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IELTS Writing Maps: Model Answer, Tips & Vocabulary

Below is an IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Model Answer with Great Tips and also Vocabulary. The IELTS Map Model Answer is Band Score 9 and helps you see the structure, key features and language. The IELTS Map question is a comparison of three maps in different time periods for the academic writing task 1. 

TIPS FOR IELTS MAPS: WRITING Task 1

Below are useful tips and techniques for writing a high band score writing task 1 map.

Types of IELTS Maps

There are a variety of maps that you can get in IELTS Writing Task 1 test:

• Changes in Towns

These types of maps focus on the expansion and layout of towns with features such as roads, buildings, land and other features of a town or city. It is most common to be given two maps, but occasionally (like in the model below) you could get three maps.

2. Changes in a Resort

This is about a holiday area which usually has different features than a town. There might be facilities such as swimming pools, nature hikes, hotels, beaches and water features. These types of tasks often compare current resorts with a future resort. However, future maps could appear as any type of map. 

3. Places with Multiple Buildings and Features

Typical examples of this type of map is a school, university or hospital.

This type of map covers an area of ground containing different buildings that serve different functions. The layout is different to a town and the facilities relate only to the function of the company/institution.

4. Floor Plans 

You could be given a floor plan which means it is the layout of a building on the inside showing all the rooms. Floor plans often show a past layout with a future plan to expand and alter rooms. Unlike the above maps, this one is about rooms and the functions of rooms. For example a room might have been a study in the past but there are plans to expand it and use it as a kitchen/diner. 

Grammar Tenses for Map Writing

Always check the date on the maps.:

• if the map is dated in the past , you must use past tense. For example, “The hospital was located to the north side of the town”
• if the map shows a future plan , you must use future forms, such as “it will be extended and will no longer be used as an office, but instead used as a reception room.”. 
• if the map is dated as “Present” or “Now”, you would use the present tense.
• If there is a comparison of dates , you must be flexible with the tenses in your sentences: “the office was located on the ground floor but in the future it will be moved to the first floor.”
• You will also notice that the passive voice is sometimes used for map reports for writing task 1.

Map KEYS and Compass Points

Sometimes your map will have a key. This is a a box of information in the map that tells you what things are called. You should pay attention to it and use that language.

Always check if the map shows north. For towns and other areas, you can always presume that north is directly up. It is important to know: north, south, east and west. Watch the video below for map vocabulary.

Structure & Paragraphing for IELTS Map Writing

Structure of Report

• Introduction – paraphrasing the description given and adding more required information
• Overview – collecting all key features into one paragraph
• Body Paragraph 1 – details of the maps
• Body Paragraph 2 – details of the maps
• Body Paragraph 3 – details of the maps (optional)

Overview: Key Features

All overviews in writing task 1 are critical to your score and are the most important paragraph. They must contain all key features. So, you need to pay attention to what changes and what stays the same. This what you highlight in your overview paragraph. The biggest mistake people make is writing only one sentence for their overview because they think it isn’t important.

Body Paragraphs

Your division of information for body paragraphs will depend on what your maps show. You might divide the information into paragraphs based in different time periods. But if you do that, you won’t be comparing. Or you could divide information based on what changes and what doesn’t. Body paragraph organisation must be logical whatever your choice.

IELTS MAP WRITING TASK 1: Model Answer 

The maps below show the changes that have taken place in Meadowside village and Fonton, a neighbouring town, since 1962.

Source: Map above not produced by IELTS Liz.

IELTS Map Comparison Model Answer

The three maps illustrate how Meadowside village and Fonton, which is a nearby town, have developed from 1962 to the present.

Overall, both Fonton and Meadowside village increased in size over the years until they eventually merged together, at which point Meadowside became a suburb. Furthermore, there have been significant changes to infrastructure, housing and facilities over the period given.

In 1962, both Meadowside and Fonton were completely separate with no roads or rail connecting them. While Fonton had a railway line running to the north, Meadowside, located to the west of Fonton, only had a small road from the west.

By 1985, Meadowside had expanded and the small road had become a main road. A further main road had been built to connect the village to Fonton. Within Meadowside, a superstore, leisure complex and housing estate had been developed. By this time, Fonton had also grown in size. 

Currently, Meadowside is known as Meadowside Suburbs after joining with Fonton. Between both places, a hotel, station and business park have been built on either side of the railway line.

COMMENTS about MODEL ANSWER:

• It isn’t often that you will have three body paragraphs for your IELTS Writing Task 1 report. But this maps has three time periods so it makes sense to have these body paragraphs.
• Body Paragraph 1 – roads and railway
• Body Paragraph 2 – land and buildings
• There is no right or wrong way to organise information into body paragraphs. You are being marked on being logical in how you organise information. If it lacks logic, you get a lower score. Your organisation also needs to help highlight key features which means deciding key features during your planning state is important because it will influence your paragraphing.
• The length of all writing task 1 should be between 170 and 190 words. A longer report will be marked down for not selecting features and getting lost in detail. A shorter report will be marked for not having enough information. To learn about the marking criteria that the examiner will assess you on, click here: Writing Task 1 Band Scores Explained

Vocabulary for Maps Video

The map shown in this lesson was designed for teaching vocabulary – it not an IELTS map task.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

• How to write an introduction for writing task 1
• Overview or Conclusion?
• Diagram Model Answer
• Line Graph Model Answer
• ALL MODEL ANSWERS AND TIPS FOR WRITING TASK 1

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The diagrams given below compare the current layout of Meadowside village and its neighboring town, Fonton with those in 1962 and in 1985.

Overall, both Meadowside village and Fonton experienced numerous changes, specifically in terms of increasing land area to eventually merge together. Furthermore, there has been significant urbanization, as the housing and infrastructure facilities have greatly developed. In 1962, Meadowside village was a bare land with no railway tracks and a small road from the west, whereas Fonton, located to the east of Meadowside was a separate land with a railway track running through it. From 1962 to 1985, Meadowside village exhibited substantial development growing into a larger village with a housing estate in the west, a super store in the south, a leisure complex in the east and wider roads. Notably, during this period, Fonton’s land area increased in size and a connection between the two towns was established via road.

The growth of these two areas has continued to the current date, consequently, resulting in the land areas joining together to form one large town ultimately forming Meadowside suburbs. The railway lines that belonged to Fonton, has now been extended alongside the road to reach a station. To the north of this station, a hotel has been constructed and opposite the station, on the other side of the road, a business park is now present.

The maps depicts the layout of Meadowside village and Fonton in 1962 and what modifications have experienced from 1985 until now. Overall, the size of Meadowside village and Fonton has been largened in favour of significant alertations to infrastructure, commercial and residential facilities which have been added. In the initial period surveyed, Meadowside village and Fonton were located separately, the former in the east and the latter in the opposite side. Railway line was laid through Fonton from the north to the west. Similarly, there was small road to the east upon the village.

The given map indicates the alters which have occurred in meadowside rural a neighboring fonton from 1962 until now. As it is clear, The maps show an expanding trend and how meadowside has developed during this time. In 1962, Meadowside was a small village on the west side of the town and two local paths made connections between the village and other parts. However, it wasn’t a stable situation because Meadowside became bigger than in the past and created two roads which through the pass of the village made a connection to Fonton. Furthermore, several places were added to the meadow side in 1985. In addition, The Fonton was developed on the west side in 1985. The Meadowside village has developed and become a part of Fonton while in1962 was a small village and now is a suburb of Fonton town and these days was build a rail station, business park and a hotel near the main road.

These three maps demonstrated the layout of a village named Meadowside and its neighborhood in the respective years 1962, 1985 and present time . Basically, over the period of time this village converted into well developed suburb area with numerous changes taken place in terms of infrastructure. Initially, in year 1962 meadowside was a village with almost very empty spaces and there was not any connecting road available to its neighborhood Fonton. Although, in year 1985 a link road was built to connect both areas. Other infrastructure developments that took place was a leisure club, a targeted area for housing and a super market. Now comparing with current scenario, Meadowside is transformed into suburban area which is expanded towards Fonton. In the midst of this area a hotel, a station is built. Additionally a business park also built in front of main linking highway.

Hi, do we have to mention that the housing complex was build to the west or is it sufficient to just mention buildings that were built?

Generally, you would give locations. However, it really depends on how much information there is to relate. If there is a lot of information, you would choose how to present it differently to if there was only a bit of information. There are no fixed rules. Task 1 is a short report aimed at being around 170-190 words. Rarely does it go over 200 and if it does, it would only be around 210 words. Also, it is designed to be completed in just 20 mins. So, if you take those things into consideration, you’ll make certain choices and this is what you plan before you start writing.

Hi Liz, shouldn’t we maintain the writing task 1 structure as follows: Introduction, Overview, Detailed Paragraph 1 and Detailed Paragraph 2? But, here you have shown five paragraphs containing the whole essay. Could you help to solve my confusion?

The first thing to note is that task 1 is not an essay. It’s really important that you realise this. Task 2 is an essay and task 1 is a report. This is why the sentence structures are similar, language is similar and structure is similar. Regarding organisation of paragraphs, IELTS is testing your ability to group information together into paragraphs. There are no set rules for how many paragraphs you might have. But logically, you can see that in a short report (and IELTS reports are short), you will need an introduction, an overview and body paragraphs (plural). It is most likely that you will only need 2 body paragraphs. Almost all task 1 will have only two. But three are sometimes needed. That is why I create these model answers. I want you to see what must stay the same and where there is flexibility. So, you are doing the right thing in spotting these differences. But just know that if I’ve done it in a model answer, then it’s safe to do. My model answers are safe to learn from and I am careful in how I create them for learning purposes.

Hi liz i hope you are doing well i had one question in your map essay you categorise it to five paragraph is that possible to do it in any writing task1 because to my knowledge most of the time we make it four and thank you for your assistance

The first thing to realise is that writing task 1 is a report, not an essay. Secondly, there are no fixed rules for the number of paragraphs. Most reports will have two body paragraphs, but occasionally you’ll get a task that requires three. It all depends on the information given in the task.

The maps show the changes that have taken place in meadowside village and a neighbouring town called Fonton since 1962. It shows meadowside village and Fonton town as two independent places in 1962 with no road or rail linking them. However, both places have now been connected by a road and a few other infrastructure have been constructed between them.

Overall, the maps show a significant growth in both places between 1962,1985 and now. The development started in 1985 with a housing estate, leisure complex and a superstore, all established in meadowside village. A road was also constructed this particular year linking meadowside village with Fonton town. Both places also expanded in terms of land mass between 1962 and 1985.

Currently, meadowside village has become a suburb and is presently called meadowside suburb, it has also further expanded and completely merged with Fonton town. Additionally, a hotel, station and bus park have been built between both places.

In conclusion, it is obvious that both meadowside village and fonton town have immensely seen major growth and development between 1962 and now.

I don’t usually comment, but I will say this: The overview is the most important paragraph in task 1. It contains all key features, not data and details. It is an general view of the main stages or main changes. You can’t have an overview and a conclusion in a report for task 1. Just the overview is required.

The map illustrates Meadowside village and Fonton and how they have developed over the years 1962, 1985 and presently.

Overall, Meadowside village has become bigger and is now Meadowside suburb as it has merged with Fonton. There are new roads connecting the two villages and new buildings have been built.

In 1962, Meadowside village and Fonton lie on either side not connected by road or rail. But it is visible that Fonton had a rail running through it from the north to the east. On the other hand, Meadowside village had a small road passing through it; it started in the north and moved to the west.

As we move to 1985, we can see that Meadowside village has been expanded and now facilitates a housing estate along with a leisure complex beside it. Across the road that runs through the village which was previously only a small road and is now a main road, we are able to notice the presence of a superstore on the south of the residential area which first appeared in 1985. It is noticeable that there is a road that passes through the village and Fonton from the west to east.

In terms of now, Meadowside is now a suburb. A new rail has emerged towards the east starting from a station located in the center of the two places. Just above the station is where the hotel is situated. Below the station, we can see the business park as well.

Hi can you please correct my mistakes and let me know if there is anything I can do to make this better. And what is a score that I can expect?

The maps presents the development of the urbanization in Meodowside village and the nearest located town Fonton, from year 1962. Meodowside and Fonton started far apart from eachother, but have gradually been structured over time into a bigger town with linking roads, trainroad tracks, and new-built housing.

In 1962 Meodowside village was situated singularly, without any connection to Fonton. The small village had a smaller road passing through. Fonton had only a trainway track going through town.

Under the period up until 1985, there was a significant change. Looking at the middle map, Meodowside has developed to a larger village and buildings as the housing estate and a superstore were constructed in additional. The small road was built wider and another linking road was shaped between the town and village.

After the year 1985, the infrastructure changed massively. A hotel with a nearby trainstation and a business park have been reinforced. Comparing now to 1962 shows a big difference and total connection creating a town out of the the prior village and town.

172 words 32 minutes

The map illustrates the information about the development of Meadowside and Fonton over three periods of time. Overall, it can be seen from the map that there was no development of Meadowside and Fonton in 1962. Meanwhile, in the present, there are so many facilities, including housing estate, superstore, hotel, train station and business park.

Initially, in 1962, there was no development in the landscape in the middle of area. There is only a road ran through Meadowside village and a railway in Fonton as well. Moreover, in 1985, a housing estate, superstore and leisure complex were built in Meadowside village. The road was upgraded to concrete road and connected to Fonton. Additionally, Fonton area was bigger than the 1962.

In the present, a hotel, train station and business park is built between Meadowside suburbs and Fonton. In addition, train station is connected to Fonton. Meadowside suburbs and Fonton area have merged into one major landscape.

Three maps are shown, depicting the composition of Meadowside village and the neighbouring town of Fonton in 1962, 1985, and in the present.

Overall, one can retrace the development and growth of the two communities with first, the building of a bigger and connecting road through Meadowside village into an enlarged Fonton and second, the incorporation into one continuously populated area with new shared infrastructures.

By 1985, the previously smaller road through Meadowside village had been rebuilt into a larger road, including a new section dividing from its curved path, leading straight into the town of Fonton. Further infrastructural changes have only been made after 1985. Nowadays, a novel railway terminus is situated in the area between the two communities, that provides access to the Fonton railway.

In terms of other buildings, both communities had grown considerably by 1985, with the map illustrating a housing estate, leisure complex and superstore located within Meadowside village. Since then, this housing estate has increased further, and a hotel and business park have been built next to the new station, centered in between the once two communities. connecting the formerly beforehand separate communities.

broo this is a 9.5 score band

i love u lizz

The maps depict both Meadowside village and Fonton town in their present and past appearances, dating back to 1985 and 1962.

Overall, it can be clearly seen that not only have the town and village been developed, they are also connected to each other among the considered periods. Similarly, a number of infrastructures have been developed.

In 1962, Fonton and Meadowside were ordinary towns and villages with no interconnection, but they had their own roots. In Meadowside village, there was a road expanding to the south-west of the village and north, and Fonton had a rail road running in the middle of the town. By the year 1985, for the first time, the village and the town had joined each other with the construction of a road. Furthermore, in Meadowside Village, there had been built a supermarket, a housing state, and a leisure complex to the southern part, to the western part, and to the northern part, respectively.

By present, both Meadowside village and Fonton town have been totally connected. There is a station right in the middle of town, a hotel to the north, and a business park to the south. And there is a noticeable extension of the railway to the middle of the town. Furthermore, the name of the village has been changed to Meadowside Suburs.

The maps show the development projects taking place in both Meadowside Village and Fonton, which is a neighboring town, from 1962 to the present era. Overall, there were significant changes in both towns, Meadowside village were extended in size and has become a Surber area. There is some infrastructure, a housing estate, and a leisure complex. Meadowside Village is connected by a main road to the Fonton. In 1992, both Meadowside Village and Fonton Town were completely separated. There is a railway track in Fonton Town, which runs through its North side, and a road in Meadowside Village which runs from its west side. In 1985, some changes were made in Meadowside Village. An estate housing and a complex leisure wade made on its North side and a superstore at its south side. Moreover, Meadowside Village was extended by a main road, which connect it to Fonton Town directly. At that present time, another railway track has been made, which comes from the Western side of Fonton Town. There is also a station made there. A business park has been constructed on the opposite side of the railway station. Besides this, a hotel has been constructed here. Shortly, it can be said that these two towns are completely merged.

The maps illustrate the developments that took place in the Meadowside village and its neighbouring town, Fonton since 1962. There are 3 maps and they show the same region across 3 different dates (1962, 1985, and current).

Overall, initially Fonton Town appears considerably larger than Meadowside village but as time passed, the meadowside village grew in size. It can be observed that Meadowside village had more changes compared to Fonton town. Currently, Meadowside village and Fonton Town are interlinked with many buildings and roads.

In 1962, Meadowside village had only one road passing through it which ran from the west to north while Fonton had a railway line from north to the east. The two did not have any interlinks between them for commute. By 1985 however, Meadowside village grew rapidly, with the road being expanded and a new section of road had been laid out to reach Fonton Town. The village had a housing estate, leisure complex, and a super-store.

Currently, Meadowside Village has transformed into Meadowside Suburbs and a new railway line has been established in Fonton Town which ends in a station situated nearly in the centre of the two localities. The Hotel lies to the north of the station compared to the business park being located in the south. The business park can be accessed from the road linking Meadowside suburbs and Fonton Town.

The maps provide information about two neighbouring settlements, Meadowside(a village) and Fonton(a town), which have undergone development in the space of 60years. Overall, there has been development in the infrastructure, housing and transport systems in both Meadowside and Fonton, and the two areas have increased in size over the years.

Notably, there was a huge difference in both the size of Meadowside and its infrastructures between 1962 to 1985 as housing estate, leisure complex and super store were all constructed in 1985 as opposed to the lack of these facilities in 1962 in the village. In the same period, Fonton town was developed with increased size and construction of road passing from the southeast to the southwest, connecting Meadowside and Fonton together.

At the moment, both Meadowside and Fonton has been transformed with amenities such as station, business park and a hotel which serve both the suburb and the town.

Impressively, while Meadowside was merely a village up till 1985, it is now a suburb area. Also, Fonton town and Meadowside are now connected together as their sizes have increased to joining each other.

you need to describe the map. stating the location of the buildings developed using the map axis will be better..

Hi Liz, I hope you are doing great on your job. I just want to know that if you have released any updated article for IELTS writing recently as I believe that structure of IELTS writing is modernized by the changes of time. Thank you so much in advance for your response.

The writing test hasn’t changed. The format is the same as it always was. The marking is the same. The techniques are the same. Nothing has changed.

Thank you for this update

You’re welcome 🙂

The map illustrate the change that foncton and meadowside village went through in three time periods (1962, 1985 and the present).

Overall, the two neighbors used to be separate with no road or railway connection whatsoever, the two entities managed to grow over time, first to be linked with a road and merged at the end with new different infrastructure facilities.

in 1962, Meadowside village had only one small road coming from the west of the village and heading north. Meanwhile, foncton had a railway coming from the north, passing through the city and going west.

in 1985, the only road in Meadowise village got increased with an extention linking to it’s neighboring village and going east.Furthermore, a housing estate and a leisure complex were builled north of the West-East road, and a superstore was constructed on the south side of the that road.

Currently, Meadowside village name changed to Meadowside suburbs as it merged with foncton, a new business park was constructed south to the East-west road, a new train station was build at the center of the merging neighbors with a new railroad linked to the old one, north of it, a hotel was build.

The maps illustrate the progress occurred in Meadowside village and its neighbor, Fonton in three different time periods.

Overall, there were significant changes clearly seen in these two areas, one of which is their merging at present.

In detail, both Meadowside and Fonton were separated in 1962. The foremost was still a small village with steep road that passed from north to west. The latter, on the other hand was larger in size with rail ran through north to east.

Meanwhile, in 1985 both towns increased their land areas. There were leisure complex, superstore and housing built in Meadowside. Moreover, the steep road was converted into wider roads, one of which was extended to Fonton.

At present, Meadowside village which is now a suburb is combined with Fonton. Hotel and station has been established in the eastern side with newly built business park adjacent to the main road connected to Fonton. Alternatively, Fonton formed additional railway across west nearby suburb.

This map illustrates how Meadowside village and Fonton , which is neighbour town, have developed over three different times (1982, 1985 and now). Now Meadowside village is grown much more than 1982, it is merge with Fonton and grown significate infrastructure, 1962, this two village were completely separated. There where no rail and Road transportation, they didn’t have any kind of communication. They was only road from west. 1985, there was growth in Meadowside village, there was Leisure Complex, Housing Estate in west. Super Store in south. Small road converted to main road and also extended to Fonton has also developed. Now, they are now connected through subways and fonton is now joined .They are more developed. Railways are built in west and run in fonton where the station are built. To north side of the station, a hotel is construction and opposite the station . There is the business park built in south.

Hi Liz ! Thank you so much for sharing with us such a well-explained essay. I found your website veru useful. I will take IELTS exam in the coming month and I will inform my score with you.

Sincerely, Anvar

The way you explain is extremely beautiful like you. And apologies if i am crossing my limit but your smile could make anyone’s day. Thank you for providing all the information regarding task 1 and 2. Keep smiling.

