GCSE Business
Questions
& Answers

Not a bank of questions with the answers printed underneath. The three banded responses are the starting point, not the output: what follows each one is the discriminator, named out loud, then the questions you actually ask to move a student from the first answer to the last, then the mark scheme that shows what each line was worth.

Business is a subject where the marks are lost to arithmetic and to context, so the book is built against both. Two companies run through it: a bicycle shop owned by two partners, and a private limited company making kitchen furniture to order. Every derived figure about them is computed from their inputs when the book is built rather than typed on a page. Revenue, contribution, break-even, both margins, the average rate of return and a six-month cash-flow forecast all fall out of the same data, which is why the number on page nine is the number on page fifty-two.

That machinery earns its place. In an early draft the two views of one company’s year (its profit and loss on one side, its break-even data on the other) implied profits of £222,000 and £844,000. Every figure matched the table it came from, so every check passed. A checker that validates figures against their own table cannot find a contradiction between two tables, and the book now asserts that the two reconcile on every build.

Every calculation the subject content names is worked at least once, and every one is step marked, with each step saying what it still earns when the figure coming into it is wrong. One rule governs them all and it is stated plainly: error carried forward rescues a wrong number and never a wrong method. A candidate who divides by the wrong figure at step two keeps the marks for steps one and three; a candidate who divides fixed costs by price instead of contribution keeps none, because everything after it answers a different question.

75% of the marks are set in one of the two named companies, with a floor enforced on every build, because an answer that is correct about business in general fills the knowledge row of a mark scheme and leaves the application rows empty. That is what caps a fluent answer at four out of nine. The last ten pages are about exactly that student. The assessment objectives are computed from the hundred questions each time the book is built, and the build stops if they fall outside what the regulator sets. No board is named anywhere.

Written to

The GCSE subject content for business published by the Department for Education — including the calculations it names in full — and the assessment objectives set by Ofqual at 35% knowledge, 35% application and 30% analysis and evaluation

Intended for

business teachers and heads of department. Used with a class, not a student revision guide

Extent

115 pages · 7 sections