student, the stressed graduate, the slightly more sorted person I am now — and her loyalty has never wavered. When my father was in hospital a few years ago, she travelled four hours just to sit with me in the waiting room. You don't forget that. Honestly, at this point she's less a friend and more family I got to choose.
Part 3 · Discussion
4–5 minDeeper follow-up questions on the part 2 themes.
How do people's friendships tend to change as they get older?
How to answer
Structure the answer by life stage — childhood, adulthood, later life — and soften claims with 'tend to' and 'generally' to avoid overgeneralising.
Sample answer
Generally speaking, friendships seem to narrow but deepen with age. Children collect friends almost accidentally — whoever's in their class or their street — whereas adults are far more selective, partly because work and family eat up their time. I'd also say the function changes: teenagers mainly want companions for fun, while people in their forties or fifties often want emotional support more than entertainment. That said, it isn't all loss — many people find the friendships that do survive into later life are the most honest ones they've ever had.
Ready to try Family and Friends?
One credit. All three parts. Feedback in about a minute.
Start this test