That’s a lovely comment. Thank you. I’m glad my lessons are useful 🙂

Are you briliant teacher

you are really very good person and Don’t forget keep always smiling 😊

The map illustrates the meadowside village and Fonton which are the neighbouring towns, have developed over the different time periods from 1962, 1985 and the present era.

Overall, the Meadowside village developed their infrastructure which includes transportation, buildings, hotels etc and connected with the Fonton town.

In 1962, both the villages Fonton and Meadowside were not developed as there was no means of transportation between these two places. While Fonton had a railway line running from the north to eastern side of the village. Whereas Meadowside had a small road running from the northern part to western side of the village.

In 1985, there has been considerable changes in both the villages, especially in Meadowside village. The small road which was running from north towards the western part of the region had been converted into a highway road and the southern part of this road were merged with another road line which connects to Fonton village. Since then travelling between two villages became more convenient. Moreove in Meadowside village three important landmarks were added to their infrastructure, the Leisure complex in the western part, Housing estate in the eastern side and Super store at the southern area of the village.

At present both the villages were developed by improving the mode of transportation, as new connection railway lines were constructed from the western part of Fonton towards the centre location between two villages. To enhance the tourist economy of this area, they built a hotel behind the railway station and the business park on the opposite side of the station towards the south.

The map compares the development of Meadowside Village and its neighboring town Fonton throughout three periodical times (1962, 1985, and present time). Overall, the size area of the village and the town have increased and both areas become one union with Meadownside become a suburb area under Fonton administration. There are also developments in infrastructures such as roads, railways, housing, and business center. In initial year, Meadowside was only a small village with a small road crossing through the village. Located in the east of the village, there was Fonton, a neighboring town with railway running through it. However, there was no road that is channeling both areas. In 1985, the size of both areas increased. The big road was built in this year, being the hub between the village and the town. There were also a development in infrastructure, as housing estate, leisure complex, and superstore were built in Meadowside village. In present time, these two areas eventually merge as one, results in Meadowside became a suburb under Fonton town. They also built some facilities in area between Fonton town and the suburbs, such as hotel and business park. The railway line which once was only running through Fonton now extends to Meadowside as a new station was built around there.

The maps indicate the developments of a village called Meadowside and of a near town called Fonton, over a period started in 1962.

Overall, it can be seen that over the period in question the village and the town were expanded with the addition of a motorway and some facilities. Nowadays, Fonton and Meadowside are connected to each other.

In 1962 the village covered a small area and was crossed by a small street. In the following thirteen years it was improved, with the additions of a leisure complex, a housing estate and a super-store. Also Fonton was expanded and the two sites, in 1985, were connected with a motorway, which crossed both of them, from west to east.

Now, Meadowside and Fonton share only one area. To the west, there are Meadowside suburbs and to the east there is Fonton. The most noticeable additions are the hotel which is collocated between them in the north of the area, the station, built along the motorway and the business park.

Keep up the good job ✊Your explanation is liked me 😉

The rendered map illustrates the information about the improvments in town namely frenton in 32 years between 1990 to 2012.

Overall, it can be clearly seen from the map that there were tremendous changes after three decades in frenton. Se buldings had been improved. At the outset , school and library were only buildings which stay unchanged and in west side of high street . Trees were cut down to set up a techpark in left bottom side of town, further more , there was a bank beside the school was converted to restaurant . Hospital in the centre had been axpanded . Proceeding further , bottom playing feild with trees was demolished in order to make blocks of flates , new flats also opened alongside high street . Houses were changed to flats. There were cafe and park in east side of town which were improved into hotel and golf course . Theatre and shops were modernized in cimema as well as supermarket in last year

Hey Liz, i just want to know that can we write things in brackets as you have done in introduction, is it accepted in ielts.

Yes, of course. It’s 100% fine and in fact very useful for Writing Task 1. However, don’t overuse them. You need to vary the way you present data. They are mainly useful for line graphs, bar charts, tables and pie charts.

The map shows the different development for three years (1962,1985 and currently) in Meadowside village and Foton, a neighbouring town.

In general, the small road was replaced by big two main roads. One of them running through the Meadoside village and the other crossing the south-east of Foton. The two states have been together in the present and the size of the place was increased. There are more buildings were constructed during the three years.

In 1962, the village was spirited from the other. Also, there were no buildings and connecting the main road between them. The size of tow places was small. However, Foton was bigger than the village.

In 1985, Meadowside village constructed by lot of buildings such as ( i can’t see the names) On the other hand, Foton remains the same thing without any buildings except the size of the place which has been increased during the period.

In the present, the two places become bigger together and the have been untied by a big road accessing the place from the southeast to the southwest. And the other one from the north ending with the previous road. Between the main roads in. northeast there has been built a hotel and a station. So the number of entertainment buildings has been increased.

Hi, Liz, Hope you are safe. I have a doubt about your writing task 1 practise charts.

Which tense to use for the map “an island before and after the construction of some tourist facilities”?

It would depend on the fixed date. If the before date is in the past, you use past tense. If the after date is in our current past, you use past tense. However, if it is in our future, you use the future forms. English grammar rules apply as normal to IELTS.

Thank you, Liz, but there are no dates in the question only before and after. That’s why I’m confused.

Where did you find this question? Which IELTS Cambridge book did you find it in?

Pardon, the section’s name is ” IELTS CHARTS FOR PRACTICE”.

I know the one. You use past tense for “before” and present tense of “after”.

Thank you so much, Liz. Thank you for your valuable time.

Thanks Liz 😍💜

Its clear now Liz . Thankyou so much for quick response and help.

I wanna ask how is this task 1 estimated at band score 9 as it has 200+ words. I read in one of your reply that band score 9 has words between 170 and 190.

Can you please elaborate?

Don’t confuse advice with rules. There is no upper limit for words. However, you should aim for between 160 and 190 words (more or less). Writing more might lead you to add more detail and also increase your chances of making more language errors. You don’t get a particular band score because you have written a particular number of words. As I am fully trained and also a native English speaker, I can get away with reaching slightly over 200, but even so, most of my model answers fall just under 190 words.

Liz thank you so much 😊

Thanks you so much Liz mam ❤️❤️

Dear Liz I heard that there is a new rule of British Council that there should write a conclusion in Writing part 1? Is it true?

No. Writing task 1 is a report and you will see on the band score descriptors published by IELTS that the examiner is looking for an overview. Some people write a conclusion which is actually an overview – that is fine. It is about content and functionality. A conclusion traidtionally contains your opinions summarised – task 1 cannot contain opinions. A conclusion traditionally restates main points – task 1 cannot have repeated information. An overview is the one and only paragraph containing the key features of the task – it can be put after the introduction or at the end – some people put it at the end and call it an conclusion. That is the reason you are confused.

@Liz, which one is the best and good for achieving the IELTS band score. 1. Introduction > Overview > Paragraph 1 > Paragraph 2. 2. Introduction with overview > Paragraph 1 > PParagraph 2 > Conclusion.

I am really so confused between above them. Please share your opinion.

See this page to learn: https://ieltsliz.com/ielts-writing-task-1-lessons-and-tips/ . Use everything I have written to train yourself. That is the purpose of this site 🙂 The answer is there for you to find 🙂

Is it a must to write a conclusion in Task 1? Many people say, that you lose marks if there is no conclusion paragraph

You are immediately penalised if you do not write a conclusion in task 2. You are also immediately penalised if you do not write an overview in task 1.

I have heard that there should be no conclusion or overview in diagrams of writing task 1

That is completely untrue. ALL writing task 1, for the academic paper, MUST have an Overview.

Liz is considered by me to be perfect teacher for all type of information regarding ielts. Thanks for giving ur precious time to us.🙏🙏

Hi Liz,I just wanna know if it is a band 9 sample ?!

And as i realize from this sample , each paragraph explains about only the related map.I want to know whether we need to compare all the three maps with each other or not.

In writing task 1, you compare when necessary – it is not necessary to compare all things at all times. You task is to write a report which is about reporting features – comparison often only comes in the overview. For a diagram, it sometimes doesn’t come at all. For some bar charts (not all) it is the main feature of the report. Each task type is different.

Hello Mam…some IELTS coaching institutes say that we should write overall in task 1 academci at last instead of after introduction because it also also like a conclusion and we write conclusion always at last…is it okay with this?

There are no fixed rules about this in IELTS. You can choose the position of the overview. However, remember that this is not an essay – it is a report.

This task contain much more words than 150 …i think we are suppose to write upto Maximum 180 word… .

Your task is to write over 150 words. A high band score task 1 will usually have between 170 and 190 words. On the whole, it is best to avoid 200 words plus in order to reduce the density of errors and show the ability to select information.

Dear Liz can we write “Meadowside village has been increased in size” But you have written “Meadowside village increased i size” we can still see that the village has increased.But why didn’t you write it in present perfect passive.Please clarify

Meadowside village increased in size” is correct. You would not choose a passive voice for that statement.

I just watched your Map video Liz, in that you told that we should use the key ( Housing area), (town center) to change into small letters but in this model band 9 sample response it isn’t changed into small letters (meadows and fonton). Pls kindly clarify my doubt. Thanks to YOU

You need to listen much more carefully to my video lessons. I did not say you remove ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. I said you must adapt the headings or labels to make them grammatically correct when you write them in a sentence. The word “Tennis” is usually given with a capital letter in a bar chart, but we do not use a capital letter with that word in an English sentence. The word “Food” might have a capital letter in a graph, but we don’t use it with a capital letter in an English sentence. You need to look at your map or chart and decide which headings must have the capital letter changed to make it grammatically correct in a sentence. Do you understand now?

Hotel has been constructed or hotel has constructed . What is duffernce between both sentences. Is it same meaning? Plz help me 🙏

The first is passive voice. You need to learn when to use it and when to use active voice.

The difference is bellow: someone has constructed the hotel the hotel has been constructed by someone

Writing task 1 I do not feel like writing properl.So learn me

This website is for people learning IELTS skills for a high score. It is not for people struggling with English. If your English level is not strong, you will need to improve your English before you think about IELTS.

Hlw, in this task there are more than 4 paragraphs but in your video you told that there will be 4 paragraphs .. is it fine to write more paragraphs?? I am so confused now

The most common is 4. There is no fixed rule about the number of paragraphs for IELTS writing – only advice. It also depends on the task you are given and the information in the map or graph.

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IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - Map questions (Lessons and questions included )

In your IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 preparation, you'll need to practice a total of 7 IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 data types. In this post, we'll look at the Map questions in IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 questions in detail and provide you 5 map practice questions.

Table Of Contents

How to tackle maps in ielts writing task 1 questions, vocabulary for ielts academic writing map questions.

• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - 5 Map Questions.

Maps occasionally show up in IELTS academic writing task 1 and when they do, you will see two maps. Often one map is in the past map, while the other is in the present. You’ll also encounter scenarios where both maps are in the past. You might also get maps which show proposals for the future such as a redevelopment scheme. Therefore, it is important to use the proper tenses to describe the changes.

Since there are 2 maps, the essay structure for this question is simple:

• Introduction: Paraphrase the question
• Overview: Describe what you consider to be the major changes over time.
• Body paragraph 1: Describe the first map in detail
• Body paragraph 2: Describe the second map in detail

We will use this essay structure for all map questions. Now, let’s join IELTS Instructor Tina below to learn how to approach IELTS Writing Task 1 Map questions.

IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Maps Lesson

• Question 1 from the video
• Question 2 from the video

The diagrams below show the coastal village of Seaville in 1980 and 2010. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

Model Essay

Important functional words are highlighted in red Useful vocabulary and phrases are highlighted in green Synonyms and topic vocabulary are highlighted in blue

The maps illustrate significant changes in the seaside town of Seaville, over a thirty-year period, from 1980 to 2010.

Overall , the village developed substantially from a holiday settlement to a permanent town over the 30 year period . Similarly, infrastructure and amenities increased, along with the town’s capacity to provide for tourists.

In 1980, Seaville was tiny, attracting only a few tourists, who were accommodated in cottages or a small hotel. In contrast , East Bank was unspoilt .   To the east of the cottages, was a marsh, and there was woodland to the north . Regarding recreation, besides the beach, the town only offered a tea room.

However , the village had grown dramatically by 2010. Retirement villages had been built to the west of the main road. The marsh had been drained and the cottages demolished in order to construct houses. To cater for tourists, both a new high-rise hotel and holiday cottages on East Bank had been constructed. The woodlands had been cleared and supplanted by a golf course. Similarly , a boat club had been built on the west bank of the river. New infrastructure was created to access East Bank. On the other hand, the town had preserved the original hotel.

PRACTICE QUESTION 1 ON OUR IELTS APP

The maps below show the centre of a small town called Islip as it is now, and plans for its development. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

The diagrams illustrate some proposed changes to the central area of the town of Islip.

Overall, the principal change to the town will be the construction of a ring road around the centre. Various other developments with regard to shops and housing will accompany the building of this road.

As the first map reveals , lslip town center now is relatively small. There is a main road from the west to the east with shops on both sides . The northern area is rarely countryside , while the southern area is filled with houses with a school at the end of the fork road in the southwest corner and a park in the southeast area .

In the future , the main road is expected to reform into a dual carriageway as a round containing all the new buildings. The shops along the north side of the new pedestrian street will be demolished to make way for a bus station, shopping centre, car parks and new housing area. The shops along the south side of the street will remain, but it seems that the town’s park will be reduced in size so that more new houses can be built within the ring road.

PRACTICE QUESTION 2 ON OUR IELTS APP

When describing the location of something on a map, you can use the following phrases and vocabulary:

Now that you're familiar with the IELTS Writing Task 1 Map questions, it's time to practice. Check out the practice questions below.

IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - Map Questions

This section presents a list of common IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - Map questions. If you want to prepare for the IELTS Writing Test, these questions are a must study.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

Write at least 150 words.

The diagrams below show the coastal village of Seaville in 1980 and 2010. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant. 

The maps below show the centre of a small town called Islip as it is now, and plans for its development. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. 

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IELTS Task 1 Map

In an IELTS task 1 map you often have to compare a map from the past with one from the present. 

This writing task 1 sample map shows you an example of one of these types of question with a model answer. 

Organisation: Each Map in Turn

You have several choices of how to organise an IELTS task 1 map such as this. 

You could choose the various features in turn, such as the fishing port and market in the past, then note how these have now gone, with the market replaced by apartments.

Or you could describe everything in the first map, then everything in the second map. This is how this sample answer is organised.

Either way, make sure you describe all the key features  in the IELTS task 1 map and don't miss any. 

Hopefully the tenses to use will be obvious. You need to use past tenses for the first IELTS task 1 map in 1995 and present tenses for the present day one. 

IELTS Task 1 Map Sample

You should spend about 20 minutes on this task.

The map below shows the development of the village of Ryemouth between 1995 and present.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant.

Write at least 150 words.

Sample Answer

The map shows how a village called Ryemouth has developed over the last twenty-five years. There have been several changes, the most noticeable being the increases in accommodation, the elimination of the fishing industry, and the introduction of sports facilities. 

In 1995, to the south of the village where the sea is there was previously a fishing industry, with a fishing port and quite a large fish market as well. Next to this was a small cafe. On the other side of the road running by the sea stood a line of five shops and a hotel, while situated in the north east part of the village was farmland and a park with trees. The main housing of the village was located in the north west around a main road that runs from the coastal road, with twelve houses, four of them encircled by a smaller side-street.

Turning to the present day map, it can be seen that the fishing facilities have all gone, being replaced by four apartments, and the shops have become restaurants. The cafe remains, as does the hotel, albeit with parking facilities which it did not have before. Having been converted into a golf course, the farmland has now gone, while the forest park has been removed to make way for tennis courts. Although the old houses remain, new ones have been built, along with a new road with two new houses beside it.  

(240 Words)

This IELTS task 1 map would receive a high score. 

The map has a clear overall progression and organisation as it is introduced, the main features are identified, then it clearly compares the first map with the second. 

There is a mix of vocabulary , with the right language of location used to say where things were positioned and the language of comparison and contrast used to good effect to show how things differed or remained the same.

There is a good range of accurate complex sentences and structures to ensure a higher score for grammatical range and accuracy.

Some examples of these are:

• ...the village where the sea is
• On the other side of the road running by the sea stood a...
• ...hotel, while situated in
• ...it can be seen that 
• ...gone, being replaced by
• ...albeit with parking facilities which it did not have before
• Having been converted
• Although the old houses

<<< Previous Sample

Next Sample >>>

More on IELTS Maps:

IELTS Map Sample: Organising the map by features / items

In this IELTS map sample for writing task 1 you have to describe the differences presented in a plan of a park.

IELTS Map Writing Task 1 Sample: Describing changes to a town

Sometimes may be asked to describe an IELTS map in task 1 of the IELTS Test. This is a map of Brandfield with two proposed sites for a shopping mall. There is a model answer.

IELTS Map Writing: Using the language of location

This IELTS map writing sample answer is about an island, before and after the construction of some tourist facilities, and it demonstrates language of location.

IELTS Map Practice: Learn and practice the language of location

This IELTS map practice exercise improves your skills in the language of location for maps. Choose the correct word to fit in the gap.

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IELTS academic writing task 1 maps lesson

How to write about maps in ielts..

Updated: June 2024

Maps often show up in IELTS academic writing task 1. There are different types of maps and the most common is the past and present (this task below) or sometimes both maps may be in the past. There are also maps which show proposals for the future such as a redevelopment scheme.

You will need to use specific vocabulary in this task and the grammar needed would be the past tense (was /were), the present perfect passive to describe change and prepositions . You also have to use specific language that shows location and change.

The structure for writing task 1

Click the blue button to see the structure for all IELTS task 1 academic tasks.

Key vocabulary to use for describing maps

Example sentences:

Note that the grammar used to describe changes is in the passive and these sentences are in the past tense, which describe 2 maps in the past.

• The offices were demolished and the surrounding area was redeveloped with a new leisure centre opening up .
• The shopping centre was extended and the parking area was enlarged to accommodate more cars
• The trees were cut down and a new office block was erected .
• A railway was constructed with the introduction of a new train station.
• The industrial area was modernised and made bigger with lots of new factories being built
• The local government had the sports facilities renovated and the small park was made into a children’s playground
• The park was replaced with a new housing complex.

Vocabulary for showing location

When describing the location of something on a map that has a compass symbol you should use phrases like:

• to the north of
• to the east of
• in the west
• to the south of
• north-west of

Prepositions are essential when describing the location on a map, such as:

•  from north to south
• from east to west
• across from
• The trees to the north of the river were cut down and a new office block has been built .
• A railway was constructed to the east of the housing estate to make way for a new train station.
• The forest to the west of the park was cut down and a new housing complex has been constructed.
• The industrial area to the south-west of the station was expanded.
• The shopping centre in the south of the city is planned to be demolished and a new stadium is expected to be built.

Prepositions:

• Houses were constructed next to the primary school.
• The forest near the river was cut down.
• A new railway running from north to south has been built.
• The footpath by the river has been expanded.
• Parking facilities were added to the city centre.
• The school across from the park was extended and new sports facilities were built.

Vocabulary for describing change over time

When describing change, the present perfect and the present perfect passive is often used. Time phrases are also used such as: over the 20 year period, from 1990 to 2000, over the years, in the last 10 years, in the years after 1990 and so on.

The present perfect and the present perfect passive shows that something started in the past up until the present moment (or near present)

Examples:  has witnessed big changes / has become more industrialised / has been built/ has been modernised

Theses sentences below are often used to give an overview of the main differences between the two maps.

• Over the 20 year period , the area has witnessed big changes especially to the farmland areas which were redeveloped.
• From 1990 to 2010 a new housing estate was constructed where a school once stood.
• The forests have been cut down and new housing has been built.
• In the period from 1990 onward , the leisure facilities were completely renovated.
• The city centre has seen dramatic changes over the years .
• In the years after 1990 , the city centre was extensively modernised.
• The town used to be very green but it has become much more industrialised in the last 15 years.
•  A new stadium has been built and more sports facilities have been opened up over the years.

The Overview

The overview comes just after the introduction and makes a general statement about the main differences between the maps. The overview is quite short, maybe about 2 or 3 sentences. Do not go into detail in the overview.

In the task below there are 2 maps. The past (1986) and present. In this case, you will need to use the past tense and the present perfect to describe the changes.

Model Answer

‘The two maps below show the changes in the town of Denham from 1986 to the present day. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features and make comparisons where relevant.’

The maps illustrate the main changes which have taken place in the town of Denham from 1986 to the present moment.

Overall, the town has most notably shown an increase in housing development which indicates a higher population and a move away from agriculture and farming.

One change that stands out is that there has been a significant redevelopment over the whole period. To the east of the river stoke housing now dominates the area of what was once farmland. In 1986 there were shops and just a handful of residential properties. Now there are neither shops nor farmland left, although the post office is still there. The bridge over the river stoke still stands as it did in 1986.

Another noticeable change is that more roads have been built around the housing complex. Additionally, the gardens that were in front of the large house in 1986 have been removed and the house has been expanded and converted into a retirement home. The primary school still stands and has been extended in the decades since.

(175 words)

Aim for around 170 to 190 words in this task. You will not have time to go into a long report and you need to be selective in writing task 1.

Any questions? leave a comment below.

