By Ms. Johanne Duffy – Geography Teacher Yeats College Galway
The Higher Level paper was a wide ranging, topical and balanced paper with a great choice of questions, which students were delighted with. The paper covered many traditional topics and some key topics had new variations
The Short Questions section, required students to have a thorough knowledge of the course, which, in my opinion, is essential. Some questions were quite specific with some testing questions on coastal and glacial features. Usual favourites also appeared in this section such as landform identification and Aerial photo and Ordnance Survey map skills.
In Physical Geography, students would have been delighted with the question choice with very straight forward questions on landform development and human interaction with surface processes. For the first time, students were asked to discuss the plate tectonics model in detail, but that would not have concerned any well-prepared students.
The Regional section included questions on Primary and Secondary economic activities in a Continental/Sub-Continental region as well as factors influencing the development of tourism in an Irish region.
The Human Elective section contained a nice mix of questions and students would have been at ease with questions on Historic settlement, Overpopulation and urban problems.
In the Options section, students were delighted with the Biome question, ‘Biomes are altered by human activity, which was hoped for and appeared in the popular Geoecology question.
