You should say:
- who this person is/was
- where this person lives/lived
- what he/she has done to help people
IELTS 9 Speaking Test 4: Describe a person who has done a lot of work to help people
Answer:
Okay, I’d like to tell you about a person I learned about when I watched a documentary on YouTube. It was about Bob Geldof and the Live Aid concert which helped many people starving to death in Ethiopia. I’ll tell you what I can remember about him and the event.
He was a pop singer in a band in the 1980s in the UK. And one night he saw a report on the TV about a dreadful famine in Ethiopia and he was very moved by the pictures and the report of hundreds of thousands of people starving and homeless. They were all camped out on a plain in Ethiopia.
He decided to organize a song for charity with some of the big pop stars of that time; I think some of them were his friends, to raise money to send food there. They wrote and produced a song with many different popular artists singing together which helped raise awareness and money for charity.
Following the success of that event, he visited Ethiopia personally and saw what was happening there. He discovered many other problems, such as transport, which meant that although food aid had arrived in the country, it couldn’t be transported to where the people needed it most.
When he returned to his own country, he talked to many people and the prime minister about the problem and asked why nothing was being done. I think he felt frustrated by the lack of involvement from some officials and charities to solve the problems.
He came up with the idea for a live music concert which was called Live Aid to raise more money to help the people suffering from the famine. It was the largest concert ever done anywhere in the world at that time. There was a live concert in England, in the UK, and another one in Philadelphia, in the USA. The two events were linked by satellite and televised all around the world.
The biggest and most popular artists took part in the event and it was a huge success. The money raised helped alleviate some of the problems that the people in Ethiopia were suffering from and changed how many charities worked to solve problems worldwide.
I think it was the first time that one individual had done something really different from the normal methods of fundraising for natural disasters around the world. So he is a person who has done a lot of work to help people.