Also take a look at the instagram page-> click here to see it ., 1 thought on “ielts academic writing task 1 maps lesson”.

very informative

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Model IELTS Academic Task 1 Essay: Map Questions 

Dec 29, 2019 | IELTS , IELTS Test , IELTS Writing

The IELTS Academic Task 1 essay is perhaps the most challenging part of the test. One reason for this is that there are many different types of data it might ask you to describe. Since you don’t know which you will receive on test day, you must master them all.

To help you, we have written a model essay based on the map style of question. This essay is likely to score from 8.5-9.0 on test day.

This task follows the following format:

Introduction:  paraphrasing the description given with the task Overview : stating the main trends [this is very important] Body Paragraph:  containing all the main data [in this essay we have divided the data between two body paragraphs]

The Question  

The plans show the layout of a grocery store in the present day and   2010. Overall, the shop has expanded both its size and product range.

The store has shelving units along three of its walls, and three sets of shelving units in the centre of the building. The north wall was reserved for dairy and meat products. By 2020 the space reserved for milk has expanded by two-thirds, reducing the area for ice cream and meat. The east wall held baked goods in 2010, and space for baskets to the left of the main entrance. By 2020 the baked products had been replaced with microwave meals and trolleys were also available.

Of the three central shelving units, only the central one was unchanged – containing space for sweets and snacks. The shelving units on the left held vegetables and fruits in 2010 but now host canned food also. The third shelving unit had contained tinned food but is now occupied by baked goods. Toiletries remain opposite the drinks section, which in 2010 ran along the western wall. By 2020 an extension had been built, and the western area now hosts a self-service cafe with seating for six. A new entrance has been added to the front of the shop. Finally, half of the checkouts are now self-service.  

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How to describe a map for academic task 1

In task 1 of the academic writing component of the IELTS exam , you may be asked to describe a map or plan.

The diagram will be of a building, street, village, city or town plan that may ask you to contrast the past and present, or the present and future.

There will also be a key that explains different locations on the map or a reference to roads and routes. You are expected to write a 150-word description of the information on the map, which will probably include buildings, routes or proposed changes for the future.

Your writing will be scored on four criteria: task achievement, coherence, lexical resources and grammatical accuracy. Let’s review techniques to achieve a good score in all four areas.

1. Organise your thoughts

Organise your thoughts before starting. This is critically important.

Plan what you will include for each paragraph. A good technique is to explain the area as if you were walking in. So if you had a map of a house, you would start with the doorway or entrance hall.

Alternatively, if the map is larger you can start from right to left. Just make sure it’s logical i.e don’t jump from right to left to centre.

TIP: While planning, look for opportunities to group the information, for example; both maps may have an area that is unchanged between the time dates. This can be written up as:

Over the fifty year period both maps have maintained a distinct recreational area despite the extensive construction in the surrounding areas.

2. Task achievement

Be sure to write at least 150 words that describe all information illustrated in the map or plan. Take about three minutes to understand the map, identify changes and circle the key points.

Summarise the main changes or information in the introduction and give more detail in the main part of your text. Give a short summary to sum up the impact of these changes on the town or area.

3. Coherence

The format of your text should be written in three to four paragraphs: an introduction, main paragraph(s) and conclusion.

The use of connectors, such as First of all, In addition to and To summarise , are important to maintain coherence and a logical flow of ideas in your work.

Other useful structures would be; opposite, in front of, on the right, to the north, to the south, etc. Maintain separate paragraphs to distinguish changes or comparisons.

For example, use your second paragraph to give details of the first map and write about the next map in your third paragraph.

4. Language

Be sure not to repeat the vocabulary shown on the map, but use your own words for the description. Let’s consider useful vocabulary to describe a map or plan.

In your initial paragraph, you can use verbs such as show, demonstrate or illustrate . For example:

This map illustrates plans to change the green area into a playground for children.

Of course, try to use synonyms to add variety to your use of language. Synonyms of illustrate are highlight, indicate or demonstrate .

= This map highlights a project to transform the green park into a play area for children.

To describe location, employ useful prepositions :

There is a large residential area between the small lake and the park.

A road runs alongside the border of the park.

As we are describing a map or plan, it is essential to use compass points to describe direction. For example:

This plan proposes to build a playground in the south-west part of the park.

The airport is currently located north-east of the town.It will be moved to the west of the park where there is more space.

A lot of other useful vocabulary for maps or plans includes town centre, residential area, roads, routes, railway station and traffic-free zone .

Where possible, use synonyms to avoid repetition.

TIP: Comparisons, and superlatives are also valuable points winners!

The passive form The passive form is often used in this type of writing task, as we do not know who is planning these changes. For example:

The park is located west of the village. The playground will be built in the south-west part of the park. A flower garden will be created east of the playground.

Use a range of tenses. As you may compare the present with future plans, show your ability to use theses times:

Currently, there is a traffic-free zone in the center of the park. This zone will be expanded to the west area of the park.

In 2014, there was a train station located in the north-east of the region. Currently, this station is now based in south of the village.

When making recent comparisons, it’s useful to employ the present perfect simple:

A new hospital has been constructed in the east of the village.

There have been two new roads built around the border of the town.

To achieve a higher score in IELTS academic writing task 1, it’s advisable to use some clauses:

To the south of the river, a new hotel has been constructed.

Greystones, which has a population of 50,000 , is situated south of Dublin on the seaside.

Take a look at IELTS academic task 1 sample essays to help you prepare and check out our IELTS essay correction service to help you improve.

Video: Describe an IELTS map - task 1. With band 9 model answer

Useful links to help you prepare for academic task 1:

• How to describe a pie chart
• Bar Chart IELTS
• How to describe a map
• Describe an image 
• Describe a natural process
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• How to paraphrase
• Line graph sample answer
• Marking criteria for Task 1
• Map vocabulary for IELTS Task 1
• How to describe a flow chart
• Essential skills for Task 1
• How to get band 9 for academic task 1
• How to describe a process diagram

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How to Describe an IELTS Writing Task 1 Map

Below, I’m going to walk you through the five steps to writing top-scored IELTS map essays:

• Master the basic vocabulary
• Understand the objectives of the task
• Fully describe the items on the map
• Describe the way elements of the map change (an IELTS Writing map is two part, showing how a place changes)
• Combine all of these skills into a full essay

A full walkthrough of Writing Task 1 maps, including a model essay, can be seen in Eliot’s video above. (You can watch the video now, or check it out later after reading this guide!)

IELTS Map Vocabulary

Before we look at the finer parts of how to write about an IELTS map, let’s think about the basic features of these maps and the IELTS map vocabulary used to describe them. In a nutshell, most IELTS maps will show a large location with buildings and other specific types of areas and locations. And typically, there will actually be two maps: a before and after map. With that in mind, there are three major important categories of vocabulary for describing such maps. For each of the three categories below, I’ve given a partial list of the kids of words you might use. This should give you a general idea, and I would encourage you to think up additional similar words on your own.

Words that Describe the Places

Adjectives:, words that describe the locations of places, compass words:.

• NOTE: Even if a compass does not appear on a map, you can assume that up is north, down is south, left is west, and right is east

DIRECTIONAL WORDS AND PREPOSITIONS:

• across from

Words that Describe Actions and Change

• constructed
• significant
• substantial

How to Write About an IELTS Map

How to write a map essay in IELTS involves a simple 5 step process:

1. Get Fluent in Basic IELTS Map Vocabulary

Develop your skills and knowledge for words that describe places, where places are located in relation to each other, and how places change in IELTS Writing maps. The lists I’ve provided are a great place to start.

2. Understand The Objectives

To tackle the challenge of describing a map for the exam, you must understand the objectives of the task at hand. Importantly, while 75% of your score represents your linguistic performance (coherence and cohesion, vocabulary, and grammar), 25% depends on your achievement of the task.

Earning a high band score for task 1 completion  is awarded for a “clear overview of main trends, differences, or stages.” If a clear overview cannot be achieved, you must minimally highlight the key features related to the prompt.

With this in mind, check out the image below:

If we want to consider key features or trends, it wouldn’t be enough to say that there are rides, recreational areas, and places where goods can be purchased. This doesn’t provide any overviews; it simply lists elements. Noting patterns and overall “trends” requires looking at the bigger picture, not isolated elements. An overview might point out instead that rides and tours tend to be farther from the parking area (i.e. the roller coaster, Ferris wheel, and magic castle), and that places where visitors can rest are closer to the theme park entrance (i.e. the food court and the playground/picnic area).

But you probably won’t be given an image and simply told, “describe it.” Instead, you will be given a specific task, and you will use the information in the image to complete it. For example, for the image above, a the full task is actually to describe the key features and differences between the current layout of the theme park, and the way the theme park will look after some planned future changes.

3. Go Beyond Naming

Ultimately, your task requires more than mere description. While nouns are obviously important (for naming various structures and natural elements and their basic positions on the map), task completion involves more than listing items. Describing trends, differences, or stages requires noting the relationship among elements and between images for comparison. Remember, there’s far more to IELTS Writing Task 1 vocabulary than just the names of things.

Imagine that your task is to examine before and after illustrations of a neighborhood over the course of a century.

For this task, it is clearly not enough to name what is new.  Don’t just describe what’s there, describe the relationship between what’s there.

For example, do not simply say “there is an office complex that wasn’t there before.” What relationship does this have to the big picture?  Remember, you must be able to provide an overview .

4. Describe the Changes Between the Two Maps

But, wait! Your overview shouldn’t just mention elements and their relationship to one another. How are the elements that you’re describing relevant to the prompt? What changes have been made?  We must connect these observations to the before and after context, reflecting change:

• The cannery along the northwest side of Oak Avenue was replaced by an office complex.
• The main road is connected to side roads that are closer to the lake and river. In the second map, the road that ended near the river now goes over the river via bridge.
• There is a petrol station on the other side of the road from the Yang Office Complex, where the elementary school had been on the older map.
• The main road currently has two shops, where previously there had been just one shop. These shops sit between the more recently constructed apartment buildings and an expanded set of homes.
• The smaller elementary school on the north side of Miller’s Lake was expanded and moved to the east side of the lake.

Now that’s more like it! Always remember that the IELTS Writing Task 1 map comparison between the old and new features is very important.

5. Put These Skills Together into a Full Essay

At this point, you’ve mastered the basic vocabulary, made your descriptions of the places on the map more detailed, and learned to describe change between two maps. Of course, these are just a few of many ways you could describe the map above. Your final step is to apply all this knowledge to map essays of your own creation. Try writing your own essay about the map above, or create an essay based on our full set of IELTS Writing Task 1 practice questions . That set includes a link to the full model IELTS Writing Task 2 essay based on the map above .

Final Takeaways For Using IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Vocabulary

Main takeaways for using IELTS map vocabulary to compare and describe an IELTS map:

• Remember that the examiner is looking for an overview with main points, not an exhaustive list of elements. (Notice, for example that I didn’t precisely quantify housing units, describe exact comparative distances, or give the exact names of every location.)
• Think of the big picture. Rather than focusing on what’s there, think about how they’re related to the overall developments.
• Don’t forget your primary task – What changes have been made? What occurred, resulting in the differences you see?

Check out more helpful articles on the use of IELTS Writing Task 1 map vocabulary ( and this bonus IELTS Video! ) on preparing for the IELTS Academic Writing Task 1:

• How to Describe an IELTS Academic Pie Chart
• How to Describe an IELTS Academic Bar Chart
• How to Prepare for Academic IELTS Academic Writing Task 1

David is a Test Prep Expert for Magoosh TOEFL and IELTS. Additionally, he’s helped students with TOEIC, PET, FCE, BULATS, Eiken, SAT, ACT, GRE, and GMAT. David has a BS from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and an MA from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. His work at Magoosh has been cited in many scholarly articles , his Master’s Thesis is featured on the Reading with Pictures website, and he’s presented at the WITESOL (link to PDF) and NAFSA conferences. David has taught K-12 ESL in South Korea as well as undergraduate English and MBA-level business English at American universities. He has also trained English teachers in America, Italy, and Peru. Come join David and the Magoosh team on Youtube , Facebook , and Instagram , or connect with him via LinkedIn !

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5 responses to “How to Describe an IELTS Writing Task 1 Map”

THANKS I LOVE IT !

Perfect explanation about the format of task 1.

Dear Sir/Madam,

If we use passive voice for present change then do we have to use have been or has been. In the above explanation, can we use has been instead of have been?

“Have been” is for plural subjects, and “has been” is for singular subjects. Here’s one of the examples from above:

The western and central parts of the island have been developed into a resort.

“Western and central parts” is plural, so you use “have.” If we change this sentence so that the subject is singular, it becomes:

“The western part of the island has been developed into a resort.”

Since this example has only one part, we use the singular “has.” I hope that answers your question!

nicely explained

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IELTS Writing Task 1 Maps Lesson

Introduction.

This guide on IELTS Writing Task 1 maps questions will cover:

• Different kinds of map question
• Describing specific changes
• Describing general changes
• Describing locations
• Sample answer

You will also be able to learn some new vocabulary that will help you deal with any Task 1 maps question.

In the IELTS writing test, you might be asked to describe a map in task 1. This type of question is becoming increasingly popular- in fact, it was on the exam last weekend here in Vietnam- and in my opinion, the easiest one to score high marks in if you’re prepared.

Many students, books and teachers overlook this type of question, and it is, therefore, a bit of a shock when one comes up. Therefore, if you are prepared, you will probably do better than most of the other students.

Different Kinds of Map Question

There are three main types of map questions:

• Describe one map in the present day.
• Describe two maps- one in the present and one in the future.
• Describe two maps- one in the past and one in the present.

The first kind is very rare, as it only requires you to use the present simple, and no comparisons can be made.

The second kind occasionally comes up and requires you to use present and future tenses. This kind of question is normally about the future development of a town or city. It requires the same vocabulary as the other two.

The third is the most common and will be the main focus of this post.

You will normally be shown two maps, as above and asked to select and report the main features and make comparisons where relevant. You will obviously use both present and past tenses to describe the maps and how the town has developed.

Also, as this is a man-made process, we will use the passive.

Source: Cambridge English Practice Papers.

To describe two maps, I advise my students to follow a four-paragraph structure.

Paragraph 1- Paraphrase Sentence

Paraphrase  question using synonyms.

Paragraph 2- Overview

Make two general statements about the map. You should describe the maps generally and write about the most noticeable differences between the two maps. You could ask yourself the following questions to identify general changes. Is the map more or less residential? Is there more or less countryside? Are there more or fewer trees? Were the changes dramatic or negligible? Were there any major infrastructure improvements? How have the buildings and leisure facilities changed?

Paragraph 3- Main Body 1

Three to four sentences about specific changes that have occurred.

Paragraph 4- Main Body 2

Further, three to four sentences about specific changes that have occurred.

You can group information in paragraphs 3 and 4 by time or location, depending on the question asked.

Look at the sample answer below to see how I have used this structure.

How to Describe Specific Changes

The ability to describe change is crucial to answering these questions. The various buildings and features will normally be labelled for you. You need to work on how to write about how they have changed from the past up until the present day.

Tip: You may be asked to describe your hometown in the speaking test . The vocabulary and grammar in this post should come in very useful.

Below I will list various buildings, features, and verbs we could use to describe their change.

Buildings – demolished, knocked down, flattened, replaced, renovated, built, constructed, reconstructed, developed, extended, expanded, relocated, converted and modernized.

The government demolished the industrial estate and developed a sports ground.

They removed the shops and replaced them with a skyscraper.

A port was constructed at the edge of the river.

The factory in the city centre was demolished and relocated to the city’s north.

The old warehouses were replaced with new hotels.

The factory was converted into apartments.

Trees and Forests- cleared, cut down, chopped down, removed, planted.

The forest was cut down  and replaced with a shopping centre.

The trees were cleared to make way for houses.

Roads, bridges and railways lines- constructed, built, extended, expanded and removed.

The main road was extended, and a new bridge was built over the river.

Leisure facilities- opened, set up, developed.

A skate park was set up next to the swimming pool.

A park was developed beside the forest.

How to Describe General Changes

As this is an IELTS writing task 1 question, we must write an overview, where we generally talk about the main changes between the two maps.

Below are some examples of general statements we could use to describe change in towns and cities.

• Over the period, the area witnessed dramatic changes.
• From 1995 to 2005, the city centre saw spectacular developments.
• The village changed considerably over the period.
• During the 10-year period, the industrial area was totally transformed.
• Over the past 20 years, the residential area was totally reconstructed.
• Over the period, the old docks were totally redeveloped.
• Between 1995 and 2005, the old houses were rebuilt.
• The central business district was completely modernised during the period.

Pick two or three of the most noticeable differences in the map and write a general statement for each. This will be your overview paragraph.

The more specific changes should be included in your main body paragraphs.

How to Describe Locations

You will also be expected to describe where things are maps and describe where changes have occurred.

You can use ‘to the left’ and ‘to the right’, but a better way is to use ‘north’, ‘south’, ‘east’ and ‘west’. I normally advise my students to draw the symbols on the question paper if they are not already there.

The forest to the south of the river was cut down.

A golf course was constructed to the north of the airport.

The houses in the southwest of the town were demolished.

The green fields to the city’s northwest were redeveloped as a park.

The airport in the city’s centre was relocated to the northeast of the river.

The school to the southeast was knocked down and a new one was built to the east of the forest.

Finally, you will also be expected to use prepositions of place , e.g. at/in/on/by/beside/to/off/from, to describe where things are.

Dramatic changes took place in the city centre.

To the town’s south is a golf course surrounded by trees.

A new school was built next to the swimming pool.

The old road running from north to south was replaced by a new motorway.

A marina was built on the banks of the river.

Sample Answer

Both maps display an island before and after it was developed for tourism.

The island is approximately 250 metres long, has palm trees dotted around it, is surrounded by ocean and has a beach to the west. Over the period, the island was completely transformed with the addition of a hotel and a pier; however, the eastern part of the island appears to have been left undeveloped.

The most noticeable additions are the hotel rooms. 6 buildings, surrounding some trees, have been built in the west of the island, and 9 buildings have been constructed in the centre of the island.  A reception building and a restaurant have been developed between the two accommodation areas.

A pier has also been built on the island’s south coast, allowing yachts access to the resort. Apart from the trees, the beach remains the only natural feature to remain relatively untouched; however, it appears to be used for swimming.

Do you need me to correct your essays and give you feedback on them? Check out our essay correction service .

I hope this lesson has helped you and if you have any questions, please comment below.

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How To Write an IELTS Map Essay

IELTS map questions are the easiest to answer. There are no numbers to analyse, just 2 or 3 maps to compare. Very occasionally, there might only be a single map, but this is rare.

The maps will be of the same location at different times. This could be in the past, the present time or a plan for a proposed development in the future. You are required to write about the changes you see between the maps.

There are 5 steps to writing   a high-scoring IELTS map essay:

1)  Analyse the question

2)  Identify the main features

3)  Write an introduction

4)  Write an overview

5)  Write the details paragraphs

I must emphasise the importance of steps 1 and 2. It is essential that you complete this planning stage properly before you start writing. You’ll understand why when I guide you through it. It should only take 5 minutes, leaving you a full 15 minute to write your essay.

In this lesson, we’re going to work through the 5 stages step-by-step as we answer a practice IELTS map question.

Before we begin, here’s a model essay structure that you can use as a guideline for all IELTS Academic Task 1 questions.

Ideally, your essay should have 4 paragraphs:

Paragraph 1  – Introduction

Paragraph 2  – Overview

Paragraph 3  – 1 st  main feature

Paragraph 4  – 2 nd  main feature

We now have everything we need to begin planning and writing our IELTS map essay.

Here’s our practice question:

The maps below show the village of Stokeford in 1930 and 2010.

Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

Write at least 150 words.

Step 1 –  Analyse the question

The format of every Academic Task 1 question is the same. Here is our practice question again with the words that will be included in all questions highlighted.

Every question consists of:

• Sentence 1 – A brief description of the graphic
• Sentence 2 – The instructions
• The graphic – map, chart, graph, table, etc.

Sentence 2 tells you what you have to do.

You must do 3 things:

1.     Select the main features.

2.     Write about the main features.

3.     Compare the main features.

All three tasks refer to the ‘ main features ’ of the graphic. You  do not  have to write about everything. Just pick out 2 or 3 key features and you’ll have plenty to write about.

Step 2 – Identify the Main Features

All you are looking for are the main features. Start with the earliest map. Identify the key features and look to see how they have changed in the later map, and again in the final map if there are three.

Here are some useful questions to ask?

1) What time periods are shown?

Are the maps of past, present or future situations? This is important to note because it will determine whether you write your essay using past, present or future tenses.

The two maps in our practice IELTS map question show the village of Stokeford at two different times in the past. This immediately tells us that we will need to use the past tense in our essay.

2) What are the main differences between the maps?

What features have disappeared? What new features are in their place?

3) What features have remained the same over the time period?

Although the location on the maps will have undergone major development, some features may remain unchanged.

Also, think about directional language you can use, such as:

So,  what information is contained our maps? Here they are again.

Source: IELTS past paper

There are a number of different features we could select such as, the loss of the shops, the disappearance of farmland, the enlargement of the school and the development of the large house into a retirement home.

Many maps will contain far more changes than our sample maps and the changes may be more complex. In such cases, you won’t have time to write about all of them and will need to select just 2 or 3 main features to focus on.

