IGCSE Geography — Core: Reading the World from Data and Maps

Knowledge, application and the use of figures — in that order of what students actually lose. A Core answer that recites 'a high birth rate' has written nothing; the same answer that says 'the wide base, with the 0-14 group at about 40% of the population, shows a high birth rate and a young dependent population' has used the resource, and that is the difference between the two marks. Almost every 'describe' and 'complete' question in the paper can be answered this way: state the pattern, then the number that proves it. The second habit is answering the verb that is printed. Describe says say what you see, with no reason offered; explain says give the cause, and a description earns nothing inside it; suggest says use the resource plus your own knowledge, which is why an answer that ignores the resource cannot reach the top band even when its geography is right. Count the command words when you plan: a six-part question usually wants two marks of pattern, two of reason and two of the local detail the resource supplies.

Population questions are asked through pyramids, tables and dot maps, so prepare the shapes and what each one means. A broad base with tapering sides is high birth rates and a young population, with the pressure on schools and the dependency ratio that follows; a narrow base with a bulging middle is falling births and an ageing load, which is the pension and health-care question in waiting. Migration is asked as push and pull, and the marks come from pairing them with a named flow — rural to urban within the country, or a corridor between countries — rather than from a list of reasons anyone could write about anywhere. Settlement is the same discipline at a smaller scale: the pattern (nucleated, linear, dispersed) and the reason in the site — a crossing point, a road junction, a water source; the land-use model in a town, with the central business district, the peri-urban edge where the town has recently swallowed farmland; and urban growth with its two consequences, one to manage (housing, water, waste, transport) and one to compare across a named lower-income and higher-income city. For every idea, have one city you can name with a figure attached, and the paper stops being a memory test.