A-Level Geography: Physical

Physical geography is marked on mechanism. Not that deforestation increases flood risk, but why: less canopy means less interception, compacted soil means less infiltration, and water that used to be held reaches the channel faster, so the hydrograph peaks higher and sooner. Every question here asks for that chain rather than for the conclusion.

The feedback question is built to defeat the usual shortcut. One of its four options carries the right label with the wrong mechanism — "positive feedback, as the system restores the original equilibrium" is a contradiction, and a student who has learnt only that melting permafrost is a positive feedback will still get it wrong. Knowing that positive means amplifying rather than beneficial is the whole point.

Elsewhere: which parts of the carbon cycle are stores and which are flows, and why calcium carbonate on the ocean floor is one and diffusion across the sea surface is the other. What a groyne does to the coast downdrift of it, which is where coastal management usually moves a problem rather than removing it. What forms a corrie. Why two magnitude-seven earthquakes kill fifty people and five thousand. Two data questions — a lag time and a percentage change taken against the right base — and one on what the Bradshaw model cannot tell you, where the three wrong options misstate what the model predicts.

Catchments, bays and villages here are invented and the questions say so, so nothing rests on a place-specific fact that may have changed.

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• Trace what a stated change does through a drainage basin, from interception to peak discharge
• Tell a store from a flow in the carbon cycle, and give the mechanism rather than the label
• Identify positive and negative feedback by what the mechanism does, not by what the outcome feels like
• Explain what a groyne does to the coast downdrift of it
• Name the processes that form a corrie
• Explain why two hazards of equal magnitude produce very different death tolls
• Read a lag time off stated hydrograph times and calculate a percentage change against the correct base
• State what the Bradshaw model does not account for

Consider a feedback mechanism where rising global temperatures cause permafrost to melt, releasing methane into the atmosphere, which further increases temperatures. How should this be classified? — one of ten questions written for this set, alongside deforestation and discharge, carbon stores and flows, groynes, corries, hazard impact, hydrograph lag time and the limits of the Bradshaw model.