Our maps are quite simple so we’ll list all 4 of the major changes I’ve just identified. 

Main feature 1:  The farmland has been built on.

Main feature 2:  The large house has been converted into a retirement home.

Main feature 3:  The school has been enlarged.

Main feature 4:  The shops have disappeared.

The key features you select will be the starting point for your IELTS map essay. You will then go on to add more detail later. However, with just 20 minutes allowed for Task 1, and a requirement of only 150 words, you won't be able to include many details.

We’re now ready to begin writing our essay. Here’s a reminder of the 4 part structure we’re going to use.

For this essay, we’ll adapt this a little to write about two of the features in Paragraph 3 and the other two features in Paragraph 4.

Step 3 – Write an Introduction 

In the introduction, you should simply paraphrase the question, that is, say the same thing in a different way. You can do this by using synonyms and changing the sentence structure. For example:

Introduction (Paragraph 1): 

The two maps illustrate how the village of Stokeford, situated on the east bank of the River Stoke, changed over an 80 year period from 1930 to 2010.

This is all you need to do for the introduction.

Step 4 – Write an Overview (Paragraph 2)

In the second paragraph, you should describe the general changes that have taken place. The detail comes later in the essay.

State the information simply. No elaborate vocabulary or grammar structures are required, just the appropriate words and correct verb tenses.

For example:

Overview  (Paragraph 2): 

There was considerable development of the settlement over these years and it was gradually transformed from a small rural village into a largely residential area.

Two sentences would be better than one for the second paragraph but we’ll be getting into the detail if we say more about these maps at this point, so we’ll leave the overview as one sentence.

Step 5  – Write the 1st Detail Paragraph

Paragraphs 3 and 4 of your IELTS map essay are where you include more detailed information. In paragraph 3, you should give evidence to support your first 1or 2 key features.

In the case of our main features, 1 and 3 are closely related so we’ll write about these two together.

Here they are again:

And this is an example of what you could write:

Paragraph 3 :

The most notable change is the presence of housing in 2010 on the areas that were farmland back in 1930. New roads were constructed on this land and many residential properties built. In response to the considerable increase in population, the primary school was extended to around double the size of the previous building.

Step 6  – Write the 2nd Detail Paragraph

For the fourth and final paragraph, you do the same thing for your remaining key features. 

Here are the two we have left:

This is an example of what you could write:

Paragraph 4 :

Whilst the post office remained as a village amenity, the two shops that can be seen to the north-west of the school in 1930, no longer existed by 2010, having been replaced by houses. There also used to be an extensive property standing in its own large gardens situated to the south-east of the school. At some time between 1930 and 2010, this was extended and converted into a retirement home. This was another significant transformation for the village.

Here are the four paragraphs brought together to create our finished essay.

Finished IELTS Map Essay

This sample IELTS map essay is well over the minimum word limit so you can see that you don’t have space to include very much detail at all. That’s why it is essential to select just a couple of main features to write about.

Now use what you’ve learnt in this lesson to practice answering other IELTS map  questions. Start slowly at first and keep practicing until you can plan and write a complete essay in around 20 minutes.

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Ielts academic writing task 1 – all lessons.

IELTS Academic Writing  –  A summary of the test including important facts, test format & assessment.

Academic Writing Task 1  – The format, the 7 question types & sample questions, assessment & marking criteria.  All the key information you need to know.

Understanding Task 1 Questions  – How to quickly and easily analyse and understand IELTS Writing Task 2 questions.

How To Plan a Task 1 Essay  –  Discover  3 reasons why you must plan, the 4 simple steps of essay planning and learn a simple 4 part essay structure.

Vocabulary for Task 1 Essays  –  Learn key vocabulary for a high-scoring essay. Word lists & a downloadable PDF.

Grammar for Task 1 Essays   – Essential grammar for Task 1 Academic essays including, verb tenses, key sentence structures, articles & prepositions.

The 7 Question Types:

Click the links below for a step-by-step lesson on each type of Task 1 question.

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How to Describe Maps for IELTS Writing Task 1

Posted by David S. Wills | Mar 17, 2021 | IELTS Tips , Writing | 0

Today, I am going to show you how to describe maps for task 1 of the IELTS writing test. I have written about this before, but this will be the first in-depth lesson on map descriptions. In this lesson, you will find out everything you need to know in order to get a great score if you encounter a map in your next writing test.

Maps and IELTS: An Overview

First of all, you need to understand the purpose of IELTS map description. In fact, it is important to recognise the purpose of task 1 of the IELTS test! This part of the exam is designed to see how well you can describe things. In that regard, it is quite different from task 2.

Maps are used in IELTS because they require you to describe the physical layout of a location in addition to showing changes over time. Normally, you will be given two maps of the same area and you will be asked to explain what changes have occurred.

It is really important to know this because otherwise you might not understand how to approach the essay. There are many misconceptions about IELTS but really it is quite simple – you are required to show that you can use the language for different purposes.

Types of Map

You will see different types of map in the IELTS writing test. There are maps of streets, towns, villages, islands, parks, and even interior layouts of buildings in some rare cases. However, they pretty much all serve the same function – there will be two maps that show changes over a period of time.

You should not think too much about the type of map as the function is basically the same – it will show a physical location . Your job is to describe that location and then highlight the changes that take place.

Vocabulary for Map Descriptions

I have a full article on vocabulary for describing IELTS maps so you should read that if you want to know the details. This lesson is quite important because it teaches you about the key things you need to know. I will summarise the important parts here.

In describing a map, you have to imagine that your reader cannot see the same image that you see. Your job is to put that image into their head. This requires you to be accurate and concise in the words that you use.

Start with cardinal directions: north, south, east, and west. These will help you immensely. It is not enough to say “on the right” because that is relative. One person’s right could be another person’s left.

You need to know prepositions as well. This is incredibly important. If you get your prepositions wrong, it could lead to a totally inaccurate description of the map. That would be a huge problem.

Example of Direction and Preposition Use

Look at these two maps of a place called Felixstone:

We can see many changes but before we begin to describe them, we need to explain where those things were.

Where is the farmland?

• In 1967, there was an area of farmland in the eastern part of the map, just to the north of the road.

Where is the private beach?

• In 2001, there was a private beach in the southeast of the map. It meets the road at its northernmost point and leads all the way to the sea at the south.

Where are the wind turbines?

• By 2001, four wind turbines had been added between the dunes and the sea.

Please note that there could be other great ways to describe any of these things. These are just a few examples to show you the uses of accurate language.

Sample Answer

Here is my full description to the Felixstone map:

There are two maps of a place called Felixstone. One map is from 1967 and the other from 2001. Many changes took place in the intervening years, including the removal of a marina and pier. In 1967, Felixstone was comprised of a road with a golf course, high street, and farmland to the north of it. To the south, there were trees and dunes, a hotel and a café, and a marina and fish market. By 2001, the farmland to the north of the road had been replaced by a hotel with a swimming pool and tennis courts. Half of the shops on the main street had been converted into apartments. To the south of the road, the hotel had gained a large car park and some wind turbines were added between the dunes and the sea. However, the biggest change was the removal of the marina and pier, which were replaced by a public beach and a private beach. The fish market beside the pier was also removed.

Tenses and IELTS Task 1 Maps

One thing that people often overlook is the importance of accurate tense use in IELTS task 1. Of course, verb tenses are always important in English. They are complicated but essential for conveying meaning. However, in task 1 people often focus on just describing the physical layout. This is important, but so is capturing time.

Considering my example above, let’s look at the first sentence of paragraph three:

• By 2001, the farmland to the north of the road had been replaced by a hotel with a swimming pool and tennis courts.

Why did I use the phrase “had been replaced”?

This is the passive form of the past perfect tense . I used the passive form because it was appropriate here. In describing map changes, we do not know who made the change, so passive voice is necessary. As for past perfect, this is how we look further into the past from the perspective of a point in the past.

Let me explain more: This map referred to two points of time – 1967 and 2001. Both of these points of time are in the past. Thus, when we look at changes that have occurred by 2001, we must use look back into the past from the past! It seems so complicated, but it really isn’t.

Choosing What to Describe

When it comes to IELTS maps, you might face two potential problems about choosing what to describe:

• There are too many things to describe.
• There aren’t enough things to describe.

This can be difficult, particularly in an exam scenario. I would offer the following advice:

• If it seems that there are too many things, then begin by picking the most important and then describe it as best you can. Then pick other things logically. If you find it is taking too long, you can finish and not worry about the others. After all, you don’t need to describe everything .
• If it seems that there aren’t enough things, you are going to need to get creative. You should devote a little extra effort to giving details about the key aspects of the map. Don’t just say “there is a bridge in the north.” Say “there is a bridge in the north of the map that goes over the Severn River. It connects the towns of Dorwith and Forlsom.” This will help you to use more words. However, it really shouldn’t be a problem as IELTS maps tend to contain enough data to easily write 150 words.

Anyway, the most important thing is that you select the most important data and sequence it logically.

How to Structure an IELTS Map Description

I wrote this article on IELTS writing task 1 essay structures. You should read this because maps really don’t require anything special. The structure will basically be the same as it would for charts, tables, and so on. It should look like this:

• Introduction – say what the map is and highlight a key change
• Body paragraph one – describe the first map
• Body paragraph two – describe the second map and highlight changes

There are other reasonable ways to approach this. You may, for example, devote a paragraph to the main changes and another paragraph to lesser changes. However, it is usually best to give a paragraph on each of the two maps.

One thing is the “general trend” sentence. As you probably know, IELTS writing task 1 essays require a sentence that gives the general trend of a chart or table. However, there is no such thing for maps. You can instead highlight a significant change or try to capture the gist of the differences.

Video about Difficult Maps for IELTS

Last year, I made this video about describing difficult IELTS maps. You might find it useful given the information in this lesson.

You can also find sample map descriptions here and here . On a related note, you can find IELTS listening map skills here .

About The Author

David S. Wills

David S. Wills is the author of Scientologist! William S. Burroughs and the 'Weird Cult' and the founder/editor of Beatdom literary journal. He lives and works in rural Cambodia and loves to travel. He has worked as an IELTS tutor since 2010, has completed both TEFL and CELTA courses, and has a certificate from Cambridge for Teaching Writing. David has worked in many different countries, and for several years designed a writing course for the University of Worcester. In 2018, he wrote the popular IELTS handbook, Grammar for IELTS Writing and he has since written two other books about IELTS. His other IELTS website is called IELTS Teaching.

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IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Vocabulary: Sample Answers & PDF

• Last Updated On August 21, 2024
• Published In General

Maps have been humanity’s silent guides, charting courses from uncharted lands to bustling cities. Now, they’ve become a challenge in the path to IELTS success .

Table of Content

With the average IELTS writing score hovering around 7.0 in 2024 , mastering the art of map description is essential. To transform geographical data into compelling prose, you need more than just direction — you need the language of a map expert.

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In this blog, you’ll explore essential IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary words that can help you improve your descriptions and boost your overall writing score. Using the right terms and phrases ensures that your map descriptions are detailed, accurate, and aligned with the standards needed to achieve a score of 7.0 or higher. 

Want to ace IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary? Dive in!

Key Highlights

Here is a table detailing this blog’s key points that will help you ace the IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary.

What is IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Vocabulary?

In IELTS writing task 1, map vocabulary plays a crucial role as it helps you accurately describe the changes and features shown in different maps. Your ability to use precise terms like “ constructed ,” “ demolished ,” and directional phrases like “ north of ” or “ adjacent to ” is essential for achieving a high score.

This vocabulary is assessed under the Lexical Resource criterion, one of four areas, along with Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Each contributes 25% to your overall Task 1 score.

Here is a table that outlines the key types of vocabulary used in IELTS Writing Task 1 map descriptions:

These terms help you convey the map’s details clearly and concisely, which is crucial for achieving a high score.

Types of Map Charts in IELTS Writing Task 1

Familiarising yourself with the common map chart types will enhance your ability to effectively apply IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary in your response. 

Here are some of the most frequently encountered map types in this task.

• Before and After Maps : These maps highlight how a specific area has changed, showing developments or transformations.
• Proposed Changes Maps : These maps depict plans for an area, such as new infrastructure or urban development projects.
• Comparative Maps : These maps compare locations or areas, highlighting their similarities and differences.
• Single Time Point Maps : These maps present the layout of a place at one specific moment, offering a snapshot of that location.
• Tourist or Transport Maps : These maps focus on key tourist attractions, transportation routes, or other thematic elements related to travel and navigation.

Also Read: Personality Vocabulary IELTS: About People & Personalities

IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Vocabulary: Key Terms

The overall average IELTS score for 2024 is reported to be 7.5 , emphasising the need for precise language skills, particularly in specific tasks like map descriptions. Mastering IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary is crucial for accurately conveying changes, locations, and features in map-based tasks.

This section outlines essential terms and phrases to enhance your ability to describe maps effectively, helping you align with the high standards reflected in the current average IELTS scores.

Below are tables of key terms, each with an explanation of the key terms and their usage.

1. Regions and Directions

Regions and directions are essential for accurately locating features on a map. These terms help describe the geographical placement of different elements.

Here is a table outlining key vocabulary for regions and directions.

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2. adverbs and prepositions.

Adverbs and prepositions are crucial for describing the relative positions and movements of features on the map.

Here is a table of important adverbs and prepositions used in map descriptions:

Nouns identify various features and areas on a map, helping to categorise and describe different elements clearly.

Here is a table of key nouns used in IELTS map descriptions:

4. Verbs to Describe Changes

Verbs describe actions, movements, or changes in features on the map. They are key to detailing developments over time.

Here is a table listing important verbs for describing changes on maps.

5. Paraphrases for Maps

Paraphrases offer alternative expressions to add variety and avoid repetition in your map descriptions .

Here is a table of common paraphrases used in IELTS Writing Task 1 maps.

Most Commonly Used IELTS Map Vocabulary in 2024

Writing Task 1 of the IELTS Academic test often includes a map description, a task you may find challenging. In this task, you need to describe the given map in a clear, well-organised essay of at least 150 words.

To maximise your score, it’s important to avoid repetition and demonstrate a broad range of vocabulary. 

To help you prepare, here’s a list of commonly used IELTS map vocabulary that can help you aim for a Band 9 in Writing Task 1.

Example Sentences for IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Descriptions

When describing maps in IELTS writing task 1, using varied and precise vocabulary is key to conveying changes and locations effectively.

Below are some example sentences that illustrate how to use map vocabulary correctly. These examples will help you understand how to describe various features and developments on a map with clarity and detail.

• The hospital is located on the southeast side of the road.
• In that year, there was a significant decrease in rainfall.
• Over time, the village had steadily developed.
• The trees underwent rapid growth.
• During these years, the buildings were expanded.
• There was a shop positioned in the middle of the street.
• A roundabout was developed at the junction of the road.
• The depth of the pond was over 20 metres.

Structure for IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Questions

A clear and organised structure is crucial for effectively communicating your analysis when tackling IELTS writing task 1 map questions. Using precise IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary is essential for accurately describing changes, locations, and developments over time.

Below is a detailed structure that will help you approach these questions systematically.

• Introduction : Start by paraphrasing the prompt. Mention the key features on the maps, such as the periods, the areas involved, and any significant changes that stand out.
• Overview : Provide a broad summary of the main features or trends. Highlight general changes, like urbanisation or expansion, without delving into specifics. This sets the stage for a more detailed analysis.
• Main Body Paragraphs : Break down 6-8 significant changes in detail. Use a variety of tenses to describe past, present, and future developments. Specify locations and directions, utilising precise IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary words such as “north of,” “adjacent to,” and “demolished.” 

Read more about IELTS Academic or General: Which is the Easiest Test?

Common Features of Map Charts in IELTS Writing Task 1 

In IELTS writing task 1, various symbols and icons represent different map features and changes. Understanding these symbols is key to accurately describing the map’s details.

Here is a table detailing the various icons and how to translate them into your essay seamlessly:

Also Read: IELTS Connectors and Linking Words for 2024

IELTS Writing Task 1 Map – Band Score 8.5 Sample

Achieving a Band 8.5 in IELTS writing task 1 requires exceptional precision and clarity, especially when describing maps. Mastery of IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary is crucial for effectively communicating changes, locations, and developments.

This Band 8.5 sample showcases how to expertly use map vocabulary to create a detailed and accurate description for IELTS Writing Task 1.

The maps below show the town of Stokeford in 1930 and 2010. Write a report of at least 150 words, summarising the main features and making comparisons where relevant.

Sample Answer

Here is a sample answer to the above question.

The two maps illustrate how Stokeford changed between 1930 and 2010. The main point of the city was its transformation from rural to urban areas, along with the increased infrastructure and the disappearance of farmland. 

In the year 1930, the town was a farmland area with a large number of livestock located both in the southwest and the northeast. There were two shops and a post office in the west, with a primary school just on the east of the road and an individual big house with gardens between the north and south of the area. During the next 80 years, the town saw several significant changes. The most noticeable is that all of the farmland areas were transformed into a housing area, where the two shops were demolished, and several houses were built along with two connecting roads in the northwest and northeast.

Moreover, the large house and the gardens were knocked down, and several retirement houses were built in 2010. In contrast, only the bridge, the post office, and the River Stoke remained in the exact same condition for 80 years, although the primary school was added with two retirement houses in 2010.

Our blog post on IELTS Writing Task 1 Map provides further details on how to structure your answer for writing task 1. 

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IELTS Writing Task 1 Map Vocabulary: Grammar Tips

Precision in vocabulary and grammar is crucial for success in IELTS Writing Task 1, particularly when describing maps. 

Choosing the correct tense is key to accurately describing the changes and features shown in maps. Here’s how to effectively use language in your map descriptions.

• Present simple tense is ideal for describing the current layout of a map.

Example: “A library stands in the centre of the town.”

• Past simple tense is used to describe past states or changes.

Example: “The area was a vast forest in 1980.”

• The present perfect tense is useful for describing developments that have occurred up to the present.

Example: “The village has expanded considerably in the past decade.”

• Future simple tense should be used for proposed or planned changes.

Example: “A new highway will be built along the city’s northern edge.”

• The past perfect tense is applied when describing changes that happened before another event in the past.

Example: “By 2005, the old market had been replaced by a shopping mall.”

Strategies for Tackling Map Charts in Task 1

You should begin by closely examining the map provided. Identify significant changes or differences between the maps and consider periods, symbols, and icons.

Read below on how you can expertly proceed from here to craft a high-score-worthy essay answer.

1. Planning Your Response

Carefully plan your response by grouping related information based on similar locations or directions. This will help you create a logical and coherent description.

2. Writing Your Response

Structure your writing into the following three clear sections:

• Introduction : Paraphrase the task statement and briefly overview the maps.
• First Body Paragraph : Describe the features of the initial map, focusing on key elements.
• Second Body Paragraph : Compare the maps, highlighting major changes such as new constructions, removals, or modifications.

To Conclude

Mastering IELTS writing task 1 map vocabulary is essential for achieving a high score, especially with the overall average IELTS score for 2024 being 7.5.

By using precise directional language, descriptive terms, and correct verb tenses, you can effectively convey the changes, locations, and developments shown on maps, making your descriptions clear and accurate.

Elevate your IELTS preparation with LeapScholar! Get top-tier training from the best instructors, with live classes, tailored module-specific lessons, and personalised support. Whether it’s practice tests or doubt-solving sessions, we’ve got you covered.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. what is ielts writing task 1 map vocabulary and why is it important.

A. IELTS Writing Task 1 Map vocabulary refers to the specific words and phrases used to describe maps in the IELTS exam. This vocabulary is crucial because it helps you accurately convey changes, locations, and developments in map-based tasks, which can significantly impact your score. Mastery of this vocabulary allows for clearer, more precise descriptions.

Q. How can directional language improve your IELTS maps vocabulary?

A. Directional language, such as “north,” “south,” “adjacent to,” and “between,” is an essential part of IELTS maps vocabulary. It helps you describe the exact locations and movements of features on a map, making your descriptions more precise and easier for the examiner to understand. Using these terms correctly can enhance the clarity and accuracy of your response.

Q. What are some common verbs in map task 1 vocabulary that describe changes?

A. In map task 1 vocabulary, verbs like “constructed,” “demolished,” “expanded,” and “replaced” are frequently used to describe changes over time. These verbs effectively convey the development or removal of structures and features on a map. Correct verbs are key to providing clear and accurate descriptions of changes.

Q. How do prepositions play a role in map vocabulary for IELTS Writing Task 1?

A. Prepositions such as “along,” “beside,” and “near” are important in map vocabulary for IELTS Writing Task 1 because they help describe the spatial relationships between different features. These words allow you to precisely indicate where one feature is located about another, which is crucial for creating an accurate map description.

Q. Why is it important to use descriptive language in your IELTS maps vocabulary?

A. Descriptive language in IELTS maps vocabulary, like “expanded,” “reduced,” or “transformed,” helps to detail the size, scale, and changes of features on a map. This language adds depth to your descriptions, making visualising the map’s content easier for the examiner. Detailed descriptions can increase scores as they demonstrate your ability to convey information.

Q. How should tenses be used in map task 1 vocabulary when describing maps?

A. Tenses play a critical role in map task 1 vocabulary, as they reflect the time frame of the changes described. For example, use the past simple tense for past changes, such as “The park was expanded in 1990,” and the future simple for planned changes, like “A new road will be constructed next year.” Correct use of tenses ensures that your descriptions are accurate and contextually appropriate.

