What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0460 Geography papers and filtered to population density and distribution. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
Start practising practice questions →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on population density and distribution, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Defining population density without any reference to area. "Lots of people" is not a density.
- Confusing density with distribution. Density is a number per unit area. Distribution is a pattern.
- Confusing sparsely populated with under-populated, or densely populated with over-populated. They are different ideas and the mark schemes zero the confusion explicitly.
- Describing a distribution without the word uneven, and without any compass direction.
- Ignoring "do not use statistics" or "use statistics" in the command.
- Using a factor that is not visible in the resource when the question says "only".
- Giving four physical reasons on a question that asked about economic factors, or the reverse.
- Answering "why is this area unevenly populated" with reasons why the whole area is empty.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Population density and distribution revision notes.