The examiner asks you some questions about yourself and about familiar, everyday topics. Answer each question aloud and record yourself if you can; the model answers unlock after you submit.
Topic 1 — Work or studies
"I'm a full-time student at the moment. I'm in the second year of a business degree at a private university in Dhaka, and I'm specialising in marketing, which I'm really enjoying so far."
"Mainly because I've always been curious about why people buy the things they do. My father runs a small shop as well, so I grew up hearing about customers and prices, and business just felt like a natural choice."
"Probably the statistics module. I was never particularly strong at numbers, so I have to put in a lot of extra hours just to keep up, although it's slowly starting to make more sense."
"Definitely in the morning. My head feels much clearer before lunch, whereas by the evening I'm usually too tired to take anything in, so I try to get the hardest reading done early."
Topic 2 — Colours
"I'd say dark green. It's a calm, natural sort of colour, and I suppose it reminds me of the paddy fields around my grandparents' village, where I spent a lot of my holidays as a child."
"Pretty much, yes. Most of my clothes are navy, grey or black, mainly because they're easy to match and I don't have to think too hard in the morning. I only really wear bright colours at weddings."
"Yes, it was bright orange, believe it or not. I insisted on having an orange schoolbag and an orange water bottle, which my older brother used to tease me about constantly."
Topic 3 — Parks
"There's a small one about ten minutes' walk from my flat. It's nothing special, just a walking track around a pond and a few benches, but it's always busy early in the morning with people exercising."
"Not as often as I should, honestly. Maybe once or twice a week, usually in the evening when it's a bit cooler and I need a break from my laptop."
"Mostly walking and jogging, especially older people first thing in the morning. In the afternoons you'll see children playing cricket wherever there's a bit of open space, and families sitting on the grass with snacks."
"Absolutely. Dhaka has very little green space for the number of people who live here, so even a few more small parks would make a huge difference, particularly for children who have nowhere safe to play."
Read the card, then use the 1-minute preparation timer to make quick notes. When it ends, start the 2-minute timer and speak until it stops, covering all four points.
"I'd like to talk about a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini, an American psychologist. It's quite an old book now, since it first came out in the eighties, but it's still one of the best-known books on why people say yes to things, and for a marketing student like me it turned out to be incredibly useful.
I read it about a year ago, during the break between my first and second year. One of my lecturers had mentioned it in class almost in passing, and when I spotted a second-hand copy on a pavement stall at Nilkhet, I picked it up for next to nothing. To be honest, I expected it to be dry and academic, but I got through it in about a week, mostly on the bus to and from university.
Basically, the book explains a handful of principles that make people more likely to agree to something. One is reciprocity, which means that if someone gives us something, even something small, we feel we owe them in return. Another is social proof, the idea that we tend to copy what other people are doing, and a third is scarcity, which is why a label saying 'only two left' makes us want something more. What I liked most was that every idea is backed up with real experiments and everyday examples, so it never felt like a textbook.
As for why I found it so useful, it completely changed the way I look at my father's shop. After reading it, I suggested that he let regular customers taste a new brand of biscuits before buying, and he was surprised by how many of them bought a packet afterwards. It's also made me a more careful shopper myself, because I now notice when a website is trying to rush me with a countdown timer. So it's one of those rare books that changed what I actually do, not just what I know."
The examiner asks you some more general questions connected with the topic in Part 2. Answer each question aloud; the model answers unlock after you submit.
Theme 1 — Books and reading
"Probably not, at least in the traditional sense. My parents' generation grew up reading novels and newspapers, partly because there wasn't much else to do in the evenings, and the Ekushey Book Fair was a huge event for them. Today people arguably read more words than ever, but most of it is short posts and messages on their phones rather than whole books. That said, the book fair is still packed every February, so I wouldn't say reading has died out; it's just become something people do now and then rather than every day."
"It depends a lot on the age group, I think. For students, the bestsellers are probably exam guides and admission-test books, which says a lot about how competitive education is here. Beyond that, Bangla fiction is still very popular, especially thrillers and detective stories like Satyajit Ray's Feluda series, which my parents' generation grew up with and now pass on to their children. Picture books and comics for young children have grown as well. On the whole, people seem to choose books that are either useful for exams or pure escapism, while serious literature has a much smaller audience."
"I think it's partly because life feels more competitive and uncertain now, so people are looking for quick, practical ways to improve themselves, whether that's managing money or being more productive. These books promise clear steps, which is reassuring. Social media plays a part too; when a well-known person recommends a book, sales can shoot up overnight. Personally, I think some of them are genuinely helpful, but quite a few repeat the same simple message over two hundred pages, so readers need to be fairly selective."
"I imagine audiobooks will keep growing, because people can listen while they commute or cook, and in a city like Dhaka, where people spend hours in traffic, that's a real advantage. It's also possible that AI tools will summarise books for people, which might mean fewer readers actually finish a whole book. On the other hand, I suspect book clubs and reading groups will become more popular, because people still enjoy talking about a story with others. So reading will probably become more varied, but I very much doubt it will disappear."
Theme 2 — Learning after education
"Up to a point, yes. Plenty of people teach themselves to cook, code or edit videos just from online tutorials, and books are great for the theory behind a skill. The problem is that nobody is there to correct you, so it's easy to pick up bad habits without realising. With something like driving or playing an instrument, a teacher can spot a mistake in seconds that you might otherwise repeat for months. So I'd say books and videos are an excellent start, but for most practical skills you eventually need someone to give you feedback."
"Mostly, I think, it comes down to time and energy. Once people have a full-time job and a family, studying in the evenings can feel almost impossible. Some people also associate learning with exams and pressure, so as soon as they leave university they're relieved to put it all behind them. And there's a confidence issue as well, because adults can feel embarrassed about being beginners at something. Ironically, though, people who do keep learning often find it far more enjoyable than school, since they're choosing what to study for themselves."
"Within reason, yes. It's an investment that usually pays off, because employees bring back new skills and tend to be more loyal to an employer that has supported them. Small firms may struggle to cover the cost or to manage without someone for weeks at a time, so it can't be an absolute rule. A sensible compromise might be a shared arrangement, where the company pays for the course and the employee agrees to stay for a certain period afterwards."