Hey, I just saw the most unusual car parked on the street, and I immediately thought you might be interested in it. It’s a small, bright-yellow car with a really distinctive vintage design. The body is extremely rounded, almost like a bubble, and it has two enormous circular headlights on the front. What really caught my attention is the oversized chrome grille, which takes up a huge portion of the front of the car. It also has a black glass roof, curved windows, and some unusual vents along the sides near the rear wheels. The tires are relatively small, and they have white rims that match the retro appearance. Overall, it looks like a combination of an old-fashioned car and a modern compact vehicle. Since you’ve been thinking about getting a unique car, do you think I should find out who owns it and ask whether they’re interested in selling it?
Speaking Task 8: Describing an Unusual Situation
Speaking Task 8: Describing an Unusual Situation is part of the Speaking section of the CELPIP test. You get 30 seconds to prepare and 60 seconds to speak. It is scored on Content / Coherence, Vocabulary, Listenability, Task Fulfillment.
- Preparation
- 30 seconds
- Speaking time
- 60 seconds
- Prompts here
- 23 published
The three-move unusual scene
- 1
Set the ordinary scene first
Our CLB 11 answer spends its opening on how completely normal the office is — desks, monitors, a coffee machine — and only then breaks it.
- 2
Name exactly what breaks it
One clear sentence on the thing that does not belong. This is the information your listener cannot see.
- 3
Offer a guess, marked as a guess
"It seems", "maybe", "my best guess is" — the task rewards speculation, but only speculation that knows it is speculation.
Describe the normal before the strange, or nothing is strange.
Without a baseline the listener has nothing to be surprised by.
Learn the speculative language and descriptive vocabulary you need to describe an unusual or unexpected image and guess what is going on in CELPIP Speaking Task 8.
You describe a strange picture to someone who cannot see it and speculate about it. Combine precise descriptive vocabulary with speculation phrases (it looks as if, perhaps, it could be) to cover both what you see and what you think.
- Open by saying where you are and what you have seen so your listener has a frame before the details.
- Describe in a fixed order: size and overall shape first, then colour, then the unusual details.
- Compare it to something familiar when the exact word escapes you — hesitating over vocabulary costs fluency.
- Keep the final seconds for the question the task asks: whether you should find out more about buying it.
- 1Starting with the odd thing, which leaves the rest of the description with nowhere to go.
- 2Stating a guess as a fact.
- 3Describing for the full time and never speculating at all.
- Content / Coherence
- Whether your ideas are relevant, developed and logically ordered.
- Vocabulary
- The range and accuracy of your word choice under time pressure.
- Listenability
- How easy you are to follow as speech: grammar, flow, pacing, pauses and fillers.
- Task Fulfillment
- Whether you answered the actual question and covered what was asked.
These are the answers our scorer was calibrated against. Reading a CLB 5 beside a CLB 11 for the same prompt is the fastest way to see what a level actually means. CLB 9 is marked as the target because it is the level that earns maximum language points for Express Entry.
Now do it yourself and find out where you land
A model answer shows you the target. It cannot tell you whether your own response hits it — that is a CLB level for each criterion, with the sentences that earned it.
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Create your free account →- What is the hardest part of Speaking Task 8?
- Describing something unfamiliar without the right words. Speculation phrases let you stay fluent even when you are unsure what the image shows.
- How is Task 8 different from Task 3?
- Task 3 describes an ordinary scene factually; Task 8 shows an unusual image, so you both describe it and speculate about what might be happening.
- ·An Unusual Farm Outside the City
- ·A Strange Drawing at the Art Gallery
- ·An Unusual Playground in the Neighbourhood Park
- ·A Business Meeting Among Inflatable Animals
- ·An Unusual House in the Neighbourhood
- ·An Unusual Television in an Electronics Store
- ·An Unusual Piece of Furniture
- ·A Newly Opened Amusement Park
- ·An Unusual Cake
- ·An Unusual Museum Exhibition
- ·A Space-Themed Birthday Party
- ·An Unusual Hotel Room
- ·The Imagination Garden
- ·An Unusual Restaurant
- ·The Broken Head
- ·An Unusual Library
- ·The Fish Boat
- ·An Unusual Grocery Store
- ·The Octopus Food Truck
- ·An Unusual Fitness Centre
- ·The Upside-Down House
- ·An Unusual Hotel Lobby