The last task, and the one people prepare for least
Task 8 shows you an image of something unusual — an object that should not exist, a scene that does not quite make sense, a thing being used for the wrong purpose — and asks you to describe it to a person who cannot see it.
Both halves of that sentence are the task. Most answers lose marks on one of them.
Half one: the listener is blind
Task 3 also asks you to describe an image, and the phone-call reframe fixes it. Task 8 writes that reframe into the prompt itself. Somebody is on the other end with nothing but your voice.
Which means these sentences do no work at all:
"As you can see, the thing on the left is quite strange." "It is like this, and the other part is like that." "There is a sort of round object here."
Here. This. That. As you can see. Every one of them assumes a shared picture. Your listener has none. Delete them from this task entirely.
Half two: the thing is strange, and you must say how
The image is chosen to be odd. The marker wants to hear you name the oddness — not tiptoe around it.
Weak:
"There is a chair and it has some things on it. The chair looks different from a normal chair."
Strong:
"It's a dining chair, except somebody has replaced all four legs with stacked books — three tall piles of hardbacks and one pile that's clearly shorter, so the whole thing leans."
The second one describes the same object and actually tells you what is wrong with it.
The move that carries this task: compare it to a normal thing
You do not have vocabulary for an object that does not exist. Nobody does. So describe it against something the listener already knows:
- "It's shaped like a kettle, but the spout comes out of the top instead of the side."
- "Imagine a bicycle where both wheels are the same size as a coin."
- "It's about the size of a microwave, and roughly that shape, but it's made of what looks like woven rope."
Size, shape, material, and what it resembles. Four handles, and they work on anything.
The shape that works
- One sentence: what is it closest to? "It looks like a phone box, but…"
- Say what is wrong with it. The single strangest thing, first.
- Give scale and material. How big, made of what.
- Describe the parts in order — top to bottom, or left to right. Pick one and hold it. A listener who cannot see needs a route through the object, not a scatter of details.
- Say what a person in the image is doing about it, if there is one. Reaction tells the listener more than another adjective.
- Guess what it is for. "My best guess is that it's meant to…" You are allowed to be wrong.
A worked example
The image (described here for reading; in the test you would see it)
A man in a suit sits at a bus stop. Where the bench should be, there is a full-sized bathtub, plumbed to nothing, resting on the pavement. He is reading a newspaper inside it.
The response (spoken, about 60 seconds)
Picture a normal city bus stop — glass shelter, timetable on the wall, road in front. Everything is ordinary except the seating.
Instead of a bench, there's a full-sized white bathtub sitting on the pavement, the old kind with feet. It isn't connected to anything; there's no plumbing, it's just standing there under the shelter, taking up the whole width of it.
A man in a grey suit is sitting inside the tub — not on the edge, in it, with his knees up and his briefcase balanced on the rim. He's reading a newspaper and he looks completely relaxed, as though this is where he always waits.
Nobody else in the photo is looking at him, which somehow makes it stranger.
My guess is it's either an advert for a bathroom company, or one of those art installations councils put up. Either way, he's decided it's a seat.
Why this works.
- Sentence one gives the listener a frame to hang everything on: an ordinary bus stop.
- The oddness is named immediately, and precisely — a bathtub, unplumbed, under the shelter.
- Scale and material are there: full-sized, white, the kind with feet.
- The correction is the best line in the answer. "Not on the edge, in it." That is a speaker who can hear their own ambiguity and fix it — exactly what "easy to follow" means.
- It ends with a guess, offered as a guess.
What is not being marked
- Not whether you identify the object correctly. There often is no correct answer.
- Not your accent.
- Not unusual vocabulary. Plain words used precisely beat rare words used vaguely. "About the size of a microwave" is worth more than "of considerable dimensions."
And the rule underneath everything:
A response giving insufficient information to assess scores 0 or 1.
Sixty seconds of "it's very strange, it's not normal, it's a bit unusual" reaches that. Strange is your reaction. How it is strange is the answer.
The habit that fixes this task
Find an object in the room and describe it for forty seconds to someone who cannot see it — no pointing, no "this", no "here". Then, if you can, have somebody draw it from your description alone. Whatever they get wrong is exactly what your Task 8 answer is missing.
Try one
[Try Task 8: Unusual Situation →] — one full task, marked, no card required.