Writing Task 1 maps: describing change, not giving directions

Two maps of the same place, decades apart, and 150 words to say what happened. Candidates who meet their first map in the exam room produce tours ("at the top left there is a farm, next to it a road…") — a description of a map rather than of change between maps, which is the entire task. A map question is a before-and-after comparison wearing geography, and every sentence should carry a transformation: something was demolished, replaced, extended, converted, constructed.

The grammar the task runs on

Map answers live in the passive — the agent of change is unknown and irrelevant: the woodland was cleared to make way for a housing estate; a marina has been constructed along the southern shore. Two refinements separate band 7 from band 6 here:

• Tense by date pair. Two past dates → past simple and past perfect (by 2005, the factory had been converted into apartments). Past-to-present → present perfect (has been widened). A future/planned map → future passive or is to be (a new terminal is to be built north of the runway). Using one undifferentiated past for a 1990/2010/proposed triple throws away the Grammatical Range marks the task was designed to award.
• Change verbs over existence verbs. There is/there are freezes time; replaced, expanded, relocated, pedestrianised move it. The single highest-value habit: name what stood there before in the same sentence — "the orchard gave way to a car park" does in seven words what two static sentences can't.

Position language, the map-specific lexis

In the north-east corner; along the coastline; adjacent to the school; on the site formerly occupied by; opposite the station; the area between the river and the main road. Compass points beat left/right (examiners read maps as maps), and relative anchors beat coordinates. This vocabulary is finite and learnable in an evening — and it is exactly the Lexical Resource evidence the task can offer, since map topics rarely admit ambitious topic vocabulary.

The overview still decides the score

Task Achievement at band 7 requires a clear overview here exactly as on a line graph. For maps it is the direction of transformation in one or two sentences: Overall, the village changed from a primarily agricultural settlement into a residential suburb, with almost all farmland built over and transport links substantially expanded. Rural→urban, industrial→leisure, expansion of X at the expense of Y — every map task published has such a summary; finding it before writing is the two minutes that matter most. Then organise bodies by area (north vs south) or by theme (housing vs transport) — either works; a random walk through fifteen changes does not.