A-Level Geography: Human

Human geography is marked on who gains, who loses, and what the evidence actually supports. So the dockland question does not ask whether regeneration is good: it states that the tax base rose and that original residents left, and asks which process that describes. The question about a town presented one way in a tourist brochure and another way in a resident's diary is about the gap between a curated representation and a lived experience, which is a distinction the changing-places papers return to constantly.

Two questions are arithmetic, and both are built around the base you divide by. A dependency ratio divides dependents by the working-age population, not by the whole population — the tempting wrong answer here is the one that uses ten million instead of seven. A percentage change divides by the starting value, not the final one, and the three wrong options are the first year alone, the second year alone, and the change measured against the wrong end.

The rest covers what a transnational corporation's location decision turns on when tax holidays are among its stated requirements, which flow is described when workers rather than money cross a border, the difference between a place's internal characteristics and the outside forces acting on it, the thermal mechanism behind an urban heat island, and what the Human Development Index cannot show — averages hide the distribution beneath them, and three of that question's options are things the index does in fact cover.

Every city, firm and country in these scenarios is invented and the questions say so, so nothing rests on a fact about a real place that could date.

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• Identify what a transnational corporation's location decision turns on from its stated requirements
• Classify a described movement as a flow of capital, labour, goods or information
• Distinguish a place's endogenous characteristics from the exogenous forces acting on it
• Separate a curated representation of a place from a lived experience of it
• Explain the mechanism behind an urban heat island, and identify gentrification by its distributional effects
• Calculate a dependency ratio and a percentage change using the correct base
• Say what a table of figures does and does not support
• State what the Human Development Index conceals, and what it does in fact measure

The invented country of 'Isola' has a population of 10 million. The number of people aged 0 to 14 is 2 million, the number aged 65 and over is 1 million, and the working-age population aged 15 to 64 is 7 million. What is the dependency ratio for Isola? — one of ten questions written for this set.