Part 2 Map Labelling: Follow the Speaker's Feet

Part 2 is a monologue: one person — a guide, a teacher or a volunteer — describes a place. There is nobody to talk back: no one asks questions and the speaker never stops. In a map labelling question you see a plan of a building, a park or a town centre on the screen; the places are marked with the letters A-I, and as you listen you must work out which letter matches each item in the list.

Why this format is considered difficult:

• The speaker keeps moving — you have to "walk" along with them, or two sentences later you are lost on the map.
• A listener who is facing the wrong way will pin the place on the wrong letter, even when they heard the place name correctly.
• The audio plays only once, and the pace of Part 2 is faster than Part 1.

The good news: the map is in front of you before the audio starts, and direction vocabulary is a limited set that you can learn completely. This strategy gives you an exact method for reading the map, choosing anchors and following the speaker's route.

The simplest reason for losing marks on a map question is a vocabulary gap: if your brain starts searching the moment it hears north-east, you are already two seconds behind. This list has to become an automatic reflex:

And the most important subtlety — a map has two reference systems:

1. Tied to the plan: north, at the top of the plan, on the left of the map — these are the sides you see on the screen.
2. Tied to the speaker's route: on your left as you come in, just past reception on the right — these depend on the direction the speaker is walking.

opposite needs special care: it does not mean "next to" but "face to face", while diagonally opposite means across the centre, on the diagonal. Misunderstanding these two expressions can sink every question that follows.

Use the preview time you are given before the audio to "anchor" the map. In practice, you can set aside 20-30 seconds for this step; this is not a fixed official time limit for every task:

1. Find the entrance. entrance, reception, main gate, front door — the entrance is a possible starting point; confirm the position stated in the recording.
2. Pick two or three fixed objects. Places that are already named on the map — Car Park, Lake, Main Road — are your anchors: the movement sentences are given in relation to these fixed points.
3. See the routes as arrows. The lines of a path, corridor or river — the speaker walks along these arrows.

This is how the anchor technique works: in the sentence The café is just past the fountain, on your left, if fountain is already written on the map, you do no calculation at all for café — you simply place it at the point "just past the fountain, on the left". With each new sentence you don't rebuild the whole plan; you only take a step from the last anchor.

The most common mistake: listeners work out "left" and "right" from their own point of view (for example, looking from the bottom of the plan upwards). If the speaker is standing at the entrance looking inwards, their left may be your right. Remember: use the speaker's viewpoint for route-based left/right, and the map's compass for north/south.