Geographical Skills | OCR A-Level Geography (H481)

Geographical Skills

115 questions
7 subtopics
Examined across all three papers
Component 01, Component 02 and Component 03

Geographical Skills is examined in all three written papers, Component 01, Physical systems, Component 02, Human interactions, and Component 03, Geographical debates, each of which carries marks for geographical skills, and the same skills are used in the Independent Investigation.

It covers geographical data, its types and the ethics of using it, collecting data: sampling, measurement error and digital devices, qualitative methods, sources and drawing conclusions, measures of central tendency and dispersion, correlation, lines of best fit and Spearman's rank, significance tests: chi-squared, Mann-Whitney U and the t-test and climate graphs, maps and graphical techniques.

Sample questions from Geographical Skills

Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.

Geographical data, its types and the ethics of using it

Give an example of crowd-sourced mapping being used after a disaster.

Show the answer
After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, volunteers used the Ushahidi platform to map text messages sent by survivors and used OpenStreetMap to map damaged roads and camps, helping aid agencies locate where help was needed.
Geographical data, its types and the ethics of using it

Explain one socio-political implication of the categories used to collect data about communities.

Show the answer
Whoever designs a survey decides which groups exist, so a community with no category of its own becomes statistically invisible and finds it harder to claim funding or services, which is why Gypsy or Irish Traveller was added to the census of England and Wales only in 2011.
Collecting data: sampling, measurement error and digital devices

Describe stratified sampling.

Show the answer
The population is divided into sub-groups and each is sampled in proportion to its share of the whole, so if 60% of an alluvial fan is gravel and 40% is sand, 60% of the sample points are placed on the gravel.
Collecting data: sampling, measurement error and digital devices

Give three ways to reduce measurement error in fieldwork.

Show the answer
Take repeated readings and use their mean, check and calibrate equipment before use, and have the same trained person take each type of measurement throughout the survey.
Qualitative methods, sources and drawing conclusions

What is coding in qualitative research?

Show the answer
Coding is labelling passages of an interview transcript, a text or an image with short codes for the themes they express, such as fear of crime or loss of community, so that recurring ideas can be identified and compared.
Qualitative methods, sources and drawing conclusions

How can repeat photography be used as evidence of landscape change?

Show the answer
A historical photograph is taken again from exactly the same viewpoint, so changes such as the retreat of a glacier snout or the loss of a cliff-top path can be compared directly.
Measures of central tendency and dispersion

Define the range, and state its main weakness.

Show the answer
The range is the difference between the highest and lowest values, and because it uses only those two figures a single extreme value distorts it.
Measures of central tendency and dispersion

How can the standard deviation of clast size distinguish till from outwash?

Show the answer
Till is unsorted, so its clast sizes have a high standard deviation, whereas meltwater sorts outwash by size and gives a much lower standard deviation.

The 7 subtopics

One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.

Subtopic	What it covers	Questions
Geographical data, its types and the ethics of using it	Recall questions on what makes data geographical, quantitative and qualitative, primary and secondary, and numerical and spatial data, crowd-sourced mapping after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, big data and its limits, informed consent, anonymity and fine-scale mapping, the socio-political effects of data categories, judging reliability, and misleading axes, start dates, percentages and the ecological fallacy.	18
Collecting data: sampling, measurement error and digital devices	Recall questions on why geographers sample, random, systematic and stratified sampling, point, line and area sampling, sample size and pilot studies, systematic and random error, accuracy and precision, the Powers roundness scale, reducing measurement error, collecting data with smartphones and their limits, and the benefits and pitfalls of geographical information systems.	17
Qualitative methods, sources and drawing conclusions	Recall questions on structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews and their strengths and limits, open and closed questions, oral histories, coding qualitative data and checking its reliability, purposive and snowball sampling, analysing textual sources, repeat photography and annotation, triangulation, well-evidenced conclusions, and building an extended geographical argument.	17
Measures of central tendency and dispersion	Recall questions on the mean, median and mode with a worked example, when each average is most useful, the range and interquartile range, standard deviation and a worked calculation, telling till from outwash by clast size spread, dispersion diagrams, box and whisker plots, comparing sites with equal means, and skewed data.	15
Correlation, lines of best fit and Spearman's rank	Recall questions on positive and negative correlation, correlation and causation, lines of best fit, residuals and extrapolation, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, its formula and tied ranks, worked calculations for an outwash plain and an alluvial fan, null hypotheses, significance at the 0.05 level and critical values, and why small samples are unreliable.	15
Significance tests: chi-squared, Mann-Whitney U and the t-test	Recall questions on the chi-squared test, its formula and conditions, a worked corrie aspect calculation, degrees of freedom and critical values, the non-parametric Mann-Whitney U test with worked pebble data, the t-test with worked infiltration data, choosing between Spearman's rank, chi-squared, Mann-Whitney U and the t-test, and non-significant results.	16
Climate graphs, maps and graphical techniques	Recall questions on constructing and reading climate graphs, worked temperature range and rainfall totals for a tundra station, rainforest and tundra graphs compared, the limits of climate graphs, rose, kite and triangular diagrams, logarithmic scales, isoline, proportional symbol and flow line maps, a worked gradient, drawing cross-sections, and vertical exaggeration.	17

Geographical Skills is 115 of the 3,740 questions in the guide.Get the guide, £7

How the guide is worked

Answering a question from memory stores it far better than reading the answer again. The guide runs that as a fixed procedure on one subtopic at a time, about twenty minutes a session.

Step 1 · Closed book
Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.
Step 2 · Open book
Go back to the top. Read each printed answer and write it out in full, including the ones you had right.
Step 3 · Closed book again
Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.

Read the full method, the return schedule and the research behind it.