Last Updated: 17th April 2022
IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 168
Describe a book that you enjoyed reading because you had to think a lot.
You should say:
- what this book was
- why you decided to read it
- what reading this book made you think about
and explain why you enjoyed reading this book.
[You will have to talk about the topic for one to two minutes. You have one minute to think about what you are going to say. You can make some notes to help you if you wish.]
Model Answer 1:
I don’t really get much time or opportunities to read many books these days, probably because I am just too busy earning my livelihood. But, I guess, I just got little lucky last summer when I got some time off from my job. And that’s when I managed to read a good book which actually made me think a lot.
The book, I am talking about, is called “The Story of My Life” which is written by Helen Keller. Published in 1903, this book gives a very inspirational account of the world of a blind and deaf girl, whose speech development also ceased soon after, as she grows up. The main characters in this book are the writer herself (Helen Keller) and Anne Sullivan (a teacher who taught Helen Keller). This is such a book that it would be really difficult for a reader to withdraw from it unless he/she finishes it in just one sitting. And at the end of reading it, one sure would be able to put a smile on his/her face and restore spirit at a time when so much negativity envelopes us.
By the way, I didn’t really know much about Helen Keller except that she was some kind of English “writer”. But, when I incidentally read an article about some of the most “inspirational women figures” of the 20th century, last summer, I came to know about her in great more detail, and it was at that time that I decided to read this all-time, American classic, written by this prolific American author.
Anyway, I enjoyed reading this book, from start to finish, primarily because it had me think a lot. In fact, I was losing my mind just to even imagine how possibly a woman with such “debilitating disabilities” could actually finish her graduation at a time and age when a very few women would attend a college, and when the disabled would simply be relegated to the background and neglected like some kind of “untouchable creature”?
Model Answer 2:
Over the last few years, I was lucky to have read a few books that were, more or less, interesting and thought-provoking. But, none of them really matched the appeal of the book that was written by Stephen Hawking. So, I guess, it is only fair that I talk about that book here.
The name of this is “A Brief History of Time”, and I read this book about a year ago when I was enjoying my summer holidays at my elder sister’s place. Well, I should have rather said that I only “started” to read this book during that summer holidays, and I continued reading it for the next few days before I could finish it, apparently because it had lots of pages to cover. In fact, if I remember correctly, this book had more than 250 pages.
Now, the size of this book would have been enough of a reason to avoid reading it, but I still chose to read it because I wanted to prove to myself that I was intellectually sound enough to understand and appreciate some of the complex theories of science and their interpretations in relation to the events of our world as well as the universe. I chose to read it also because up and until that point, I never read a book that was written by such a world-famous scientist like Stephen hawking. But, for whatever reasons that I chose to read this book, it made me think that God and science can actually co-exist. Besides, it also made me think that how insignificant we really are in this universe.
So, in the end, it is fair to say that I really enjoyed reading this book, mainly because many of the things, which I learned at school a long time ago, were proved out to be either outdated or wrong. But, what was even more interesting about reading this book was that I just didn’t know whether to feel dumber or smarter after finishing reading it, because there were just so many new things in it to understand!