Speaking Part 2 · Media & abstractIn the Sep–Dec 2026 reported set
Describe a Time When You Changed Your Opinion
In short
“Describe a Time When You Changed Your Opinion” is a common IELTS Speaking Part 2 cue card. You get 1 minute to prepare and should speak for 1–2 minutes, covering all four points below. This page gives you a Band 9 model answer, an idea map so you can make it your own, the Part 3 follow-up questions with answers, and the vocabulary examiners reward.
The task card
Describe a Time When You Changed Your Opinion. You should say:
- •What your original opinion was
- •What made you change it
- •What you think now
- •And explain how you felt about changing your mind
Band 9 model answer
The opinion I changed was about cycling infrastructure, which sounds trivial and turned out to be a fairly useful lesson in how I form views generally.
My original position, held with considerable confidence, was that the cycle lanes being built across my city were a waste of money and made congestion worse. I drove to work at the time, and I could see with my own eyes that a lane had been taken away from cars and given to a much smaller number of cyclists, and that my journey had got longer. That seemed like the whole argument.
What changed it was a combination of two things. The first was reading an article that explained induced demand properly for the first time — the finding that adding road capacity reliably fills up with new traffic within a few years, which means you cannot build your way out of congestion. That reframed the question: the lane I'd lost wasn't the cost of the cycle lane, it was a lane that would have been full regardless. The second was more personal. I broke my foot, couldn't drive for two months, and ended up cycling a route I'd driven for years. Doing it on a bike showed me something the statistics hadn't — the roads without a protected lane were genuinely frightening, and I understood immediately why so few people cycled.
What I think now is that I was measuring the right thing badly. Cycle lanes do slow individual car journeys in the short term, which is real and shouldn't be denied. But the question is how many people a corridor moves, and by that measure a protected lane substantially outperforms the traffic lane it replaced. I'd also concede the point I resisted longest: the lanes look empty in the early years because nobody cycles until it feels safe.
How I felt about changing my mind was more uncomfortable than I'd expected. Not about the conclusion — I got there reasonably quickly once I had the information. It was about the confidence. I'd argued this at dinner tables. I'd been quite dismissive of people who disagreed with me. And the actual evidence had been publicly available the entire time, and I'd simply never looked because I was certain.
So what I really took from it wasn't about cycling. It's that the strength of my conviction had no relationship whatsoever to how much I'd looked into it, and I now treat that feeling of certainty as a prompt to check rather than a sign I'm right.
Make it your own: three angles
A social or political view you revised
The richest material, because you can explain the reasoning on both sides. Choose something low-stakes enough that you can be fair to your former self.
An opinion about a person that turned out to be wrong
More personal and easier to narrate. Works well if there was a specific moment that overturned the impression.
A preference you changed through experience (food, a place, an activity)
Lighter, and perfectly acceptable — but make sure there is a real reason for the change, not just "I tried it and liked it".
What the examiner is listening for
This card is built for contrast and for the language of concession, so use it: 'I used to think… whereas now…', 'I'd still accept that…, but…'. The fourth bullet is the discriminator — 'I felt good' is worth nothing. The model admits discomfort about having been confident rather than about having been wrong, which is a subtler answer and exactly the kind of reasoning that lifts a Part 3 discussion.
Part 1 warm-up questions
- Do you often discuss your opinions with friends?
- Do you find it easy to admit when you are wrong?
- Where do you usually get news from?
- Do you think people argue more online than in person?
Part 3 follow-up questions & answers
Why do people find it hard to change their minds?
Because an opinion is rarely just an opinion — it's usually attached to an identity or a group, so changing it costs something socially. There's also the plain discomfort of having been wrong in public. And we're demonstrably better at finding flaws in arguments we dislike than in ones we already agree with, which means the evidence never arrives on a level playing field.
Is it a strength or a weakness to change your opinion?
A strength, though it's frequently treated as the opposite — politicians get attacked for it more than for being consistently wrong, which is a strange set of incentives. The distinction worth drawing is between changing your mind because of evidence and changing it because of pressure. The first is how thinking is supposed to work; the second is just deference.
How do the media influence people’s opinions?
More through selection than through persuasion, I'd say. What gets covered, and how often, shapes what people think is important, and that's a larger effect than any individual argument. Algorithmic feeds intensify it by showing people more of what they already engage with, so a view can feel overwhelmingly obvious simply because you've never seen it seriously contested.
Do people discuss disagreements less than they used to?
They discuss them more visibly and probably less productively. Online, disagreement happens in front of an audience, which turns it into performance — you're arguing to your own side rather than to the person. Face to face, I think people have become more cautious about raising anything contentious, so the low-stakes conversations where minds actually change are getting rarer.
Should children be taught to question what they are told?
Yes, though it needs teaching properly rather than as a slogan. Blanket scepticism is as useless as blanket trust and usually ends in believing whatever contradicts the mainstream. What's genuinely valuable is knowing how to check something — who says it, what evidence, who benefits — and that's a teachable skill rather than an attitude.
Is it possible to have a productive argument?
Certainly, but the conditions are quite specific: both people have to want to be right more than they want to win, and there has to be some agreement about what would count as evidence. Without that second part you get two people talking past each other indefinitely. It also helps enormously if there's no audience.
Useful vocabulary
| Word / phrase | Meaning |
|---|---|
| to have a change of heart | to change your opinion or feeling |
| to come round to something | to gradually accept an idea |
| to see something in a new light | to understand it differently |
| to be set in your ways | to resist changing habits or views |
| to concede a point | to admit the other side is right about it |
| with the benefit of hindsight | knowing how it turned out |
| to reconsider | to think about something again |
| firmly convinced | completely certain |
| to talk past each other | to argue without really engaging |
| to take something on trust | to believe it without checking |
More cue cards
Describe a Difficult Decision You Made
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