Q. What types of areas should you be familiar with in map vocabulary IELTS Writing Task 1?

A. In map vocabulary IELTS Writing Task 1, it’s important to know terms for different areas such as “residential area,” “commercial zone,” and “industrial area.” These terms help you categorise and describe various sections of the map, providing a clear and organised explanation of the map’s layout and features.

Q. Can you explain the importance of relative locations in IELTS Writing Task 1 map vocabulary?

A. Relative locations, such as “adjacent to,” “next to,” and “between,” are vital in IELTS Writing Task 1 map vocabulary because they help describe where features are positioned about one another. Using these terms correctly can significantly improve the clarity and detail of your map descriptions, making it easier for the examiner to understand the relationships between different elements.

Q. What are some key phrases in IELTS maps vocabulary for describing natural features?

A. Key phrases in IELTS maps vocabulary for natural features include terms like “green space,” “water body,” and “forest area.” These phrases help you accurately describe natural elements on a map, which is essential for providing a complete and detailed response. Accurately describing natural features can enhance your overall map description and contribute to a higher score.

Q. How can map vocabulary for IELTS Writing Task 1 enhance your score?

A. Map vocabulary for IELTS Writing Task 1 enhances your score by enabling you to describe map features and changes with precision and clarity. A strong command of this vocabulary allows you to convey complex ideas succinctly, making your descriptions more effective and easier to follow. This can result in better task achievement and overall higher marks.

Q. What strategies can help improve your IELTS maps vocabulary?

A. To improve your IELTS maps vocabulary, regularly practise describing different types of maps using a variety of terms and phrases. Focus on learning directional language, descriptive adjectives, and verbs related to changes and developments. Consistent practice with these terms will help you become more comfortable and proficient in using them during the actual exam.

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IELTS Writing Task 1 – Maps Example Essay 1

There are so many questions written each year, you may find you practice answering various questions on different topics. It is best practice to learn how to answer each one of the various types of writing task 1 questions , from bar charts, line graphs, maps, process etc.

If you would like to learn how to structure a map essay  please click the button below >

The two maps below show an island, before and after the construction of some tourist facilities.

Overall, the island changed rapidly, as before development, the island was empty, with a beach and scattered palm trees. After the island had been developed, there were many new buildings, roads and a pier added, in order to attract tourists.

After further development, tourists could swim at the beach located in the west of the island. A restaurant was built in the north of the island and just below a reception area was added. There are also vehicle tracks that connect both facilities. A pier was also constructed in the southern part of the island where sailboats can moor. Lastly, the eastern part of the island was not developed.

We hope you found this post useful in helping you to study for the IELTS Test . If you have any questions please let us know in the comments below or on the Facebook page.

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IELTS Task 1 Essay: Building with 3 Maps

by Dave | Sample Answers | 0 Comment

This is an IELTS writing task 1 sample answer essay on the topic of a map of a ground floor in a building and containing 3 maps.

Find my full IELTS Ebooks here .

You can find maps here and line charts here and bar charts here .

The floorplan shows how a building has changed from 1958 to the present day. Looking from an overall perspective, it is readily apparent that the building has served both commercial and residential purposes with the only area remaining unchanged being the kitchen. At present, the flower shop has a more open layout relative to when it was an apartment and office.

In 1958, the building was used as an office with a meeting room in the top left corner of the floorplan, an assistant’s and secretary’s office below there and a toilet in the bottom left corner. In 1985, the meeting room was extended and turned into a living room and a large bathroom and shower took the place of the offices and toilet. The florist shop contained a gift card room in the top left, above a large open space for flowers and a play area in the bottom left corner.

On the right side, the kitchen in the top corner was unaltered across all iterations of the ground floor. In comparison, there was a manager’s office on the right hand side and a reception area in the bottom corner. These spaces were allocated for bedrooms in the apartment and are now an office and additional space for flowers.

1. The floorplan shows how a building has changed from 1958 to the present day. 2. Looking from an overall perspective, it is readily apparent that the building has served both commercial and residential purposes with the only area remaining unchanged being the kitchen. 3. At present, the flower shop has a more open layout relative to when it was an apartment and office.

• Paraphrase what the map shows.
• Write a clear overview summarising the differences.
• Add a second sentence to make sure everything is covered.

1. In 1958, the building was used as an office with a meeting room in the top left corner of the floorplan, an assistant’s and secretary’s office below there and a toilet in the bottom left corner. 2. In 1985, the meeting room was extended and turned into a living room and a large bathroom and shower took the place of the offices and toilet. 3. The florist shop contained a gift card room in the top left, above a large open space for flowers and a play area in the bottom left corner.

• Begin writing about the map.
• Make sure you compare as much as possible.
• Don’t leave anything out.

1. On the right side, the kitchen in the top corner was unaltered across all iterations of the ground floor. 2. In comparison, there was a manager’s office on the right hand side and a reception area in the bottom corner. 3. These spaces were allocated for bedrooms in the apartment and are now an office and additional space for flowers.

• Write about the final, other parts of the map – include everything!
• Compare the categories.
• Add in everything, even what has not changed.

What do the words in bold below mean? Take some notes on a piece of paper to aid your memory:

The floorplan shows how a building has changed from 1958 to the present day . Looking from an overall perspective, it is readily apparent that the building has served both commercial and residential purposes with the only area remaining unchanged being the kitchen. At present , the flower shop has a more open layout relative to when it was an apartment and office.

In 1958, the building was used as an office with a meeting room in the top left corner of the floor, an assistant’s and secretary’s office below there and a toilet in the bottom left corner . In 1985, the meeting room was extended and turned into a living room and a large bathroom and shower took the place of the offices and toilet. The florist shop contained a gift card room in the top left, above a large open space for flowers and a play area in the bottom left corner.

On the right side, the kitchen in the top corner was unaltered across all iterations of the ground floor . In comparison , there was a manager’s office on the right hand side and a reception area in the bottom corner. These spaces were allocated for bedrooms in the apartment and are now an office and additional space for flowers.

Try to write down or think of an antonym/opposite word for further practice:

floorplan blueprint

from … to the present day starting then up until now

Looking from an overall perspective, it is readily apparent that overall

served both commercial and residential purposes was for business and for living

remaining unchanged was not altered

At present now

open layout lots of space

relative to when compared to the time

meeting room place to meet

top left corner northwest

assistant’s people helping out

secretary’s office below assistant’s working space under that

bottom left corner southwest

extended lengthened

turned into transformed into

took the place of replaced

florist shop contained flower shop has

gift card room place to sell cards

play area where kid’s can play

unaltered across all iterations of the ground floor didn’t change through the years

In comparison compared to that

manager’s boss’s

on the right hand side to the right

reception area area to get help from a receptionist

allocated for made for

additional extra

Pronunciation

Practice saying the words below using this tip with Google voice dictation :

flɔː plæn   frɒm  …  tuː ðə ˈprɛznt deɪ   ˈlʊkɪŋ frɒm ən ˈəʊvərɔːl pəˈspɛktɪv ,  ɪt ɪz ˈrɛdɪli əˈpærənt ðæt   sɜːvd bəʊθ kəˈmɜːʃəl ænd ˌrɛzɪˈdɛnʃəl ˈpɜːpəsɪz   rɪˈmeɪnɪŋ ʌnˈʧeɪnʤd   æt ˈprɛznt   ˈəʊpən ˈleɪaʊt   ˈrɛlətɪv tuː wɛn   ˈmiːtɪŋ ruːm   tɒp lɛft ˈkɔːnə   əˈsɪstənts   ˈsɛkrətriz ˈɒfɪs bɪˈləʊ   ˈbɒtəm lɛft ˈkɔːnə   ɪksˈtɛndɪd   tɜːnd ˈɪntuː   tʊk ðə pleɪs ɒv   ˈflɒrɪst ʃɒp kənˈteɪnd   ɡɪft kɑːd ruːm pleɪ ˈeərɪə   ʌnˈɔːltəd əˈkrɒs ɔːl ˌɪtəˈreɪʃᵊnz ɒv ðə ɡraʊnd flɔː   ɪn kəmˈpærɪsn   ˈmænɪʤəz   ɒn ðə raɪt hænd saɪd   rɪˈsɛpʃᵊn ˈeərɪə   ˈæləʊkeɪtɪd fɔː   əˈdɪʃənl  

Vocabulary Practice

Remember and fill in the blanks . Note it on a piece of paper so you can remember better:

The f_________n shows how a building has changed f____m 1958 t _________________ y . L______________________________________________________________t the building has s_____________________________________________s with the only area r_____________________d being the kitchen. A_________________t , the flower shop has a more o _____________________________ n it was an apartment and office.

In 1958, the building was used as an office with a m_________________m in the t______________r of the floor, an a_______________s and s________________________w there and a toilet in the b__________________r . In 1985, the meeting room was e ___________ d and t______________o a living room and a large bathroom and shower t___________________f the offices and toilet. The f______________________d a g__________d room in the top left, above a large open space for flowers and a p__________a in the bottom left corner.

On the right side, the kitchen in the top corner was u______________________________________________________r . I_______________n , there was a m___________s office o___________________e and a r_____________a in the bottom corner. These spaces were a______________r bedrooms in the apartment and are now an office and a_______________l space for flowers.

Listening Practice

Listen to the related topic below and practice with these activities :

Reading Practice

Read more and use these ideas to practice:

https://thursd.com/articles/8-floral-shops-from-around-the-world-you-should-visit

Speaking Practice

Practice with the following related questions from the real IELTS speaking exam :

• Do you work in an office?
• Is it common for people in your country to work in office?
• Where do most of your friends work?
• Would you like to design an office?

Writing Practice

Practice with the related map below and then check with my sample answer:

IELTS Task 1 Essay: Map of a Museum in 1990 and 2010

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IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Map Topics 2024

This list contains a selection of IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 map topics that were submitted by students who completed the IELTS exam in 2024 . Select a topic at random and start practicing and enhancing your writing abilities.

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50+ Recent IELTS Writing Topics with Answers: Essays & Letters

14 min read

Updated On Aug 21, 2024

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This article lists recent IELTS Writing topics for Academic and General Training exams, covering Task 1 visual data and essays on themes like health, education, environment, and more. It also offers sample questions to aid in effective exam preparation.

Table of Contents

Ielts writing topics for academic writing task 1, ielts writing topics for general writing task 1, common ielts writing topics for writing task 2.

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IELTS Writing topics are one of the most essential study resources for IELTS exam preparation. There are two reasons for this: firstly, topics are often repeated in the IELTS exam and secondly, practising these IELTS Writing questions will help test-takers familiarise themselves with the format and requirements of the exam.

While the first task for the IELTS Writing exam has different versions of IELTS Academic and IELTS General , the second task is essay-writing for both. Even with differences in format or difficulty levels, both these tasks revolve around common IELTS writing topics like health, environment, education, travel, family and children, etc.

In this blog, we have compiled a list of the most popular and recent IELTS Writing topics based on the different tasks in this section and recurrent themes. Also, get hold of the IELTS writing questions and answers PDF that will help you practice at your own pace.

In the IELTS Writing Task 1 of the Academic exam, candidates have to summarize important visual information presented in graphs, charts, tables, maps, or diagrams in at least 150 words within 20 minutes.

Below are some IELTS Writing Task 1 topics with answers for each type of graphs and diagrams in IELTS Academic.

Line Graphs

Check out the list of IELTS Writing Task 1 - Line graph with IELTS writing questions and answers. Make sure to use appropriate IELTS Writing Task 1 Line Graph Vocabulary to write effective answers.

• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 - Shops that Closed
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic: Different sources of air pollutants - Line Graph
• IELTS Writing Task 1 - The Graph Below Shows Different Sources of Air Pollutants in the UK Sample Answers
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : Price changes for fresh fruits and vegetables - Line Graph
• The Percentage Of The Population In Four Asian Countries - IELTS Writing Task 1
• The Changes In Ownership Of Electrical Appliances And Amount Of Time Spent Doing Housework In Households - IELTS Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 38: Paris Metro station passengers - Line Graph
• Projected Population Growth of China and India- Line Graph
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : Percentage of Car Ownership in Great Britain - Line Graph
• Waste Recycling Rates in the US From 1960 to 2011- Line Graph
• Weekday Volume of Passenger Activity on the Toronto Metro system- Line Graph
• US Consumers' Average Annual Expenditures on Cell Phone- Line Graph
• Consumption of Fish and Different kinds of Meat in a European Country- Line Graph
• Demographic Trends in Scotland- Line Graph

Here is a list of IELTS Writing topics with answers on the IELTS bar chart .

• People Who Ate Five Portions of Fruits and Vegetables Per Day in the UK - IELTS Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : People affected by four types of noise pollution - Bar graph
• How Families in One Country Spent their Weekly Income - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Division of Household Tasks by Gender in Great Britain- Bar Graph
• Annual Pay for Doctors and Other Workers - IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Bar Chart
• Estimated World Illiteracy Rates by Region and by Gender - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Southland’s Main Exports in 2000 and Future Projections For 2025 - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Carbon Emissions in Different Countries - IELTS Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 22: Railway system in six cities in Europe – Bar Chart
• IELTS Writing Task 1 Test On 28th July With Band 8.0-9.0 Sample
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic: Percentage of people living alone in 5 different age groups in the US - Bar Chart
• Amount of Leisure Time Enjoyed by Men and Women of Different Employment Statuses – Bar Chart
• USA Marriage and Divorce Rates Between 1970 and 2000 and the Marital Status of Adult Americans- Bar Graph
• Top Ten Rice-Producing Countries in the World in 2015- Bar Graph
• Rural Households that Had Internet Access Between 1999 and 2004- Bar Graph
• Information About Underground Railway Systems in Six Cities - IELTS Writing Task 1

Explore the list of IELTS writing topics related to pie charts and solve them with the help of pie chart vocabulary for IELTS preparation.

• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : Survey conducted by a university library - Pie chart
• Methods of Transportation for People Traveling to a University - Pie Chart
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 13: Percentage of housing owned and rented in the UK – Pie Chart
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : The percentage of water used by different sectors - Pie chart
• Online shopping sales for retail sectors in Canada - IELTS Writing Task 1 Pie chart
• Percentage of Water Used for Different Purposes in Six Areas of the World- Pie Chart
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 18: Average Consumption of food in the world – Pie Chart
• Main Reasons Why Students Chose to Study at a Particular UK University - IELTS Writing Task 1 Academic Pie Chart
• Composition Of Household Rubbish In The United Kingdom - IELTS Writing Task 1

Here is a list of IELTS Writing topics with answers on the IELTS table chart .

• Fishing Industry in a European Country - IELTS Writing Task 1 Academic
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1: Social and economic indicators for four countries - Table
• The Situation of Marriage and Age from 1960 to 2000 in Australia - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Past And Projected Population Figures In Various Countries - IELTS Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 35: Number of travelers using three major German airports - Table
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 05: Size of US households over a number of years
• Changes in Modes of Travel in England Between 1985 and 2000- IELTS Writing Task 1 (Table)
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 12: Internet use in six categories by age group – Table
• Cinema Viewing Figures for Films by Country, in Millions- Table
• Number of Medals Won by the Top Ten Countries in the London 2012 Olympic Games- Table
• Sales at a Small Restaurant in a Downtown Business District- Table

Here is a list of IELTS Writing topics 2024 with answers on the IELTS Map Diagram .

• Paradise Island Map – IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Answers
• Floor Plan of a Public Library 20 years ago and now - IELTS Writing Task 1
• A School in 1985 and the School Now - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Village of Stokeford in 1930 and 2010 - IELTS Writing Task 1 Map
• Map of the Centre of a Small Town Before and After - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Plan A & B shows a Health Centre in 2005 and in Present Day - IELTS Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Example 9 : Chorleywood is a village near London whose population has increased steadily - Map
• Two possible sites for the supermarket Sample Answers
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : Cross-sections of two tunnels
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1: Local industrial village in England called Stamdorf - Map
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 : Hawaiian island chain in the centre of the Pacific Ocean - Map

Process Diagrams

Here is a list of IELTS Writing topics with answers on the IELTS Process diagram .

• Process of Making Soft Cheese - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Growing and Preparing Pineapples and Pineapple Products – IELTS Writing Task 1 Diagram
• Ceramic Pots Process - IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Diagram
• How Orange Juice is Produced - IELTS Academic Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 09 : Consequence of deforestation
• The Diagram Shows the Manufacturing Process of Sugar- IELTS Writing Task 1
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic 10: How apple is canned - Diagram
• Life Cycle of the Salmon - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Academic IELTS Writing Task 1 Recycling process of wasted glass bottles Sample Answers
• Production of Potato Chips - IELTS Writing Task 1
• The Process of Milk Production - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Process of Making Pulp and Paper - IELTS Writing Task 1 Diagram
• Stages of Processing Cocoa Beans - IELTS Writing Task 1

Mixed/Combination Diagrams

The following is a list of IELTS Writing topics 2024 with answers on IELTS mixed or combination diagrams, practising which will aid in mastering these visual presentations for a top IELTS band score .

• Anthropology Graduates From One University - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Water use Worldwide and Water Consumption- Line Graph and Table
• Transport and Car Use in Edmonton- Pie Chart + Table
• Demand for Electricity in England- Line Graph and Pie Chart
• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Topic : Newly graduated students in the UK and their proportions - Multiple Graphs
• The table and charts below give information on the police budget - IELTS Writing Task 1

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In the IELTS General Writing Task 1 , test-takers are required to write a letter in response to a given situation. The letters are of three types depending on the context, namely formal, semi-formal and informal.

Below are some common IELTS Letter Writing topics that cover all the 3 ielts writing questions types of letters.

Formal Letters

Have a look at the list of IELTS General Writing Task 1 Sample Formal Letters that will help IELTS candidates prepare for the IELTS Writing questions for the actual exam.

• An Article in an International Travel Magazine - IELTS Writing Task 1
• A Magazine Wants to Include Contributions from its Readers - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Recently Booked a Part-Time Course at a College Now Need to Cancel Your Booking - IELTS Writing Task 1 General Formal Letter
• Advertisement From a Couple Who Live in Australia - IELTS Writing Task 1 General Formal Letter
• You Found You had Left Some Important Papers at the Hotel – IELTS General Writing Task 1
• Advertisement for a Training Course which will be Useful – IELTS Writing Task 1
• Write a Letter to Your Manager about a Party that You Want to Organize at the Office – IELTS General Writing Task 1
• A Feedback for a Short Cookery Course – IELTS General Writing Task 1
• Letter to the Local Authority about Construction of an Airport - IELTS Writing Task 1
• You Are Soon Going to Spend Three Months Doing Work Experience in an Organisation - IELTS Writing Task 1

Semi - formal Letters

The following is a list of IELTS General Writing Task 1 Sample Semi-Formal Letters with answers.

• A Friend Of Yours Is Thinking About Applying For The Same Course - IELTS Writing Task 1 General Semi-Formal Letter
• Letter to Neighbour About Barking Dog - IELTS Writing Task 1
• A Letter to Your Friend Who Lives in Another Town and Invite - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Letter to a Singer about His/Her Performance – IELTS General Writing Task 1
• You Have a Full-time Job and Doing a Part-time Evening Course - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Letter to Neighbor About the Damaged Car While Parking - IELTS Writing Task 1
• You Work for an International Company- Semi-formal letter
• You and Your Family are Living in Rented Accommodation- Semiformal Letter

Informal Letters

Here is a list of IELTS Writing topics with answers on the IELTS General Writing Task 1 Informal Letters that will help you to learn how to write an IELTS informal letter and brush up your writing skills.

• A Friend is Thinking of Going on a Camping Holiday - IELTS Writing Task 1
• Advice about Learning a New Sport – IELTS Writing Task 1 (Informal Letter)
• Help with a College Project - IELTS Writing Task 1 from Cambridge IELTS General 18
• Write a Letter to Your Friend Planning a Weekend Trip - IELTS General Writing Task 1
• Your Parents will be Celebrating their 50th Anniversary Next Month- Informal letter
• You are Studying English at a Private Language School- Informal Letter
• You Have a Friend Who has always Liked the Car you Currently Drive- Informal Letter
• You Have Recently Started Work in a New Company- Informal letter
• A friend Asking for Advice About a Problem at Work- Informal letter
• A Friend has Agreed to Look After your House- Informal Letter

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IELTS Writing Task 2 is similar for both IELTS Academic and IELTS General Training with minor differences in the difficulty level. Therefore, let us have a look at the compilation of IELTS writing topics with answers for different IELTS Writing Task 2 sample essays based on the common common IELTS Writing topics 2024.

Business, Work & Talent

Work-related topics often cover issues such as work-life balance, the gig economy, and the impact of automation on employment. Also, business topics may include discussions on corporate responsibility, entrepreneurship, and the impact of globalization on local businesses.

