A-Level Geography: Global Systems and Governance

This topic is marked on who gains and who loses, and it is lost by candidates who arrive with a verdict on globalisation instead of an account of a mechanism. So every question here states a flow, gives the figures, and asks what follows.

It starts with arithmetic that makes the point better than an essay would. A country sells its coffee unroasted at two pounds a kilogram; the same coffee, roasted and packed somewhere else, reaches a shop at eight. The grower has a quarter, and the way to a larger share is to do more of the processing — not to grow more beans, which is the option offered to anyone who reads the problem as one of volume.

Then dependence, treated as exposure rather than as a failing: a country earning most of its foreign exchange from one crop when the world price drops, where diversification spreads risk and does not confer control over prices. A transnational corporation arrives with higher wages, real training, a five-year tax holiday and full repatriation of profits, and the answer has to hold both halves — the wages and the skills stay, the tax and the profit do not, and neither "investment is always good" nor "it is simply extraction" survives contact with the case. There is also a quieter trap: a tax holiday is a waiver, not a deferral, so nothing arrives later.

Migration is set out at both ends of the same flow, filling a labour shortage in one country while costing another its trained workers and sending money back to it — different consequences in the two places, from one movement. Remittances and aid are then separated by who decides how the money is spent and what each is exposed to.

The governance half is about why agreement is hard. A fishery outside anyone's jurisdiction, where each fleet gains by taking more and all lose if all do, is the classic commons problem, and the question asks why an agreement without monitoring does not solve it. A treaty binds those who sign it and one significant state stays outside, which shows the limit sovereignty places on global governance without making the treaty worthless — the answer that it is worthless is there for anyone who overcorrects.

The last three: an income figure beside low life expectancy and schooling, where a composite measure is broader rather than simply more accurate; a country whose export price falls while its import price rises, which is a decline in the terms of trade and not a moral judgement; and a global city beside a rural region in the same country, which makes globalisation a pattern with causes rather than a stage everywhere eventually reaches.

Every country, city, firm and figure described is invented. No real place, company or organisation is named, and no statistic is attributed to a real body. Nothing is reproduced from any exam board specification, past paper or mark scheme.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Work out a producer's share of a final price and say what would change it
• Treat dependence on one export as exposure, and state what diversification does and does not fix
• Weigh a transnational investment on both sides, naming what stays and what leaves
• Give the consequences of one migration flow separately at each end
• Distinguish remittances from aid by who decides and what each is exposed to
• Explain why a shared resource without monitoring is over-used
• State the limit sovereignty places on a treaty without declaring the treaty worthless
• Say what an income figure misses and what a composite measure adds
• Read a terms of trade movement, and describe globalisation as uneven rather than sequential

Ten invented places and flows: coffee at two pounds a kilogram and eight in the shop, a country earning most of its exports from one crop, a factory with a five-year tax holiday, workers moving between two countries, remittances beside a donor's aid, a tuna stock nobody owns, a treaty one state declined, a country with high income and low life expectancy, minerals falling while machinery rises, and a finance hub beside a rural region in the same country. Twelve flashcards carry the vocabulary — commodity chain, value added, export dependence, profit repatriation, remittance, brain drain, global commons, terms of trade, interdependence, composite indicator, uneven development.