tips for geography gcse!!

hi, ive been inspired by another thread on here, and would like to give some advice for geography as someone who got 9s all through out year 10 and 11, including in my actual gcses!!

- you do NOT have to learn everything about your case studies, i got by with learning around 3 case study facts that i felt confident i could talk about ,, i always find this is the part that people get the most overwhelmed with, you are not expected to remember everything about a case study, just make sure you have specific information about that and figures to help support your answer, even if its an easy one to remember (e.g 3,300 people were displaced is enough information for the examiner to know that you know what you're talking about, as long as you have more facts specific to the case study and evaluate it properly)

- you dont have to overthink evaluation, obviously if you can and have the time to do a detailed evaluation, awesome!! but even saying something like "This resulted in less tax being paid to the government, which reduced funding for new infrastructure development, therefore people recieved poor education. This lead to an overall knock-on effect towards the country's literacy rate" etc etc is enough to get you those marks.

particularly in the social side of geography, you want to link your answers to the development indicators, as thats an easy way to show off a broader understanding.

- make sure you know what the marking points are, and practise ensuring you include them in all of your answers. for example, i know many schools use PEEL (point evidence explain link) paragraphs, which are a good guide to be able to mention all the points required for the marks, however don't feel limited by this structure, or any other structure. when i was in year 11, once i was confident that i knew what to write to get the marks, i deviated from the structure as that allowed me to write more consisely. NOW this wont work for everyone, but i want you to be assured that as long as you know what youre doing, dont feel like you have to stick to the structure.

one structural change i would reccomend to more people, however is to put your linking statements throughout your paragraphs, for example:

"This resulted in less tax being paid to the government, which reduced funding for new infrastructure development, therefore people recieved poor education. This lead to an overall knock-on effect towards the country's literacy rate. The reduction of literacy rate also resulted in less people in work, which further reduces the taxes paid and causes a multiplier effect on the decline of the economy."

here, the extra link inbetween allowed me to go more in deph about the impacts of the impacts, which displays much more of the information you have.

- quality over quantity, please practise writing paragraphs no matter how boring it might be, nobody likes it i know BUT practise will make you quicker nd better at writing them and you will be needing that time in the exam. if you cannot write too long of paragraphs in the exam time, dont,, just do what you can that will get the most marks.

- if you dont know something, theres no harm in making something up.

NOW you should only really do this if you are absolutely stumped on a question, writing something is better than writing nothing. for example, i did this in one of my mocks that asked about new technology in lics, my mind went blank and i wrote about aid organisations providing portable stoves to populations in lics and although i wasnt exactly right, i still got some marks because i wrote something, and it was on topic and well evaluated.

- never leave multiple choice questions blank, its so easy to just put a random letter, you have a 25 % chance of being right.

more along the physical geography side of things,,,

(im not as good at this side so pls dont flame me lol)

- same sort of things apply with paragraph writing and questions etc.

- avoid going down the route of climate change/global warming as your main point.

"One disadvantage of such and such is that it contributes to climate change" is vague, climate change is also natural

"One disadvantage of such and such is that it contributes to global warming" is better, but hard to evaluate past that

"One disadvantage of such and such is that it releases greenhouse gasses when used, this contributes to global warming as greenhouse gasses absorb heat from the sun." this is good, but can still be better through mentioning that this only will contribute to global warming at a LARGE scale. one co2 molecule wont cause anything, but billions and billions of co2 molecules will.

- dont feel scared when you get given a question you dont know how to structure, like "explain how this tectonic plate will interact with that tectonic plate", you can do a step to step of the plate boundary shown and that will be fine!!

like i said, physical geography is something im less interested in, but if you have any questions about anything around gcse geography, whether or not its mentioned here ill be happy to answer them to the best of my ability!!