• Some people are born with certain talents - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Women Should be Allowed to Join the Army, the Navy and the Air Force just like Men - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: Until What Age Do You Think People Should be Encouraged to Remain in Paid Employment?
• IELTS Writing Task 2 - Top Level Authorities Should Take Suggestions From Employees
• How Realistic is the Expectation of Job Satisfaction for all Workers - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Men and Women Can Be Equally Suited to Do Any Type of Work - IELTS Writing Task 2
• People Work Long Hours Leaving Little Time for Leisure - IELTS Writing task 2
• Some People Say that it is Better to Work for a Larger Company than a Small One - IELTS Writing Task 2

Education topics often focus on the role of technology in education, the importance of higher education, and the debate over traditional vs. modern teaching methods.

• IELTS Writing Task 2: Nowadays it is More Difficult for Children to Concentrate to Pay Attention in School
• Placing Advertisements in Schools is a Great Resource for Public Schools - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: Giving Homework Daily to School Children Works Well
• Very Few School Children Learn About the Value of Money: IELTS Writing Task 2
• Traditional Examination Are Not Often True to Students Ability - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Secondary School Children Should Study International News - IELTS Writing Task 2

Environment

Environmental issues are increasingly prominent in IELTS Writing, with topics covering pollution, climate change, and the conservation of natural resources.

• IELTS Writing Task 2 - Some people say domestic animals, like cats, should not be reared in cities
• We No Longer Need to have Animals Kept in Zoos - IELTS Writing Task 2
• The Importance of Biodiversity is Being More Widely Recognised - IELTS Writing Task 2
• People Should Use Public Transport to Support Pollution Control Initiatives - IELTS Writing Task 2
• International Community Must Act Immediately to Reduce Consumption of Fossil Fuels - IELTS Writing Task 2

Family and Children

IELTS Writing questions related to family and children often explore the changing dynamics of family life, parenting styles, and the impact of technology on children.

• IELTS Writing Task 2 - Young Single People No Longer Stay With Their Parents Until They Are Married
• Is it Better to Rear Children in Joint Family or in Nuclear Family - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: Majority of Children are Raised by their Grandparents Due to the Fact that their Parents are Busy
• IELTS Writing Task 2: In Some Countries Children Have Very Strict Rules of Behaviour
• Some People Spend Their Lives Living Close to Where They Were Born - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Should Parents Read or Tell Stories to Their Children - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Women Make Better Parents than Men - IELTS Writing Task 2
• The Older Generations Tend to Have very Traditional Ideas - IELTS Writing Task 2

Food, Lifestyle and Entertainment

Food and entertainment related IELTS writing topics often discuss issues related to diet, the global food industry, and cultural food practices.

• Explain Why the Movies are As Popular As a Means of Entertainment - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: Popular Hobbies and Interests Change Over Time
• IELTS Writing Task 2 - Which Do You Prefer Planning or Not Planning For Leisure Time?
• IELTS Writing Task 2: People Always Throw the Old Things Away When they Buy New Things
• Food Can Be Produced Much More Cheaply Today | IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: The Era of the Silver Screen is Coming to an End
• Why is Music Important for Many People - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: Why is the Circus Still a Popular Form of Entertainment
• Crime Novels and TV Crime Dramas are Becoming Popular - IELTS Writing Task 2

Health-related topics are a staple in the IELTS Writing section, focusing on public health issues, diet, and the impact of modern lifestyles on health.

• Discuss the cause and effects of widespread drug abuse by young people - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Obesity is a Major Disease Prevalent among Children - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Exercise is the Key to Health while Others Feel that Having a Balanced Diet is More Important - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Government Providing Free Healthcare - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Tobacco and Alcohol are Drugs that Cause Addiction and Health Problems - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Many People Complain that They Have Difficulties Getting Enough Sleep - IELTS Writing Task 2
• and More People are Hiring a Personal Fitness Trainer - IELTS Writing Task 2

Language and Culture

Topics related to language and literature often explore the importance of preserving cultural heritage, language learning, and the impact of globalization on languages.

• Many Old Cities Around the World are Going Through a Major Process of Modernization - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Reading for Pleasure Develops Imagination and Better Language Skills - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2 - Traditional Festivals and Celebrations Have Disappeared
• Globalization will Inevitably Lead to the Total Loss of Cultural Identity - IELTS Writing Task 2

Societal issues such as violence, social inequality, and media influence are common in IELTS Writing topics.

• Individual Greed and Selfishness Have Been the Basis of Modern Society - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2 - Individuals Should Not Be Allowed To Carry Guns
• Nowadays We are Living in a Throwaway Society - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Different People Have Different Approaches to Life - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Violence and Conflict were more Evident under Male Leadership than under Female Leadership - IELTS Writing Task 2
• What Changes Do You Think this New Century Will Bring - IELTS Writing Task 2
• People Remember Special Gifts or Presents they Receive - IELTS Writing Task 2

Sports topics in IELTS Writing often cover the role of sports in education, the impact of professional sports on society, and issues related to sportsmanship.

• Many People Think Olympic Games and World Cup are an Enormous Waste of Money- IELTS Writing Task 2
• Cricket has Become More Popular than the National Sports - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Sports Today is Turning into a Business - IELTS Writing Task 2

Technology & Science

Technology is a rapidly evolving field, and its impact on society, work, and communication is a common topic in IELTS Writing. Media-related topics also come under this section and often focus on the influence of mass media, the ethics of journalism, and the role of the internet in modern communication.

• Internet and Computers Will Ever Replace the Book or the Written Word - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: More and More People are Choosing to Read Ebooks Rather than Paper Books
• Some People Think That Mobile Phones Should Be Banned in Public Places - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Persuade More People to Embrace Electric Cars – IELTS Writing
• The most important aim of science should be to improve people's lives - IELTS Writing Task 2
• People May No Longer Be Able to Pay for Things Using Cash - IELTS Writing Task 2
• Mobile Phones and the Internet could have Many Benefits for Old People - IELTS Writing Task 2

Tourism and Travel

Tourism and travel topics may include discussions on the impact of tourism on local cultures, the environment, and the global economy.

• Foreign Visitors Should Pay More Than Local Visitors for Cultural and Historical Attractions - IELTS Writing Task 2
• IELTS Writing Task 2: What Do You Think are the Benefits of Going Away on Holidays?
• In the Future More People Will Go On Holiday in Their Own Country - IELTS Writing Task 2

Download the IELTS writing topics PDF that contain all the IELTS writing topics with answers to fasttrack your IELTS preparation!

Being familiar with these IELTS Writing topics and practicing your writing skills within these themes can help you prepare more effectively for the IELTS Writing test. Moreover, understanding the issues and arguments related to each topic will enable you to write well-rounded essays that meet the IELTS criteria. So, if you need further guidance through a free demo session or sign up for free IELTS webinars .

Additional Reads

• IELTS Academic Writing Task 1: Useful Tips and Vocabulary to Describe a Graph or Chart
• Recent Writing Task 2 Essay Topics for IELTS 2024
• IELTS Band 9 Essay Samples: Writing Task 2 Insights for IELTS Learners
• Visuals: Writing About Graphs, Tables and Diagrams for IELTS Writing Task 1 (Ebook)
• How to Plan an IELTS Writing Task 2 Essay (Best Strategy)
• IELTS Writing Task 2 Preparation Tips/Tricks

Frequently Asked Questions

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Task Search

Use Your Imagination - Rapunzel

As rifts continue to pop up across Eternity Isle , you'll need Rapunzel 's help to close the rift near the Sundial Isle. This guide provides a walkthrough for the Use Your Imagination: Rapunzel quest, a subquest of Merlin's Mysterious Mickey .

Use Your Imagination: Rapunzel Walkthrough

• Follow Rapunzel to the rift in time near the Sundial Island.
• Talk to Rapunzel.
• Craft a Floating Lantern.
• Ask Mickey, Gaston, Oswald, and EVE about their deepest wishes.
• Follow Rapunzel to the rift in time near the Sundial Island and toss in the floating lantern.

Follow Rapunzel to the Rift in Time near Sundial Island

After speaking to Rapunzel during Merlin's Mysterious Mickey quest, follow her to the rift in time near the Sundial Island.

Talk to Rapunzel

With the Spark's magic running on imagination, have Rapunzel think of something she can toss into the rift. This something turns out to be some Floating Lanterns.

To craft the Floating Lanterns, you will require the following materials:

25x Tropical - Use Your Imagination: Rapunzel 10x Bamboo - Use Your Imagination: Rapunzel 3x Rope - Use Your Imagination: Rapunzel

How to Get Tropical Wood

How to Get Bamboo

How to Craft Rope

Craft a Floating Lantern

Once you have gathered the required materials, head to a crafting table and craft the Floating Lanterns.

When crafted, give the lantern to Rapunzel, who states something is missing.

Ask Mickey, Gaston, Oswald, and EVE About Their Deepest Wishes

Wanting to add the deepest wishes of several villagers to the lantern, speak with Mickey, Gaston, Oswald, and EVE to learn more about their deepest wishes.

Upon gathering Mickey's, Gaston's, Oswald's, and EVE's deepest wishes, speak with Rapunzel, who will write them down and prepare to toss them into the rift.

Follow Rapunzel to the Rift in Time near Sundial Island and Toss in the Floating Lantern

With the Floating Lantern and deepest wishes in hand, follow Rapunzel back to Sundial Island and toss in the Floating Lantern to close the time rift and complete the quest.

Use Your Imagination: Rapunzel

Ready to continue with Merlin's Quest? See our Mysterious Mickey Walkthrough for more, or jump to one of its subquests:

• Use Your Imagination - Gaston
• Use Your Imagination - EVE
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The Ezra Klein Show

Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’

By Ezra Klein

Nate Silver on How Kamala Harris Changed the Odds

Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting. But before Silver was in politics, he was a poker player. And after getting into politics, he went back to being a poker player. He’s been running through poker championships and out there on tables — partly because he’s been writing a book about risk.

The book is called “ On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything .” And it applies the frameworks of the gambler to politics, to A.I., to venture capital.

The way Silver thinks about politics I find very useful. So I invited him on my podcast to talk about how that thinking has guided him over the past year and how he’s thinking about the election going forward.

This is an edited transcript of part of our conversation. For the full conversation, watch the video below, or listen to “ The Ezra Klein Show .”

The election forecaster discusses 2024 and what politicians can learn from gamblers.

“Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting. He built models that were pretty damn successful at predicting American politics.” “Nate Silver is the founder of fivethirtyeight.com, a polling website that correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states in the last presidential election.” “Election Oracle, ESPN’s Nate Silver, he predicted every state in the last presidential election.” “And once again, Nate Silver completely nailed it.” “The guy’s amazing.” “But before Silver was in politics, he was a poker player. And after getting into politics, he went back to being a poker player. He’s been running through poker championships and out there on tables —” “Savage, savage bluff by Silver. Oh, my God.” “— partially because he’s been writing a book about risks. The book is called ‘On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.’ And it applies the frameworks of, I would say, the gambler, maybe say the poker player, to politics, to AI, to venture capital. Nate, the way he thinks about politics I find very useful. I find that he thinks more clearly about risk and probabilities than a lot of people do and maybe more people should follow. So I wanted to have him on to talk about how that thinking has guided him over the past year and how he’s thinking about it in the election going forward. As always, my email, [email protected].” [THEME MUSIC] “Nate Silver, welcome to the show.” “Thank you, Ezra. Happy to be here.” “Last I looked, your model has Harris winning the election at around 52 percent. It might be mildly different today. But this has been an unusual election. So how much stock do you put in your model right now?” “I think the model is balancing the different factors pretty well. I mean, there are some things you could argue are favorable to Harris, one of which is that for the past few weeks we’ve been in what the model thinks is supposed to be the convention bounce period for republicans, where typically you poll pretty well after your convention. There’s the afterglow of the new nomination and things like that — the afterglow of the VP pick, often, too. And Kamala Harris kind of stomped on Donald Trump’s news cycle. So maybe it’s an overly favorable assumption for Harris. There’s also in polls what’s known as nonpartisan response bias. So when voters get more enthusiastic, you’d rather have that than not as a candidate. But it also means that they sometimes are more likely to respond to polls. At the same time, her momentum has been pretty good, which usually I dismiss. We don’t really kind of know what the baseline is here, right? You know, Hillary Clinton, who was, I think, kind of a terrible candidate, won the popular vote by two points. Is she a little bit better than Hillary Clinton? Probably, right? So can she win by three or four? Well, if you win by three or four, then you win the electoral college in most instances.” “I don’t think many people expected — if you did, I’d like to know it — the turnaround in her numbers we have seen since she’s become the presumptive nominee. She’s gone to net favorables, which I would not have bet a ton of money on at this speed at least. People were looking at a lot of data on Harris and assuming that data was solid. That data was not solid.” “When a candidate’s a hypothetical candidate, you have to treat that polling very carefully. People are — I think it’s a weird thing to ask, you know, what if Gavin Newsom ran against Trump. It’s not the same thing as when you actually have the candidate in front of you, and have the advertisements, and have the news articles, and everything else to actually evaluate. I mean, I think this is, like, on the higher side for a jump in favorables, but, you know, she was amazingly well-organized at getting the entire establishment behind her within literally minutes [LAUGHS]: of Biden announcing that he was going to step down. And so that suggested that maybe she did have more support in the party than she let on. And also, you know, I don’t — I think the Biden people may have been in somewhat bad faith. Maybe not consciously, but I’m not sure they weren’t trying to undermine her. Because the obvious thing to do would be to have this qualified, if not always that politically adept, you know, much, much younger vice president take over for you when you’re about to be 82. But they gave her the border. They gave her voting rights, which is kind of the one major domestic policy area where they got very little done. So I don’t think they gave her a very good hand to play. But meanwhile, she’s getting a lot of reps, and giving speeches, and building connections, and played the game really well. I have a lot of respect for that.” “Well, the key thing, I think, is that Biden had a huge amount of influence over how the party viewed her in both directions. There was a long period, I would say, when the quiet signals out of Biden world were this isn’t going well.” “Yeah.” “And when there was pressure to push Biden off the ticket, those signals got louder — Harris cannot do this. If you get rid of him, you’re going to get her. You’re going to lose. But then the thing you saw happen is a moment Biden actually stepped aside and fully endorsed her. That was a signal so powerful that it functionally won the potential primary for Harris instantly. Nobody was going to go against Joe Biden in that moment. And so, in both directions, Biden had, and the team around him, a lot of influence. When implicitly Biden world told the Democratic Party Harris can’t do it, the Democratic Party believed them. And then when explicitly Biden himself told the Democratic Party and the world Harris could do it, the Democratic Party believed him. And by the way, from what I could tell, it seems he was right. And I don’t blame Biden, I think, for things that happened earlier in the administration. That was a lot of staff talk. And to be fair, it was based on some things. There were problems in her office. There were reasons to be skeptical. But he and they had tremendous power. In a way, this was not, to me, like a mini primary. This was a parliamentary process, right? The party came together and chose a leader through endorsements from elected officials. That’s functionally what happened.” “Yeah, it felt very British. It felt like —” “It felt very British.” “— the Liz Truss kind of thing or something, right, where, yeah. There’s a loss of confidence. Those are fascinating dynamics to study. But yeah, it’s interesting to have the inside view versus the outside view a little bit. And, you know, again, we talk about this in the book a little bit, but I come at a position where I’m more skeptical about the competence of people who work in politics. Right? Even if I like the candidates they endorse — I mean, I plan to plan to vote for Kamala Harris. I would not have voted for Joe Biden, by the way. I think it was deeply irresponsible to nominate him, and I would have voted libertarian or something. But I have a more skeptical view, and I think even the rationales they state out loud are sometimes maybe the rationales they believe or not. But, you know, I think human behavior is pretty strategic when you understand people’s incentives, and kind of information set, and things like that. And I think it was in Biden’s narrow self-interest to make Harris look weaker. And I think that plays a role at all sorts of subconscious margins in terms of how she was treated.” “Well, let’s talk about that skepticism. You and I have known each other a long time. We’re old-school bloggers. And my read of you is that somewhat over the 2016 election, then specifically over the pandemic —” “Yeah.” “— and your experience, I think, with online liberalism in the pandemic, you became much more disillusioned with the people who once felt to you like your group, your coalition, your tribe. There’s been a kind of an alienation for you. Is that a fair read?” “Yeah, I’d say it’s three things, right. Number one, the 2016 aftermath, I thought a lot of the kind of liberal and centrist news media, kind of were in denial about their own role in the ‘But her emails’ stuff and then picked scapegoats for Trump’s victory that were not the real reasons that he won. You know, Russian bot farms have approximately nothing to do with why Donald Trump won the 2016 election. And the Russia stuff, in general, I think was treated with an order of magnitude more importance than it probably objectively had. And blaming Facebook and the tech industry for that, I thought that was irresponsible. And also kind of the obsession over the polls in 2016, where I think there was some revisionist history where the polls actually showed a pretty close race. I mean, we had Trump with a 30 percent chance. And it was kind of the conventional wisdom that assumed that he was dead in the water. So the ability to conveniently lie a little bit or manipulate facts and spin facts, I mean, that was part one. Part two was the pandemic. Absolutely. And, you know, ‘orange man bad,’ I think, was often the reason that people believed a lot of what they believed. Because in some ways, the move to shut down society in some ways kind of went against the values of traditional liberalism, right? There’s a transfer of welfare from younger people [LAUGHS]: and people who are not able to work from home to wealthy suburbanites and older people who you’re protecting their health, but you’re undermining the education of millions and millions and millions of schoolkids around the country, and essential workers are still putting themselves at risk that you deem unacceptable for people who are able to work with laptops to take. So I thought it was very self-serving, and I thought kind of expertise was co-opted and corrupted by political partisans. And then third was the Biden stuff.” “Well, it seemed to me it happened for you before the Biden stuff.” “Yeah. I mean —” “And you were crosswise with a lot of liberals on Twitter. I mean, I came back to Twitter for three weeks during the height of Bidenmania to try to be sort of in touch with that sentiment and mostly stay away from it. But Twitter is a place that groups that exist outside the online hothouse purify inside the online hothouse. So there’s the public health community outside Twitter, and then there’s how it acts inside Twitter — political scientists outside Twitter and then inside Twitter, republicans outside Twitter, then inside Twitter. And my sense was that you ended up in a lot of fights with liberals who had a much lower risk tolerance than you did. And between that and what was, I believe, unfair criticism of the 2016 model, which got the election much more right than most did, that it sort of — you began to see habits of — you call it ‘the village.’ The village is your term for —” “Yeah. And that’s been a term that’s been used by other right. But the village is basically media, politics, government, progressive —” “The establishment.” “The establishment, ‘The New York Times,’ Harvard University.” “The regime.” “The regime. Yeah. The Democratic White House. Maybe not a Republican White House, but that’s a more complicated kind of edge case.” “Or maybe a different Republican White House.” “Yeah.” “Right? George W. Bush was part of the village.” “Absolutely.” “Maybe Donald Trump wasn’t.” “Absolutely.” “I think you’ve also called it the indigo blob in different ways, that you began to see it as a kind of set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you disagreed with. What were they?” “So one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It’s not my term. Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. So the example I give in the book is that if you’re able to say I abhor the Chick-fil-A’s CEO’s position on gay marriage — I don’t know if it’s changed or not, but he was anti-gay marriage, at least for some period of time — but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich. Like, that’s decoupling.” “I abhor their treatment of chickens.” “Yeah.” “I have a strong direct take on Chick-fil-A. I don’t like how they treat chickens.” “O.K. Or you can say or separate out, you know, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, separate the art from the artist kind of thing. Right? You know, that tendency goes against kind of the tendency on the progressive left to care a lot about the identity of the speaker in terms of the racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials. And this other world that I call ‘the river,’ the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right.” “The river is your name for the community of people who think about risk roughly the way you do and are willing to make big bets, willing to accept loss. The river is your — it’s your world of gamblers at all levels of society.” “Capital and lowercase g gambling.” “So hedge funds —” “Expected value.” “— venture capitalists.” “Yeah. And then you get kind of the more —” “Crypto.” “— groundwater stuff where it’s like crypto, and meme stocks, and things like that. It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way. And that’s very against, I think, the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the indigo blob, because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan, centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media that’s kind of rooting for Democrats. Different parts of ‘The New York Times’ have both those functions in place. And as someone who’s kind of more on the nonpartisan side, even though, again, I would prefer to see Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain. And particularly in the kind of pre-Elon pandemic-era Twitter days, the pile-ons were kind of insane, and 98 percent of people don’t have the tolerance for that. But I didn’t really care because these people are not my friends, and I have a good life outside of Twitter, and because, you know, to some extent, even if you run a newsletter, being a little polarizing is O.K., right? If I have 10 random people yelling at me on Twitter and 10 people sign up to be paid subscribers to ‘Silver Bulletin,’ then I come out like way ahead in that deal. And so I think I couldn’t do my job without running afoul of this group of people.” “Let me ask you about the definition of decoupling there, because I think decoupling is interesting. And I found the examples you pick also interesting but contestable.” “Yeah.” “So in the Chick-fil-A example, I’m between a vegetarian and vegan these days, so I got my own issues with Chick-fil-a, but was not a believer necessarily in boycotting it if you didn’t have my issues. But I understood it as more like a boycott, that theory, right? You don’t want to give money to something that’s going to work against your interests. The question of decoupling art and artist, which I’m more on the side of decoupling, but also has a dimension of — those both strike me as versions of activism, right? What you want to do, what people who hold those positions are trying to do, is affect change in the world by applying consequences to beliefs. And maybe you don’t want that, or you don’t agree that the beliefs they are trying to affect should have those consequences on them. But it’s kind of different than the idea of things are being pressed together that don’t go together. I think an interesting sort of decoupling issue that happened in the pandemic was the same public health voices who were at one point saying you had to be so careful, even outside oftentimes were then pro joining the George Floyd protests, which a lot of people found very upsetting. What people were looking to the public health world for right then was not their views on protests but their views on distancing. And that felt like it coupled things in a way that undermined one to achieve another.” “Well, and they framed it in, like, oh, this is good for public health reasons, right? If they had said, look, I’m a big believer in racial equity; there is a little bit of risk here; but outside, wear a mask, and probably not a huge problem — I mean, that would be honest, right?” “Which ended up being true too.” “Yeah. But instead it was in the name of public health, right? I think people don’t do enough thinking about thinking and don’t read enough of the literature on cognitive biases. Ironically, this is kind of like the expert literature on how powerful the human mind is at confirmation bias, and how powerful a drug political partisanship is, and how smart people are maybe better rationalizes in certain respects. I mean, a lot of irrational traits are like rational on some halfway approximate different version of the universe. You know what I mean?” “My first book was on polarization. And what I understand you as doing in the book in part is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of both risk tolerance and thinking about risk. And you write something that caught my eye where you say, quote, ‘COVID made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces.’ And you go on to say, quote, ‘People are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance, and this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote.’” “Yeah.” “Tell me about both sides of that — the way that it made risk tolerance visible, but then your view that since then risk tolerance is becoming a deeper cleavage in society.” “I mean, on the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, right? Among young people in particular, they’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex. A different type of risk tolerance, they are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. That’s kind of a — free speech is kind of a pro-risk kind of take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course. On the other hand, you have this boom and bust, and various booms and busts, in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting and things like that. You have the CEO of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s worth it. It’s a good gamble to take. You have FTX and all this stuff. And the first trip I made after COVID was to a Casino in Florida, which is every bit the shit show that you think it might be. And the tournament drew record numbers of Poker players. And so it just seems to me like we are in a world now where institutions are less trusted. And some people respond to that by saying, O.K., I make my own rules now, and this is great, and I have lots of agency. And some respond by kind of withdrawing into an online world, or maybe clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility, or just by becoming more risk averse. I mean, I think the pandemic also revealed that there’s a lot of differences in introversion versus extroversion. I just can’t deal with being cooped up inside all day. This doesn’t work for me at all. But I think some people kind of secretly like the idea that, O.K., there’s no more FOMO. I can kind of be cozy all day. And that’s fine. There’s differences in desire for human companionship and things like that too.” “Let’s talk about a couple of those people. One of the things that’s kind of fun about the book is you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting.” “Yeah.” “One of them is Peter Thiel. What were your impressions of Peter Thiel? What did he learn spending time with him?” “The first impression is that he’s a weird dude. I interviewed him by phone. And the first question I asked him he took half an hour to answer. So he’s very thoughtful. And the question was what I thought was kind of a softball question. It’s like, if you ran the world 1,000 times or 10,000 times, how often do you think you’d wind up in a situation like the one that you’re in? And it was kind of a nerdy way to ask, do you think you got lucky. Which in Thiel’s case is interesting. There’s an anecdote in the book about this famous or infamous car trip he took with Elon Musk. They were going to pitch Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital, and Elon had a new McLaren F1 and was going way too fast, and spun out of control in the middle of whichever Sand Hill Road or whatever, and they totaled the car. They could easily have been killed. And instead, they actually hitchhiked to this meeting and saved what was then called Confinity — it was like the future of Paypal, right? And so this twist of fate, twist of good fortune, kind of helped [LAUGHS]: Peter Thiel out. But most people understand, like —” “Wait, how did it help him out? I mean, he didn’t die.” “Well, he didn’t die. So he avoided — yeah, he avoided dying, I guess I’d say. So probably the expectation was not that he’d die. But the point is still that you can easily have a world in which Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are not a part of it if there’s a car going the wrong way and the other side of the road. So most people, when you ask that question — I asked Mark Cuban, for example — they’ll give the politically correct response. Which is, oh, of course I’ve been very lucky, and I’m a talented person, but of course it’s a 1 in a million thing. Right? And Thiel objected to the question. He said, you know, well, if it’s predetermined, then the odds are 100 percent. And if the world’s not predetermined, then the odds are probably approximately zero. But that doesn’t really make sense. Like, how can you perturb the world by exactly this amount? But I think he kind of believes in predestiny a little bit. And —” “As a spiritual thing or as a matter of classical physics?” “There’s a good book by I think Max Chafkin was the journalist — or ‘Chaff-kin’— I don’t how you say his last name — about Peter Thiel called ‘The Contrarian,’ which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative, more than libertarian, and probably quite religious. But I also think that if you ARE one of these people, just the amounts of wealth, and success, and power that Silicon Valley has, I do think some of these people kind of pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways or been blessed in some ways, or, maybe the nerdy version of it, think they’re living in a simulation of some kind. Like, what odds would you give yourself that that actually makes sense that you’re the protagonist of the story? It must be kind of weird, right?” “So I used to interview Thiel. Not super regularly but every so often. My impression of him, which has been my impression of a lot of the I would call them ideologist VCs, which is not all VCs, but the ones who are heavily behind or out online and sort of pushing a kind of what I would think of as like VC ideology that leans now right, talking to him always interesting. Because over the course of a conversation, he would offer like 15 or 20 ideas. I would call them more thought experiments than analytical arguments. They were not empirically backed, typically. And you would leave and be like, 13 of those seem genuinely ridiculous to me. Two of them might be very importantly right. I’m not 100 percent sure which are the two and which are the 13. And Peter Thiel, I think, is very — he is a sort of template of the VC mind, and a lot of VCs try to be him. And he’s been very successful. I mean, he’s a guy who has backed a number of very important companies, found a number of very important founders. He is able to do something there. But it is oriented towards being right in important and counterintuitive ways, like, three out of 20 times and doesn’t care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times. Whereas if you think about media, media is oriented towards being right 17 out of 20 times, and the three that it gets wrong are going to be really big because they’re going to be correlated across the entirety of American institutions. But it’s a very different way of thinking about risk. It’s like you want big payouts, not a high betting average.” “And that’s because this is core to the VC mindset. The two things that you hear from every VC, one is the importance of the longer time horizon. So you’re making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years. But number two, even more important, is the asymmetric ability to bet on upside. They are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg walked through their door, or Larry Page or Sergey Brin walked through their door, and they didn’t give them funding. And then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1000x or 10,000x. And so if you can only lose 1x your money, but you can make 1000x if you have a successful company, then that changes your mindset about everything, and you want to avoid false negatives. You want to avoid missed opportunities. And I think there’s a tendency for a certain type of smart person to provoke, to troll a little bit. I think he’s like that a little bit mean. This is also partly the thing on Twitter, right? I kind of us Twitter sometimes as a sketch pad [LAUGHS]: a little bit for slightly irreverent, half-trollish ideas that might later turn into newsletter posts or something like that, or might be developed further, and probing around and seeing what things land and what don’t. Like a stand mic night at a comedy show or something. And I think that’s how Twitter is meant to be used. But other people use it for enforcing consensus. But we’ve already talked about Twitter. But yeah —” “Well, you can never talk about it enough, particularly with these people. The one thing I will say on that, and I think this is true for virtually everybody I know who has been on that platform for a long period of time, is they will tell you that I have this persona on Twitter.” “Yeah.” “Right? Twitter is not real life. I mean, I use it to provoke. I’m having fun. I’m shitposting. I’m trolling. And people, over time, if they spend a lot of time there, become more like who they are there. That is true for Marc Andreessen, another person who you profile and talk to in the book. It’s true for lots of people in politics I know. Ted Cruz has become his Twitter persona even more than he once was. It happened in Democratic politics I think in 2020. Different campaigns became more like their Twitter incarnations than that person had been in politics before. And I think it has to do with social dynamics. Because over time, the people you get praise from become more persuasive and credible to you. The people who begin to hate you, you sort of repel from. People I think always think they can be playful in their social dynamics, but actually who you end up surrounding yourself, even online, you become them. It’s very, very hard to maintain that kind of separation.” “I mean, clearly, Elon Musk maintained a stance for a while that, oh, I’m just kind of a libertarian moderate. Like, no, he’s kind of like a right-pilled conservative.” “Yeah. And I’m just having fun. I’m posting funny things. He’s his Twitter persona now. You spent some time with Sam Bankman-Fried.” “Yeah.” “Tell me what you learned from him or learned about him.” “I think Sam is kind of insane [CHUCKLES]:, and I’m not very sympathetic to him. I mean, I’m sympathetic in the sense that this is this very dramatic reversal of fortune, where he’s kind of literally emerging and on top of the whole world, and shooting commercials with Tom Brady, and it kind of all collapses, and he becomes very abandoned overnight. So he’s kind of reaching out to a couple of journalists to have conversations because he basically no friends left in the Bahamas anymore. And his parents are there and two of his employees are there, but everyone else has fled the island. Sam is somebody who has to be owned by the river. But, you know, he is unabashedly a part of that world. I mean, he had his tentacles in every part of that world. He was active in Democratic and actually, under the radar, Republican political donations. He was trying to figure out how to get into sports betting legally and things like that. And so he is kind of everywhere. And of course, most of all, with the effect of altruists — in the original plan for the book, there was this awkward transition between the chapter on crypto and the chapter on effective altruism. I’m like, how do I have a natural transition? And then SBF is very important in both worlds, and it’s a very strange connection that somehow crypto profits are funding these people who want to cure malaria or something in Africa. But, you know, I think there are a couple of things. One is that I think people were overly impressed by SBF, partly because he was able to manipulate his self image. I mean, he’s not the most conventionally normal guy, right? But he was very aware that founders — the founder algorithm, the VC algorithm is like we can’t — weirdness is good for VCs. The fact that SBF would play video games in investor pitch meetings or things like that, or dress down, or have a fidget spinner, they’re like, oh, he’s a little bit on the spectrum, and that’s actually probably good for a founder because you want the single-minded devotion. And he’s a little weird, but you want variance, variance, variance.” “Sleeps on a beanbag. Right? There was a real mythos around him.” “Which is kind of carefully constructed. He’s kind of inhabiting a character which is inspired by some inner SBF. And he’s kind of playing that character and then kind of forgets what has ever inner core values, whatever they were, might have been. But he is not a very competent manager of risk. He invested all this money in this Democratic primary for a candidate named Carrick Flynn in Oregon’s — I forget which — six or seventh district, maybe eighth district. And the candidate had been ahead in the polls by 15 points and wound up losing by 15 points. Because to spend $8 million in a congressional primary is kind of insane if you’re not in the New York media market or something. So the candidate would go to people’s houses, and they’d be like, hey, I’m Carrick Flynn. I’m a candidate for the Oregon primary. And they’re like, oh, I have your literature and bring out a stack of 20 flyers that SBF’s super PAC had sent on behalf of Carrick Flynn and made him look like a weird freak backed by this mysterious crypto billionaire. So, yeah, he had a tendency — and this is based on testimony from both the court case and an interview I did with Tara MacAulay I think his her name, his original co-founder at Alameda. He had the kind of often good initial instincts, and being a good estimator is an important skill in my world, but then would kind of double down on that a lot and rationalize things a lot. And there was also a bystander effect problem where so many people vouched for him — Sequoia Capital and all these Oxford philosophers, these effective altruists. And he’s on stage with Bill Clinton or whatever, and he’s invited to the Met Gala, and Tom Brady is shooting commercials with him. So what could possibly be wrong with this guy? I mean, maybe he seems a little bit weird to me, but all these other people are kind of in his corner. But no one was doing the due diligence. And he kind of figured out that despite — there’s a little contradiction in the river, where on the one hand we tend to think of ourselves as being contrarian. On the other hand, we’re pretty big fans of markets, because we know that it’s kind of hard to beat the Las Vegas point spread or it’s hard to beat the S&amp;P 500 Index funds or things like that. So the market judgment is that SBF is a credible actor, and how would I trust my own judgment over the market judgment a little bit. And there was too much deference toward that and too much actually groupthink about SBF, because the problems were evident the whole way. I mean, he told Tyler Cowen that if he could flip a coin to double the amount of utility in the world plus 1 epsilon or something but there’s a 50/50 chance of blowing the world up, that he would take the coin flip and repeatedly.” “So you’re actually getting two earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.” “And again, I feel compelled to say caveats here of how would you really know that’s what’s happening, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Put that aside. Take the hypothetical — the pure hypothetical. Yeah. Yeah.” “And then you keep on playing the game. So what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just Saint Petersburg paradox you into non-existence?” “Well, not necessarily. Maybe Saint Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.” “I remember seeing that Tyler Cowen interview and thinking, that’s nuts. But I think it gets at a kind of nuts that there is a bias towards in the world you’re describing. There is an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. There’s an ability to think in probabilities, and there’s an aesthetic around probabilities — people attaching, I would often say, almost random probabilities to things. I see this a lot in Silicon valley, people who I would call it like faux Bayesian reasoning where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability — 50 percent of this. