Tropical Rainforests | AQA GCSE Geography (8035)
Tropical Rainforests
- 59 questions
- 5 subtopics
- Paper 1
- Paper 1
Tropical Rainforests is examined in Paper 1, Living with the physical environment.
It covers rainforest characteristics, interdependence and adaptations, rainforest biodiversity, deforestation: rates, causes and impacts and the value of rainforests and how they are managed sustainably.
Sample questions from Tropical Rainforests
Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.
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Rainforest characteristics, interdependence and adaptations
Why is the soil beneath a rainforest thin and infertile even though the vegetation above it is dense?
Show the answer
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. -
Rainforest characteristics, interdependence and adaptations
How are the leaves of rainforest trees adapted to constant heavy rain?
Show the answer
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. -
Rainforest biodiversity
What does it mean to say a species is endemic to one rainforest?
Show the answer
It lives naturally there and nowhere else on Earth, so if that forest is destroyed the species is lost completely. -
Rainforest biodiversity
How does hunting and the wildlife trade threaten rainforest species?
Show the answer
Animals are taken for meat, skins and the pet trade faster than they can breed, so their numbers fall even where the forest itself is still standing. -
Deforestation: rates, causes and impacts
What is subsistence farming and how does it clear forest?
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It is farming to feed the farmer's own family, and a plot is cleared by cutting and burning, then abandoned once the poor soil is exhausted, so fresh forest has to be cleared. -
Deforestation: rates, causes and impacts
Give two ways energy development destroys tropical rainforest.
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Building a hydro-electric dam floods a large area of forest behind it, and drilling for oil and gas clears land for wells, pipelines and service roads. -
Deforestation in the Amazon
How does commercial soya farming contribute to Amazon deforestation?
Show the answer
Soya is grown for animal feed and export on huge mechanised farms, often on land first cleared for cattle, which pushes ranchers deeper into the forest. -
Deforestation in the Amazon
How has energy development caused deforestation in the Amazon?
Show the answer
Hydroelectric dams such as Belo Monte on the Xingu River flooded hundreds of square kilometres of land, much of it forest, and displaced the people living there.
The 5 subtopics
One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.
| Subtopic | What it covers | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Rainforest characteristics, interdependence and adaptations | Where tropical rainforests are, their hot wet climate and vegetation layers, thin infertile soils, how the forest makes its own rain, the dependence of indigenous people, and adaptations such as drip tips, buttress roots and climbing animals. | 10 |
| Rainforest biodiversity | Why rainforests hold the greatest biodiversity on land, layered niches and endemic species, their value to medicine, and the threats from specialisation, habitat fragmentation, hunting, the wildlife trade and extinction. | 10 |
| Deforestation: rates, causes and impacts | How deforestation rates are measured and change, subsistence and commercial farming, logging, roads, mining, energy development, settlement and population growth as causes, and economic development, soil erosion and climate change as impacts. | 15 |
| Deforestation in the Amazon | Changing deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon, cattle ranching, soya, logging, the Trans-Amazonian Highway, the Carajás mine and the Belo Monte dam as causes, and the economic gains, soil erosion and carbon release that follow. | 12 |
| The value of rainforests and how they are managed sustainably | The value of rainforests to local people, the world's climate and water, and management through selective logging, replanting, conservation, education, ecotourism, debt reduction and hardwood agreements. | 12 |
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.
Nearby topics
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