Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Geography B (1GB0) · Spec 6 and 6-rural
Fieldwork: changing rural areas
Read the notes, then try the questions. Each one is marked the moment you press Check, and shows the right answer and why.
Key ideas
- You study two fieldwork enquiries: one from coasts or rivers, and one from urban or rural. They must be outside the school grounds, and in the exam they are set in a UK context.
- An enquiry runs in stages: question or hypothesis, planning and risk assessment, collecting data, presenting, analysing, concluding and evaluating.
- Primary data is collected by you. Secondary data is collected by others. Quantitative data is numbers. Qualitative data is descriptive.
- Rural enquiries often count services, survey residents and compare settlements of different sizes. A good enquiry question is focused, comparative and testable.
Key terms
- Primary data
- Data you collect yourself, such as your own counts or questionnaire answers.
- Secondary data
- Data someone else collected, such as census figures, maps or Environment Agency records.
- Quantitative data
- Data in numbers, such as widths, speeds and counts.
- Qualitative data
- Data in words or pictures, such as views, field sketches and photographs.
- Enquiry question
- A focused question your fieldwork can answer, such as how access to services varies between settlements of different sizes.
Common mistakes
- Mixing up accuracy and reliability. Accuracy is how close a measurement is to the true value. Reliability is whether results are repeatable and representative.
- Saying the sample was small and stopping. Say what effect it had, for example that 12 people cannot represent a whole town.
- Calling a theory such as Bradshaw or Power's index a method. A theory is used to interpret results. A method is how you collected them.
Exam tip
Paper 2 Section C is worth 18 marks for each option you answer, and it mixes questions on your own fieldwork with questions on a new situation shown in the paper. For Evaluate or Assess, give strengths and weaknesses of your methods, say what effect each had on your results, and reach a conclusion. Make sure you have your own fieldwork notes ready.
Free practice questions
7 questions, 12 marks. Answer, then press Check. The marking guide explains how the marks are worked out. Nothing is saved.
- Question 1 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
Which of these is a way of recording data in the field, rather than presenting it afterwards?
- Question 2 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
A pupil counts the services in a village on Monday and again on Tuesday, and gets the same total both times. Which word best describes this result?
- Question 3 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
Which is the most suitable enquiry question for a rural investigation that compares settlements?
- Question 4 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
Which method gives quantitative data in a rural investigation?
- Question 5 · Fill the gaps[2 marks]
Data you collect yourself is ___ data; data from the census or a website is ___ data.
Word bank: primary · secondary · qualitative
- Question 6 · Matching[3 marks]
Match each statistic to what it tells you.
- Question 7 · True or false[3 marks]
Decide whether each statement about analysing fieldwork results is true or false.
1. A positive trend on a scattergraph proves the hypothesis.
2. An anomaly is a result that does not fit the general pattern.
3. The range is the highest value minus the lowest value.