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like what you’re talking about. SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value. Which is very appealing to the kinds of people you’re describing, maybe the kind of person even that you are. And people who know how to talk like that get through a lot of filters, because you sort of assume, if they’ve converted everything into probabilities, and they’re great at math, and he worked at Jane Street. I worried about this a lot with effective altruists for a while, which is a group I have a lot more sympathy for than most people now have. But there can be this tendency, I think, to fetishize a certain form of discourse. It’s like the first people into that form of discourse are doing something valuable, and then, after that, I think it can become a kind of costume of sloppy thinking. This worries me about models too. I’m curious how you think about it, because I often find that people talk in terms of probabilities but people hear them in terms of certainties. That somehow talking in terms of probabilities makes people more willing to believe you without actually being skeptical or attaching a failure risk to you.” “Yeah. I mean, there’s two things here. One is just there is a kind of jargon. In some ways I liken being from the river to being from the South of the United States or something, where there’s just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies — it’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models. Even in narrow problems, like I want to forecast the NFL or something or build an election model, it’s easy to build bad models. And on these open-ended problems, it’s really easy to fall in love with the incomplete model of the world and then forget that — what’s the Kamala Harris coconut tree quote? A model does not fall from a coconut tree. It exists —” “It exists in the context of all that came before it. Sure.” “So a model is supposed to describe something in the real world. And if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world, then it’s the model’s fault and your fault for building the model and not the real world’s fault. And that’s a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of trouble learning.” “Bankman-Fried is in prison. Thiel might in some ways be responsible for destroying the Republican ticket this year. I mean, in a close election, JD Vance now seems to have about as much negative value as we’ve seen from a recent Vice President. I’m not saying Peter Thiel’s the only reason Vance got chosen for the ticket, but he is one of the key reasons Vance is in politics. Before now, you would said JD Vance was Peter Thiel’s political bet that paid off best.” “Yeah.” “And now it might be his political bet that pays off worst. You mentioned Bankman-Fried’s political donations, which were kind of disastrous in a direct way sometimes. Also ended up taking a lot of other people down over time. If these guys are so good at making bets or seem to be so good at making bets, what are they missing in politics? As somebody who straddles those worlds, what is not in their models? So both these groups, both the river and the village, are groups of elites. And I think, ironically, both groups’ critiques of one another are kind of true, right? I mean, they kind of can be epistemic trespassers, but they are not very data driven when it comes to politics. And part of it, too, is that if you’re a VC, and you’re evaluating a lot of pitches and a lot of opportunities, you have very quick twitch reflexes for saying, O.K., something about this founder seems smart. Let’s investigate further. Let’s do an initial seed round of investing. But it’s like thin slicing and not necessarily — for this part of the river, the VC part of the river — more profound analytical takes on things. And so you’re surrounded by people that are inclined to agree with you, and you kind of see enemies on the other side. He thought maybe that people had some deeper intuitive sense in 2016 that something was wrong with Hillary Clinton, even though she was ahead in the polls. And to his credit, he did back Trump at a time when that seemed like a big risk to take. It seemed like it was probably going to be the wrong bet, and it seemed like he was losing a lot of credibility. And now, it turns out that he was kind of ahead of the curve. You know, people like Peter Thiel thought that the village had been discredited by 2016 and other things. You can’t really trust the polls, and they said Trump would never do x, y or z. But no, I mean, these guys often are pretty dumb about [LAUGHS]: politics. And it’s the same — the guys in the hedge fund poker game that I play sometimes are the guys that are like, I think Gavin Newsom is going to replace Joe Biden on the ticket. And it’s like, you actually were kind of right about part of this, but why Gavin Newsom? What is the infatuation with Gavin Newsom.” “I heard so many versions of that. I always thought it was so crazy.” “Yeah.” “But, you know, it’s funny. I would say what they’ve often missed, and Thiel’s particular on this, is how human beings react to different human beings. So JD Vance, for instance, wildly underperforms in the Ohio Senate race. And Vance’s problem right now, he’s pushed onto the ticket by, as best we can tell, people like Steve Bannon, Don Trump, Jr., Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk — so the very online, very reactionary pale, the people around Trump. And what is missed about him is he’s kind of offputting. He doesn’t talk to other people in a way they would like to be spoken to. He’s able to make even popular ideas like a child tax credit sound completely bizarre when he talks about them in terms of punishing childless adults — that there is something here, I think, when people look at the world — and I’ve seen this in a lot of different dimensions of these kinds of folks — when they look at the world too much in numbers, the intangibles begin to dissolve for them.” “Although I think some of these tangibles aren’t so intangible. Right? Where you can look at JD Vance’s margins in Ohio, you can look at historically candidates who don’t have experience getting elected to some lower office and then ascending the ranks, underperform. It’s been a factor in our congressional midterm models for years, for example. But, look, in some ways, these VCs are obviously incredibly, deeply flawed people. And so, why do they succeed despite that? I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, number one, and being willing to make these plus expected value, positive expected value, high risk, but very, very, very high-upside bets, and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly, and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes — half of them, right? They’re interesting people too. I mean, they’re very interesting I think. And they — I’m happy that the book is able to present, I think, a complete journalistic portrait of some of them. But they have lots and lots of flaws, and it’s made up for by the fact that this is kind of a magic formula for making money.” “Let me get us back to the election. So we mentioned before Harris’s approval ratings have gone from significantly underwater to net favorable very, very fast. She’s now leading in head-to-head polls. More than that, there’s a real deep, whatever Republicans have convinced themselves to the contrary, organic enthusiasm that has unleashed itself around her. She turns out to be very memeable in a way I’m not sure people quite predicted. I know most Democrats didn’t predict this. I don’t think you predicted it. So what was missed here? What wasn’t in the Harris model that should have been?” “Yeah, maybe you really can meme your way to victory. [CHUCKLES]: I don’t know. I wouldn’t necessarily have thought that. I mean, there’s something about how it’s off trend a little bit, and it’s kind of unexpected a little bit. And there’s something about that, that I think people were ready for a vibe shift, right? I think people in politics neglect just how annoying the pedantic, dramatic, no fun tone of politics was and the having to be like serious all the time. And if the worst Republicans can say about Kamala Harris, oh, she laughs a lot, maybe it kind of suits the mood a little bit after so many years of doom and gloom. So maybe it was just spontaneous and lucky. I mean, it’s also the case maybe when Kamala Harris was a candidate for the nomination in 2019, I had these tiers, and the top tier was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And the line was always, O.K., I got one of those right and one of those about as wrong as possible. But she was seen as this rising, up-and-coming political talent, and maybe the combination of misaligned strategy in 2019 and then not being marketed well by the White House, and we debated before what the reasons for that are, maybe that was the underperformance. And the rising star that people thought she was kind of the real Kamala Harris after all.” “So Harris ended up choosing Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her VP pick. You made a case that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Tell me why.” “Pennsylvania, number one. There’s about a 4 percent chance in our model that Harris will lose the election because of Pennsylvania, where she wins the other Midwestern swing states but she’s 19 votes or fewer electoral votes fewer because of Pennsylvania. And if you’re a probabilist, then a 4 percent chance — because campaigns often don’t make a difference, right? If we go into a recession in the third quarter, then Harris will probably lose through no fault of her own. But in the worlds where campaign strategy can make a difference, then the VP being from Pennsylvania is a reasonably big upgrade. And the fact that he has demonstrated his popularity with this very diverse state that’s kind of a microcosm of the US as a whole — in Pennsylvania, you have the Northeast, you have the Midwest, and even you have a little bit of the South creeping in the Appalachian part of the state. You have the suburbs, you have rural areas, and you have one of the biggest cities in the United States. You have a big African-American vote. You have lots of famous colleges and things like that. You have everything there, and he’s 15 points above water approval-wise. And that’s pretty powerful information to work with. I happen to think that Tim Walz is an above-average pick, better than most, better than JD Vance. Not a particularly high bar, but better than a lot of the recent picks. I mean, I think he’s kind of memeable as America’s goofy dad kind of way, and he had a pretty moderate track record in Congress. And again, my premise is that, generally speaking, moderation wins. A lot of people disagree with that, but I think the empirical evidence is strong there. More progressive governance, of course, in Minnesota. But I think it was a somewhat risk-averse decision. Now, if you read —” “Why do you say that? I found this argument you’ve made very weird. So I think there’s a very good chance — I always told people on the VP pick my head says Shapiro and my heart says Walz.” “Yeah.” “I think that because I am a cautious person, if I were running for president, worried about losing Pennsylvania, I would have found it very hard not to pick Shapiro. Because if you don’t pick Shapiro, and you end up in a we lost Pennsylvania scenario, everybody’s going to blame you for blowing the decision that could have won Pennsylvania. In terms of the expected value, both on the front end and the back end, I understood Walz as a choice on vibes, this sort of energy, this momentum she has created. He was sort of able to upend and remake all Democratic messaging in a single morning Joe appearance. There is some intangible charisma to Walz that has made him — developed him overnight, this huge online fan base, that the cautious candidate, the one, listening to the consultants, the one reading Nate Silver polls, that candidate goes with Shapiro. Walz is something else. Why did you say that you understood Walz as risk averse?” “Because I think they were worried about news cycles where the left got mad, and/or the Gaza issue was elevated, and/or you had protests at the convention in Chicago in a couple of weeks. I think they were worried about that, and maybe kind of undermining what is clearly good vibes right now, and maybe overrating — I mean, maybe it’s not. Maybe I just think it’s the lower expected value decision of what gives Kamala Harris a higher chance of winning the electoral college in November.” “I think one of the questions I’ve been reflecting on — because I often think about, where do I disagree with writers I otherwise agree with? And I think I’m typically pretty aligned with you on a bunch of things, or Iglesias, or [INAUDIBLE], or some others. But a lot of you have really gotten into a view that I think takes the median voter theorem almost too seriously. That it’s like as if politics is unidimensional, and how close you are to ideologically the median voter is what decides elections. Which I do think moderation has an effect in. I mean, we see this in the political science research. But that doesn’t have a lot of room in that model for energy, for enthusiasm, for the mediation of politics — the thing that happens in between the candidate and the public for what is happening on social media, for what is happening on cable news. And you can often sort of back out explanations here and there. But I, for instance, think this sort of in retrospect explanation that what led Obama to victory was careful moderation — one of the things he did was moderate on some issues like gay marriage. Another thing he did was unleash astonishing levels of enthusiasm in the electorate for reasons orthogonal in many ways to his policy positions. And so I’m curious how you think about that. Because to me, one of the questions Shapiro and Walz raised, Shapiro and Harris sort of are a lot like each other. I think they sort of come off as the two smartest members of the law review. Right?” “Yeah, that’s interesting —” “Which is like kind of —” “— for sure.” “— not necessary the visual you want — maybe it is but might not be — and that there is something here that is I guess people call it vibes now. I feel like it’s a little dismissive. But how you play out in earned media, in social media, how much people want to talk about you, that feeling of enthusiasm, how do you think about that as somebody who builds models and handicaps politics?” “I mean, look, if you’re literally building a congressional model, there’s a model that forecasts the vote based on fundamentals, which means not the polls if you don’t have polling, for example, based on whatever it is, seven or eight factors. And one of those factors, if you’re incumbent, is how often do you vote with your party. And the more often you buck your party, actually the more often — like Susan Collins or Joe Manchin — then you tend to overperform in your congressional race. Now, that’s also one of eight factors. Right? And even when you have all eight factors, there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty in the race. So to me, it’s like this is something where if you’re used to looking at larger data sets, you can come up with counterexamples of Jon Tester is pretty progressive actually and somehow manages to get reelected in Montana with this kind of maybe Tim Walz-like folksy personality or something —” “Sherrod Brown. Sort of similar to that.” “Also pretty progressive. But if you take all the data from every congressional race since 1990, then it becomes clear in the aggregate, right? And I’d also say, if we could get progressives to the point where — I don’t know who we is in this sentence, because I’m not sure I identify as progressive — liberal but not progressive, I’d say — if we could get them to the point where they said, yes, the median voter theorem is mostly true but sometimes outweighed by other factors. But yeah, to get them to that point, instead of thinking, oh, you win elections by winning the base — I mean, that might have narrowly been true in an earlier —” “Wait, you’re turning this around on progressives. Because I’m asking it of you. I agree that progressives should take the median voter theorem more seriously. But I am asking you whether energy, enthusiasm, media — I just think attention in politics is undertheorized. I think if you look at Donald Trump, and you do a thing that I’ve seen people do, and say, look, he is more like the median voter on certain things like immigration, et cetera, or at least he was perceived as more moderate than Hillary Clinton and that’s why he won, I think that is an undertold story about Donald Trump that is somewhat true. I think that missing the showmanship of Donald Trump, the entertainment value, the energy he unlocks in people. There’s a reason that Trump had Dana White from the UFC and Hulk Hogan on his night of the RNC. So in 2020, Joe Biden’s view is that the election should be about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump’s view is that the election should be about Donald Trump. And that was a theory of attention they both agreed on, and it worked out for Joe Biden. In 2024, Joe Biden’s view is the election should be about Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s view was the election should probably be about Donald Trump. And that was a bad theory of attention. Biden had no way of shifting a narrative that wasn’t any good for him.” “Yeah.” “And so I guess this is what I’m getting at, that one thing that I worry about in some of this thinking among people I like is that attention is important. Candidates have different theories of it, but I don’t know that we know how to think about it as rigorously as I wish we did.” “Look, I agree. I mean, again, with Harris, maybe you do have to revise your views a little bit. I think also maybe in a campaign that’s a sprint and not a marathon, then maybe you never reach the long run. It seems possible. Usually, I’d say don’t worry about momentum over the next two weeks, because inevitably you’re going to have a bad news cycle later on. It’s just how the media works and it’s how elections work. It is possible they can just sprint their way to a memeified victory in this shortened, modified campaign. That they have a good convention, and that she wins whenever the debate is held, and then you’re in October and everyone’s crazy and explicitly partisan, they may be able to sprint to a narrow electoral college victory without having this skeptical news cycle. So that may be an argument for Walz, I think.” “One of the reasons on my mind is not actually Walz. And as I said before, because I do want to say this, I’m not sure who she should have picked as VP. I actually have very conflicted views on this, although I really, really enjoy Tim Walz, and really enjoyed interviewing him, and think he’s a pretty unusual political talent. But I think you could say the same about Josh Shapiro in different ways, and Pennsylvania is a very big state. But I’ve been interested in the shift in — look, you have a campaign staffed by many of the same people, particularly in the first two weeks, and yet the campaign’s tenor has completely changed. The tone of press releases is now they are trying to get you to talk about them and doing that by courting controversy, by being kind of mean in a way. Democrats have not been mean in a long time. That Tim Walz actually made a JD Vance couch joke in his introducing himself as her vice presidential pick speech — let’s put it this way, that is not something that Joe Biden campaign was going to do. They want people to talk about them. They want to court kind of controversy, outrage. They want attention. But I think the reason it’s all on my mind is what I am seeing in them is a radically different relationship to attention than the campaign that the same people were running two weeks ago.” “Yeah. And this why we rely on you for how much these people overlap. Like, that’s not something I really —” “They overlap tremendously.” “Yeah.” “I mean, it’s not the exact same people. Mike Donilon isn’t running things anymore. But there’s enough of the same people here that you’re not dealing with ‘nobody knew how to write these press releases’ a month ago.” “It is interesting that Joe Biden, based on the polling, would probably have been better off in election with low turnout. The one thing that might have saved him is if you get that special election, midterm election, lower turnout where people aren’t very happy about it, but they go to the polls and vote for Biden and the Trump people don’t bother to show up. Because unlike in the past, the marginal voters have been more likely to vote for Trump than for Biden. So maybe by having a really boring campaign, it kind of suited their interests. With Harris, who is bringing back some of the younger voters and some of the voters of color that had defected to Kennedy, or defected to Trump, or defected to sitting out the election, those are also some of the more marginal voters. And so, now, all of a sudden, she probably doesn’t mind as much higher turnout which is going to get young Latino women to vote for her or young Black men to vote for her when they might not have voted for Biden. And so it kind of matches the incentives of where you want to turnout to be on November 5.” “Tim Alberta in the Atlantic had a great piece on the way the Trump campaign was thinking about the race that came out around the time of the debate or right after the debate. And they felt they had Nevada, North Carolina completely locked up — and Georgia — and that this was really a race in three, maybe four states. My understanding is Harris and her team think they have re-expanded the map. They think that Nevada, Arizona, Georgia are for sure back in play. They think that North Carolina might be back in play. Do you think that’s true? Do you think the map has gotten bigger?” “I think that’s right. Because, again, look at the voters that Biden was falling off with. Nevada, people don’t remember, they think of it as kind of libertarian old miners, right? No, Nevada is extremely diverse, and it’s working class voters of color. Big fall-off constituency for Biden. Georgia, you have tons of young professionals, and tons of great colleges and universities, and, of course, tons of Black voters — the same groups that he’s declining from a little bit. North Carolina has been, interestingly, kind of close in the polls. Arizona is the one that didn’t seem to have moved quite as much, though there was one poll yesterday with Harris ahead there. But that’s right. I mean, I think the map has expanded, and it’s obviously plausible again now that she would win Georgia, especially with the Brian Kemp stuff not helping Trump one bit. At the moment — I was playing in a poker tournament, very on-brand, right — when Trump gets shot and has the iconic photo, which I’m not a Trump fan, but you kind of have to admire that, I think a little bit, I think a lot of people assume he’s going to win the election. I mean, with Biden already, he’s not going to lose after this. They try to shoot him, and he has this great photo opportunity, right? And then it seems like he’s at a high water mark. And then he picks JD Vance, and I think got a little arrogant.” [LAUGHS] “Because his initial instinct apparently was not to pick necessarily JD Vance and kind of talked out of it by his sons. And I don’t know what influence Peter Thiel or whatever had. But the VC guys were like, oh, JD Vance is kind of one of us. And he probably is smarter than the average VP or something. But that appeal has been demonstrated not to work. I mean, you saw it with Blake Masters for example, right? It works every now and then. I guess Rick Scott had a background in I don’t know what exactly, but like —” “Medicare fraud.” “O.K., yeah. [LAUGHS]: But for the most part, these —” “The guy the guy ran a health company that was convicted of the single largest Medicare fraud at that point in history.” “What I tell my VC friends is if you have a rich guy, just have him buy a basketball team or something. He’s not going to come across very well to the average voter. And I think they don’t understand that. And then, again, in a poker tournament or a poker home cash game, when you go from having a big stack and you’re kind of like, oh, this is so nice. Man, I’m going to go home and cash out my winnings. Maybe I’ll have a nice little whiskey at the bar or something. And this is going to be — I’ll text my friends about how well my session ran. And then you lose a big pot, and then you lose another big pot, and then you go on tilt. And before long, you have no chips left.” “What is tilt?” “Tilt is playing emotionally, particularly in poker or other forms of gambling. It’s often sparked by a bad beat. Meaning that you got unlucky. Or it can be sparked by getting bluffed and getting mad at your opponent. Or bad luck. Or sometimes you can actually have what’s called winner’s tilt too, where maybe this is what Trump had in picking JD Vance. You have a bunch of things that are going really well. I mean, this election was going about as well as it could for Donald Trump. He’s not a popular guy, yet he had moved ahead in some of the National polls by four or five points. It’s pretty hard to do. I mean, he’s lost the popular vote twice.” “Trump feels very on tilt to me. When you think about him, for Donald Trump, he had been pretty on his message. He was talking a lot about immigration. He was talking a lot about inflation. He was letting it be known that he was thinking about picking Doug Burgum. He seemed to be enjoying this idea that he was — people were longing for a stability They now associated with his presidency rightly or wrongly. They wanted the lower prices back. They don’t like the war in Gaza. They don’t like the war in Ukraine. Maybe Trump is a strong man who can bring it back. And he was kind of playing into that. And since the Harris switch and him beginning to fall in the polls, you feel this old Trump returning. The Trump who goes to Georgia and begins yelling at the governor — the Republican governor — of Georgia. The Trump that goes to the National Association of Black Journalists and begins to talk about how nobody knew Kamala Harris was Black. The Trump who is just trying out attack lines, trying to find something that will work no matter what the kind of cost might be. I mean, your description of him playing emotionally — he’s not listening to anybody right now. He’s flailing.” “And the fact that, according to the reporting, that they weren’t prepared for the eventuality when Joe Biden dropped out was kind of inexcusable. I mean, if you looked at prediction markets, it was immediately a live consideration after the debate. I think they overestimated the degree to which Democrats are a personality cult. I mean, they can be. There was maybe a personality cult around Obama, or Bill Clinton, or things like that. But there wasn’t one around Joe Biden. He was kind of always the candidate of the party. And it was not in the party’s interest any longer to have him as their nominee. And so the Democratic Party is capable and powerful in a way the GOP is not. And they extrapolated from their views to how Democrats would behave and underestimated the smart decision that the party was capable of making.” “I talked to Republicans about this, about why they weren’t more prepared, and one thing I heard from them is they just didn’t think Biden was going to step aside. I mean, if you’re a party that has completely bent the knee to Donald Trump and is now years and years into not being able to convince Donald Trump of functionally anything, it might shift your sense of how people in power, particularly the apex of power, act. It’s one reason — this is a place where you and I’ve been a little bit different — I’ve been more on the side of Joe Biden did something difficult that deserves praise. Because — and I think you see this in how Republicans were thinking — leaders just often don’t do this. The kind of personality that gets you to that point is not the kind of personality that leaves power gracefully. It’s why, when people are talking about dictators, there’s endlessly this talk of how to create golden parachutes for dictators. You’re dealing with a kind of human being that has told a story about their own essentialness. Going back to your point about Elon Musk and feeling like you’re the main character of global life — particularly you’ve become the American president — you sort of were the main character of global life for a while — that does something to you. Those people don’t give it up easily.” “No. And if you look at the history of — before there was whichever Amendment it was, 20-something Amendment —” “22.” “— that prevents you from running for more than two terms, it was pretty routine for candidates to tease — Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and wanted a third term. Harry Truman had like a 32 percent approval rating and wanted a third term, second full term. Old men are often pretty stubborn. And I think the most interesting thing is that if Harris wins — or maybe comes close, but mostly if she wins — what that will say about the primary system, right? Maybe we should go back to giving a larger role to superdelegates for example.” “I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk — in gambling, but in other things. You talk about pain tolerance. You talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips. You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics too. I mean, there is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. I see it on this podcast. There are times when a question is physically uncomfortable for me to ask another person. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.” “So human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high-stress moments. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you saw someone’s life in danger or your own life was in danger — you know, I was in LA in January, and there was an armed robbery outside the place where I was trying to get just a cup of coffee. And time kind of slows down a little bit in situations like that. And you don’t realize how stressed out you are until I texted my partner and be like, LOL, almost got shot, ha, ha. And I was kind of like, oh yeah, I was too cool for school. And then an hour later, I’m getting some tacos or something and I almost break down. It’s like, oh my god, it could have gone really, really badly. Public speaking also triggers this for people because objectively it’s a pretty high-stakes thing. If you’re playing a $1 or $2 poker game, and it’s nothing for you, your body will when you’re playing a $100-200 game where it really matters — you will just know. You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally kind of ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects. But actually, your body is providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these kind of short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally, because it’s very related to being ‘in the zone’ like Michael Jordan used to talk about, or golfers, or hockey goalies, or whatever else — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill. Because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not.” “How much is that, in your view, in your experience, learnable, and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence some people have and some people don’t?” “I think it’s actually quite learnable. It’s a little bit like if you’ve been on mushrooms before [LAUGHS]: then you kind of learn, oh, this is the part of the brain that is — this is the things that look a little funny when you’re on mushrooms, right? You can kind of maybe tone it up or tone it down a little bit. So it’s very much like that. I mean, it’s terrifying the first time it happens. But when you start to recognize it, and you kind of make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit, and take your time, and try to execute the basics, it’s not as much about trying to be a hero. It’s about trying to execute the basics. Because when everyone’s losing their shit, if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you’re ahead of 95 percent of people. And keeping bandwidth free for dealing with emergency situations, that will take you very far.” “It’s funny, because that feels to me like a very important question that is hard to test in politics.” “Yeah.” “People have to make profound decisions under incredibly high stress. And we have simulacrums of it. The debate, in a way, is a simulacrum of that. Very, very high stress. Speeches on teleprompters are not very good analogies for that. But this question of how good is a person at that moment —” “I mean —” “— how do you evaluate that?” “I mean, Trump, after getting shot, kind of performed very well. And I think, again, the Harris moment of leaping right into action to secure the nomination also has to be seen as very good performance under stress. And Biden’s failure under stress — I mean, he went to some kind of spiral of some kind or another, physical, or mental, or whatever else. So those kind of three pivotal moments — the assassination, the debate, and then Harris seizing the nomination in record time — speak to the difference in performance. And that’s why the two of them, Harris and Trump, are still candidates for the presidency, and Biden is not.” “I was just reading Nancy Pelosi’s new book before I was reading yours, because I just had her on the show, and she talks about how, above all, she says, that what a Speaker of the House needs is intuition. They need to be able to act. And she says that the key thing is you have to act fast. Because every moment you don’t act, your options are diminishing. And I ended up thinking, then, when reading your book, of it. Because what she was describing is quite, I think, for her, physical. Like something in her knows how to act and is unafraid to act in those moments. The thing that was crucial about her, I think, in this process, inside the Democratic Party of getting Biden out, is she was willing to act in public to take the pressure of that in ways very few people were. And somebody had to be doing that in public to create space for others to be considering it in private. But you look at her career, and she has this sort of intuitive capability to know when to move. And there’s something in it that I don’t think she can explain how she does it, but it makes her a fascinating leader. People believe that she will act. And she will act because something in her knows when to act, and she’s unafraid.” “Yeah. So is gut instinct overrated or underrated? Well, it depends on how much experience you have, right? Poker players have — because now poker is actually kind of a solved game. There are computer solvers they’re called that spit out this very complicated solution to poker. Hard to execute in practice, but it’s technically speaking a solved game. However, the best poker players can have uncannily good instincts based on reading physical tells, just the kind of vibe someone gives off. And if — you know, I played a lot of Poker and writing this book, more live poker than I have in the past, and you develop a sixth sense. Not all the time. It helps if you’re well rested. But you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has a strong hand or something. Like they’re glowing green or something almost sometimes. And you can test it, because you can say, I know that I’m supposed to fold this hand here. It’s a little bit too weak to call against a bluff. But I just have a sense that he’s bluffing. And lo and behold, you’re right more often than you’d think — more often than you need to be to make that call correct based on the odds that you’re getting from the pot. So if Nancy Pelosi has decades and decades of experience in politics and reading the moves of how the coalition is moving, I mean, that’s something where intuition probably plays a pretty good role. And also the fact that being willing to work with incomplete information — I mean, I don’t know how much longer Biden could have — maybe they could have run out the clock [LAUGHS]: potentially.” “Oh, they 100 percent could of. That day when he sent that letter to congressional Democrats and said, I’m not leaving — this conversation is over, stop trying to overturn the will of the primary voters — I was getting congressional Democrats telling me, this is done. It’s a fait accompli. He’s quelled the rebellion. It looked to me like he had. I was talking to other people. They said, 10 percent shot he’s out. Nancy Pelosi goes on ‘Morning Joe’ two days later and says, we’re really looking forward to him making a decision. And I asked her about it. And I said, what was happening? I mean, he had just sent that letter. And she said, yeah, but that was just a letter.” “Yeah.” “I didn’t accept the letter as anything but a letter. I mean, there are some people who were unhappy with the letter. Let me say it a different — some said that some people were unhappy with the letter. I’ll put it in somebody else’s mouth. Because it was a — I don’t think — it didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me.” “I’m like, oh, you read a bluff.” “So I think Nancy Pelosi might be pretty good at poker.” “Good place to end. Always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience.” “So one book is pertinent to the discussion that we had a moment ago, which is called ‘The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.’ It’s written by John Coates, who is an academic economist who then became a derivatives trader, I think, for Deutsche Bank in New York and found out that the traders that he studied were really weird. Like these traders would have strange physical and mental stress responses to the market rising or falling. And he was so fascinated by it that he went back and became a neuroscientist and basically did studies of traders. So you test the testosterone of like an options trader or a guy who works at a hedge fund and see how it varies from day to day and correlates with performance. So yeah, so he studies the physical responses of risk-takers, and the book is called ‘The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.’ So that’s one recommendation. Number two, in a totally different direction, ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ by Richard Rhodes. We didn’t talk as much about some of the AI stuff today, but at the end of the book there’s a pretty long, elaborate comparison between the Manhattan Project and the building of these large language models that some people think could be potentially very dangerous. And nuclear weapons are, I think, a pivot point in human history, and this book is kind of the best history of that. The third is called ‘Addiction by Design,’ by Natasha Schüll. And Natasha is an NYU anthropologist who studied Las Vegas as her thesis basically. She did a lot of reporting just about the properties of slot machines, and how addictive they are, and about the kind of casino gambling industry in general. And of course, she draws metaphors between that and the rest of society.” “Nate Silver, thank you very much.” “Thank you, Ezra.” [THEME MUSIC]

The last I looked, your model has Kamala Harris winning the election at around 52 percent — it might be a little different today. But this has been an unusual election. How much stock do you put in your model right now?

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