Writing Task 1: Map / Plan (change over time): Question 3
Syllabus W.task1
The two maps below show the village of Marsh Hollow in 1995 and 2020. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
Marsh Hollow in 1995
Marsh Hollow was a small village built around a crossroads where the north-south Church Road met the east-west Mill Lane. A small stone church stood on the north-west corner of the crossroads, and a primary school stood on the south-west corner. A row of about ten houses ran along the south side of Mill Lane, to the east of the crossroads. Beyond these houses, further east, there was open farmland, and the fields to the north of the crossroads, on both sides of Church Road, were also open farmland. There was no shop and no bus stop in the village.
Marsh Hollow in 2020
The stone church on the north-west corner of the crossroads is unchanged, and the primary school on the south-west corner has been enlarged with a new extension on its western side. The row of houses on the south side of Mill Lane has been extended eastward, with twenty new houses built on the same side of the road on what had been farmland. Most of the fields north of the crossroads, on both sides of Church Road, have become a new housing estate, with two side streets branching off Church Road, except for the north-east corner immediately beside the crossroads, where a small parade of shops, including a supermarket and a pharmacy, has been built instead. A bus stop has also been added on Mill Lane, outside the new shops.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Achievement
A clear overview states the overall change, village growing into a small town, before the body reports every feature of both maps accurately: unchanged church, enlarged school, extended row of houses, new housing estate, new shops, new bus stop. Directions (north-west, south-west, north-east) are used precisely and match the maps exactly.
Coherence & Cohesion
The response is organised around the crossroads, working corner by corner (north-west, south-west) before moving outward (east along Mill Lane, then north along Church Road), which gives a logical, easy-to-follow structure. The two time periods are clearly separated into their own paragraphs, linked by consistent reference to the same landmarks.
Lexical Resource
Location and change vocabulary is accurate and varied: “on the north-west corner”, “along the south side of”, “had been turned into”, “apart from”. The response avoids repeating “built” mechanically, using “extended”, “lengthened” and “added” instead.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
Simple past is used consistently for the fixed 1995 map (“was”, “stood”, “ran”), and past perfect passive is used consistently for the changes completed by 2020 (“had been extended”, “had been turned into”, “had been built”), correctly signalling that these changes happened before the later map’s viewpoint, with accurate agreement throughout.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging is omitting the overview, which leaves the marker without a clear statement of the main trend, a village becoming a small town, even if the individual details are accurate.