Six of the eight Speaking tasks give you thirty seconds to prepare. Task 6 gives you sixty.
That difference is the most useful thing anyone can tell you about this task. A minute is not extra time to polish your wording — it is time to decide, because Task 6 hands you two options and refuses to say which is right. Both let somebody down. You get sixty seconds to pick one and sixty seconds to tell a named person what you picked.
The task
"Dealing with a Difficult Situation" is task 6 of 8 in the Speaking component, which runs 15 minutes in total. It gives you 60 seconds of preparation and 60 seconds of speaking — one of only two tasks with a full minute of prep. Those per-task times are official, but they come from Paragon's Speaking study pack, not from the test-format page, which lists the task names without the clock. That is why so few guides quote them.
Sixty seconds of speech is roughly 130 to 160 words — enough for a decision, a reason, an offer and an apology, and not enough for a warm-up.
The prompt
(original AlmiWorld practice prompt)
You rent out the basement suite of your house. Your tenant, Marielle, has lived there for two years and her lease ends on 30 September. Your father is having hip surgery in September and cannot manage stairs, so he needs the basement.
You can renew Marielle's lease and tell your father he has to stay where he is — or you can end the lease and ask Marielle to move out. Marielle has not answered her phone all day.
Leave a voicemail for Marielle.
Note what the prompt withholds: your father's name, the rent, whether you have a spare room. You are allowed to invent all of it, and you almost have to. Situations are resolved with specifics — a date, an amount, an offer. Inventing them is not cheating. It is the task.
Sixty seconds of preparation, honestly
Three decisions, and none of them is about vocabulary.
Who loses. Father or tenant. Pick in the first ten seconds, because a speaker still deciding at second forty will hedge for the whole minute.
What you can offer. The decision is fixed, so the only place left to be generous is the softening. A free month, a reference letter, help with the truck — one of these, invented on the spot, beats any amount of gentle phrasing.
Where the apology goes. Once, late. An apology in the opening line becomes the news, and the real news then arrives to a listener who has already relaxed.
The answer
Marielle, hi, it's Tomas. I tried you twice today, so I'm just going to leave this. I've got bad news and I'd rather you hear it from me now than get a letter — I'm not renewing the suite for October. It's decided, I've already told my dad. He's having his hip replaced on the ninth and he can't do stairs after, so he's moving into the basement. That's the whole reason. It's not you.
Here's what I can do, though. October's rent-free — stay the month, look properly, don't rush it. And I'll write you a reference: two years, never once late, I'll say exactly that.
And honestly, I'm not going to pretend October's a decent month to be hunting for a place in this city. It isn't. That part's on me for the timing.
I'm sorry, Marielle. Call me tonight, any time, and we'll sort out the truck.
Approximately 155 words — about 60 seconds at a normal speaking pace.
Read against the four dimensions
CELPIP publishes four rating dimensions for Speaking: Content/Coherence, Vocabulary, Listenability and Task Fulfillment. What follows is not a score. Nobody outside Paragon can put a level on a sample answer — there is no answer key for Speaking, no published weighting for the four dimensions, and no rater in this room. What follows points at what each dimension looks at and where this answer supplies it.
Content/Coherence. The order is doing work. Bad news, reason, offer, honest bit, apology — each block short, each finished before the next starts. "It's decided, I've already told my dad" closes the question of whether this is negotiable, which is what lets everything after it be generous instead of vague.
Vocabulary. Ordinary and exact, which is the useful combination. "Rent-free", "reference", "on the ninth", "never once late". None of it is impressive and all of it is precise, and precision is what a listener actually registers.
Listenability is officially defined as "How easy is it to listen to and understand the response?", with sub-points including "Rhythm, pronunciation, and intonation". Short sentences help. "That's the whole reason. It's not you." is two beats you can land cleanly, where one long subordinate sentence would flatten out.
Task Fulfillment. The answer chooses, says which way it chose, and gives Marielle something she can act on tonight. Beneath this dimension sits the harshest rule in CELPIP: a response giving insufficient information to assess scores 0 or 1. A minute of sympathetic noises with no decision in it is precisely what that rule describes.
What this answer is not
It is not a shape you can carry to another prompt. This answer works because of its details, and its details are the part you cannot borrow.
"He's having his hip replaced on the ninth and he can't do stairs after" exists only because this prompt has a basement in it. "Two years, never once late" only lands because the prompt gave Marielle two years. "October's rent-free" fits a lease that ends on 30 September — move the prompt to a cancelled wedding booking or a shift you cannot cover and all three sentences are dead weight.
A reader who memorises them will produce a worse answer on a different prompt, not a better one, because the fit is where the marks live. A frame you brought with you cannot contain anything specific to a prompt you had not seen yet.
What actually costs you
- Being kind instead of being clear. Sixty seconds of apology with no decision in it fails the task, however pleasant it sounds.
- Delivering the news late. If it arrives at second forty, there is no time left to soften it, and softening was the only part you controlled.
- Apologising three times. It reads as unwillingness to own the decision, and it eats the seconds your offer needed.
- Refusing to invent. Waiting for the prompt to supply a detail it was never going to supply.
- Pretending the bad option is fine. One honest sentence beats a paragraph of reassurance.
Try one
[Try Task 6: Difficult Situation →] — one full task, marked, no card required.