Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Geography B (1GB0) · Spec 6 and 6-urban
Fieldwork: dynamic urban 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.
- Urban enquiries often use environmental quality scores, pedestrian counts, land-use surveys and questionnaires. Scoring is subjective, so a second person scoring the same street tests reliability.
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.
- Sampling strategy
- How you choose where or who to measure: random, systematic or stratified.
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.
Free practice questions
7 questions, 11 marks. Answer, then press Check. The marking guide explains how the marks are worked out. Nothing is saved.
- Question 1 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
A student ticks a recording sheet for each shop type seen in a street, then draws a pie chart of the totals. Which step is presenting the data?
- Question 2 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
A class scores a street's environmental quality and a second group scores the same street on the same day. Their totals are almost the same. What does this show best?
- Question 3 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
A student found that 9 of 12 people asked said the area felt safe. Which change fixes a named weakness of that method?
- Question 4 · Multiple choice[1 mark]
Census 2021 counted a usual resident population of 59,597,300 in England and Wales. A student's questionnaire asked 40 people on one street. Which statement is correct?
- Question 5 · Fill the gaps[2 marks]
Choosing sites at regular intervals is ___ sampling; choosing them by chance is ___ sampling.
Word bank: stratified · random · systematic
- Question 6 · Sort into groups[3 marks]
Sort each source into primary or secondary data.
Your own pedestrian count
A questionnaire you handed out
Census 2021 figures
- Question 7 · Choose more than one[2 marks]
Which TWO are data collection methods?
Choose 2.