Free GCSE Geography Questions and Answers

The full-mark answer · 3 marks

Tropical storms form in a belt on either side of the equator, roughly between five and thirty degrees north and south, but not on the equator itself. The main areas are the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, the western Pacific, and the Bay of Bengal. The south Atlantic has almost none.

The full-mark answer · 4 marks

The sea surface must be above roughly twenty-seven degrees to a depth of about fifty metres, because evaporation from it supplies both the water vapour and the latent heat that the storm runs on. The air must be able to rise freely rather than being capped, and the location must lie far enough from the equator for the Coriolis effect to spin the rising column, which is why none form on the equator itself where that effect is zero.

The full-mark answer · 2 marks · 1 + 1

An ecosystem is a community of living organisms interacting with one another and with the non-living components of their environment, such as soil, water and climate. An example of a producer is oak.

The full-mark answer · 4 marks · 2 + 2

Leaves have drip tips and a waxy surface so that the heavy daily rainfall runs off quickly instead of standing on the leaf, where it would allow algae and fungi to grow across the surface and block the light the leaf depends on. Trees grow tall and straight and are supported by buttress roots because the soil is shallow and nutrient-poor: roots cannot descend far, so they spread wide instead to hold a tall trunk upright.

The full-mark answer · 2 marks · 1 + 1

Rockfall, and rotational slumping.

The full-mark answer · 4 marks · 2 + 2

Abrasion erodes the channel itself: sediment carried by the flow is dragged against the bed and banks, scraping material off them, so the channel is deepened and widened. Attrition erodes the load rather than the channel: particles collide with one another as they are transported and break apart, becoming progressively smaller and rounder downstream, which is why bed material at the mouth is fine while material at the source remains angular.

The full-mark answer · 4 marks · 2 + 2

Abrasion occurs where rock fragments held in the base of the ice are dragged across the bedrock, scouring the surface and leaving striations aligned with the direction of ice flow. Plucking occurs where meltwater at the glacier base refreezes into joints in the bedrock, so that as the glacier advances it pulls loose blocks away, leaving a jagged rather than a smooth rock face.

The full-mark answer · 1 mark

Urbanisation is an increase in the proportion of a population living in towns and cities.

The full-mark answer · 2 marks · 1 + 1

The development gap is the difference in levels of development — in wealth, health and quality of life — between the world’s richest and poorest countries.

The full-mark answer · 4 marks

Water surplus follows the equatorial belt and the higher mid-latitudes, including the Amazon and Congo basins, northern Europe, Canada and Russia. Deficit occurs in two belts at around thirty degrees north and south, across north Africa and the Middle East, and in Australia and the south-west United States. The pattern broadly follows global atmospheric circulation, although the largest deficits occur where dense population coincides with low rainfall rather than simply where rainfall is lowest.

The full-mark answer · 2 marks · 1 + 1

Taking readings at fixed intervals gives even coverage of the whole site, so no section is over-represented, and it removes the researcher’s choice of where to sample, which eliminates unconscious bias towards convenient or interesting locations.

The full-mark answer · 6 marks · 3 + 3

The value of a geographical information system is that it holds separate datasets in a shared coordinate space, so they can be overlaid: mapping a modelled flood extent on top of a housing layer identifies not merely how many properties are at risk but precisely which ones, which neither layer could show alone. Because every layer carries attribute data as well as position, that overlay can then be queried — properties at risk whose residents are over seventy-five, for example — so the output is a list that can be acted on rather than a picture to be interpreted.