IELTS Cue Card/ Candidate Task Card # 32
Describe a friend of your family you remember from your childhood.
You should say:
- who the person was
- how your family knew this person
- how often this person visited your family
and explain why you remember this person.
[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:
I used to call him “doctor grandpa” during my childhood, and I knew him from the day I learnt to recognize a person just by hearing his/her voice. His real name was Charles Gomez but we always called him grandpa! Having lived not too far away from our house, this “grandpa doctor” came to visit our family almost every week to treat my real grandfather (from my father’s side). Later on, of course, I found out that the “grandpa doctor’ was a very good friend of my grandfather as well as a distant relative, and they remained good friends of each other until my grandfather took his last breath. Being a family doctor to my grandfather, our “grandpa doctor” was also a great family friend of ours until he died.
Treating a person as terminally ill as my grandfather was never going to be an easy thing to do on a continuous basis, but I remember our old grandpa doctor (probably in his early 70’s at that time, but was in a very good shape otherwise for his age) kept doing exactly that to keep him alive for another 5 years or so if I remember it correctly! Being a man of ‘few words’, I remember how our old family doctor-cum-family friend used to just love the sweet dishes, prepared by my mother while warning me and my little brother at the same time jokingly to avoid eating too much of it in order to avoid getting “tooth infection”.
Our old family friend, still stronger than an average person of his age, used to come to our house by riding on a bicycle. And being a “bicycle riding enthusiast” myself, I would just take his two-wheeled-vehicle and roam free, without notifying him in advance, on the neighbourhood streets. But, our “more-than-generous” family friend got never annoyed or agitated because of my unruly behaviour, as I come to think of it now. I prefer to call our grandpa doctor ‘more-than-generous’ because I remember him seldom charging for the medicines, prescribed for my grandfather. And being an old doctor with limited income opportunity, I am pretty sure that he could ill-afford such generosity.
Remembering him today, I come to think of him as having some exceptional abilities to raise our morals during the times of distress because of our ill grandfather, and thus having real calming effects on all of our lives.