Predicted IELTS topics: what a topic list can and cannot do for you
Nobody publishes the real questions. Why memorised topic lists collapse on test day, and how to turn any list into ideas that actually transfer.
Study timelineGeneralUpdated 6 min read
No list of "this year's topics" is the test paper, and the honest answer to "if I prepare every topic on the list, am I covered?" is no. Live questions are not published; what circulates are recollections, gathered from people who sat different versions on different days in different countries. That does not make lists worthless — it makes them raw material. A topic list is a rehearsal surface, not a syllabus, and candidates who treat it as a syllabus are the ones who freeze when a familiar theme arrives in an unfamiliar sentence.
Why the one-topic-at-a-time approach does not scale
Speaking runs in three parts: familiar questions about you, a long turn from a card — the one minute of preparation before it is its own craft — then discussion of the abstract issues behind it. The same theme can surface in any of them, phrased in countless ways. "Describe a book you enjoyed reading", "describe something useful you learned" and "do you think people read less than they used to?" are, for preparation purposes, the same handful of ideas arriving through three different doors. Prepare them as three separate answers and you have memorised three things. Prepare the ideas and you have all three, plus the doors nobody listed.
That recombination is why "trending topic" claims are weak: themes are broad, they recur year after year, and the examiner may follow up on whatever you actually say — exactly where a rehearsed answer loses its footing.
The transferable unit: four idea banks, not forty topics
An idea bank is one real subject you can describe in detail without inventing anything, plus the sentence that gets you into it. Four banks — a person, a place, an object, an event — bend onto most of the Part 2 cards that exist. Below are one candidate's four, filled in from her own life, each with the bridge that carries it onto a different card.
| Bank | The actual subject | The sentence that opens it | A prompt it bends onto, bridged |
|---|---|---|---|
| Person | An aunt, a night-shift nurse for fifteen years | "The person I always come back to is my aunt, who has worked night shifts at the same hospital for about fifteen years." | a person you admire; someone who helped you. Bridge: "If I admire anyone it is her, and it is about those hours." |
| Place | The flat rooftop of her childhood building | "There is a flat rooftop above the building I grew up in, and I still go up there when I need to think." | a quiet place; a place you would take a visitor. Bridge: "I would take a visitor up to that rooftop." |
| Object | A second-hand bicycle she keeps repairing | "I bought a second-hand bicycle four years ago for almost nothing, and I have repaired it so often that it is basically mine twice over." | a useful object; a skill you taught yourself; and the book card, bridged below |
| Event | Six days without electricity, one February | "Two winters ago our district lost electricity for six days in the middle of February." | a difficult experience; a time plans changed. Bridge: "The hardest days I remember were those six without power." |
The Object bank is bridged here rather than in the table because its conversion is the hardest: describe a book you enjoyed reading, the card candidates who do not read dread most. You need one text you have genuinely finished, not wide reading. "I am not much of a reader, to be honest, but there is one book I have read cover to cover, which is the repair manual that came with my bicycle." That opening is true, it answers the card, and every beat after it comes from a bank she already owns. The card asked about a book; it did not ask you to be a reader.
The same banks feed Part 3, where questions turn general: the electricity week is her example when someone asks about city services or how communities cope, the aunt her example for shift work or job satisfaction. One real instance to reach for is most of what separates a thin general answer from a developed one — the substance of extending answers in Part 3.
The five-step check: is this bank real, or memorised?
Run this on each bank before you trust it. About five minutes, and brutally diagnostic.
- Talk for sixty seconds, out loud, recorded. If you dry up before forty-five seconds, the bank is a sentence, not a subject. Keep looking.
- Name three concrete details you did not say. A smell, a sound, a number, a name. If nothing comes, the subject is not one you actually know.
- Answer one abstract question about it. For the bicycle: why do people repair things less than they used to? A bank that cannot feed a general opinion will not help you in Part 3.
- Retell it, recorded again, in a different time frame. Past event to present habit, or "what I would do differently now." A memorised block cannot be re-tensed; a real memory can.
- Mark every phrase you reproduced identically in both recordings. One or two rehearsed openers are useful. A whole paragraph coming out word for word is a warning, not a win.
So use the lists. Skim them for themes you have no example for, and go build one. Never count them: no quantity of prepared topics adds up to readiness, and how long band 6 to 7 takes has the honest arithmetic on real improvement. Ten minutes with the official sample questions, used as prompts for your own four banks, beats an afternoon copying somebody's list of two hundred.