Look inside the AQA GCSE Geography guide (8035)
Guide overview All 20 topics Sample questions Papers and weighting Look inside Questions and answers
Look inside the AQA GCSE Geography guide
Questions for a subtopic print together. The answers for that section print after them. Nothing else is in the file.
- Climate Change26
- Coastal Landscapes in the UK71
- Cold Environments54
- Ecosystems26
- Energy64
- Food54
- Geographical Applications: Fieldwork Enquiry105
- Geographical Skills251
- Glacial Landscapes in the UK67
- Hot Deserts52
- Natural Hazards16
- Resource Management45
- and 8 more
- How are waves at sea created, and what three factors control how large they become?
- What is the difference between the swash and the backwash of a breaking wave?
- What are the characteristics of a constructive wave?
- What does a destructive wave look like, and what effect does it have on a beach?
- What is mechanical weathering on a coast, and which type is most common?
- How does chemical weathering break down rock at the coast?
- What is mass movement, and how does sliding differ from slumping?
- What is a rock fall, and what does the fallen material form at the foot of the cliff?
- How does hydraulic power erode a cliff?
- They are created by the wind blowing across the surface of open water, and their size depends on how strong the wind is, how long it blows for and the fetch it has crossed.
- The swash is the water rushing up the beach once the wave has broken, and the backwash is the water draining back down the beach under gravity.
- It is low and long and breaks gently, and its strong swash and weak backwash push more material up the beach than they drag away, so the beach is built up.
- It is tall and steep and breaks often, and its weak swash and powerful backwash drag material back down the beach, so the beach is worn away.
- It is the breaking up of rock into fragments with no change to its chemistry, most often freeze-thaw, where water in a crack freezes, expands and prises the rock apart.
- Slightly acidic rainwater and salty spray react with minerals in the rock and dissolve them, so rocks such as chalk and limestone are slowly eaten away and weakened.
- Mass movement is the downhill movement of loose rock, soil and mud under gravity, common where waves have undercut the base of a cliff. In a slide the material moves straight downslope as one mass, while in a slump it rotates along a curved surface so the top of the block tilts backwards.
- Fragments loosened by weathering break away from a steep rock face and drop to its base, where they build up as a sloping pile of loose scree.
- Breaking waves force air and water into cracks in the rock under great pressure, and as the water pulls back the trapped air expands again, widening the crack until pieces are blasted out.
- Describe the shape of a corrie.
- Explain how a corrie is formed.
- What is an arête, and how does one form?
- How is a pyramidal peak produced?
- What are truncated spurs?
- Describe the cross section of a glacial trough and say how it was cut.
- What is a ribbon lake, and give two ways one can form.
- Why does a hanging valley end high above the floor of the main valley?
- What is an erratic?
- It is a deep, rounded hollow cut into a mountainside, with a steep back wall and side walls and a raised rock lip at its opening, often holding a small lake called a tarn.
- Snow gathers in a sheltered hollow and compacts into ice, which deepens the hollow by abrasion and plucking as it turns on rotational slip, while freeze-thaw steepens the wall above it.
- It is a narrow, knife-edged ridge, formed where two corries cut back towards each other until only a thin wall of rock is left between them.
- Three or more corries erode back into the same mountain from different sides, leaving a sharp, pointed summit where their steep back walls meet.
- They are steep, blunt-ended cliffs along the side of a glaciated valley, left where the glacier sliced straight through ridges of land that once jutted out into it.
- It is steep-sided with a wide, flat floor, giving a U shape, and it was cut when a glacier widened, deepened and straightened a valley that a river had made before the ice arrived.
- It is a long, narrow lake lying along the floor of a glaciated valley, formed where the ice gouged a deeper hollow in a band of softer rock, or where a ridge of moraine dams the valley and holds water back.
- Its smaller tributary glacier could not erode as deeply as the far larger glacier in the main valley, so it was left perched above it and its stream now enters as a waterfall.
- It is a boulder whose rock type does not match the local geology, because ice carried it from somewhere else and dropped it as it melted.
- Where in the world are tropical rainforests found?
- Describe the climate of a tropical rainforest.
- Name the four vegetation layers of a rainforest, working upwards from the ground.
- Why is the soil beneath a rainforest thin and infertile even though the vegetation above it is dense?
- How does the forest help to create its own rainfall?
- Explain why clearing an area of rainforest quickly leaves the land unable to support the same vegetation.
- In what ways do indigenous forest people depend on the rainforest?
- How are the leaves of rainforest trees adapted to constant heavy rain?
- What are buttress roots and why do rainforest trees need them?
- In a belt either side of the equator, roughly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn.
- It is hot and wet throughout the year, with rain falling in every month and no real dry season, and temperature changing very little between seasons.
- The forest floor, the shrub or under-canopy layer, the canopy, and the emergent layer of the tallest trees.
- The heavy rain leaches nutrients downwards out of reach of roots, and most of the nutrients are held in the living vegetation and recycled straight back from fallen leaves rather than stored in the soil.
- Trees release large volumes of water vapour by transpiration, which rises and condenses to give heavy convectional downpours, so removing the trees reduces the rain that falls.
- Because the nutrient store was in the trees themselves, once they are gone the rain washes the little that remains out of the exposed soil, so the fertility that fed the forest disappears with it.
- They take their food, building materials, fuel and medicines from it and farm small clearings within it, so damage to the forest removes their way of life.
- They are waxy and have pointed drip tips so water runs off quickly, which stops algae and fungi growing on them and stops the weight of water breaking branches.
- They are wide, flared roots at the base of the trunk that give a very tall tree stability, because the soil is too thin for deep anchoring roots.
questions
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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.
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Step 1 · Closed book
Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.
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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.
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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.
AQA GCSE Geography Active Recall Guide
Every question paired with its answer, ready to work in three passes.