What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0460 Geography papers and filtered to settlements and service provision. 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.
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What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on settlements and service provision, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Defining sphere of influence as "the area influenced by the service". A mark scheme states explicitly that this earns no credit. Say it is the area people travel from.
- Defining threshold population without the word minimum.
- Answering "why does a high order service have a large sphere of influence" with "it has a large variety of goods". A March 2022 mark scheme scored that zero.
- Explaining why settlement patterns develop without ever naming a pattern. Every point must end in dispersed, linear or nucleated.
- Giving the same settlement pattern twice when a question shows two contrasting areas.
- Describing a relationship without stating its direction. "There is a relationship" earns nothing; "negative relationship, the higher in the hierarchy the fewer the settlements" earns the mark.
- Naming the anomalous settlement instead of saying what is unusual about it. The mark is for "larger than expected", not for the name.
- Answering a comparison question one sided. "Urban areas have hospitals" is half a comparison; add what the rural area has instead.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Settlements and service provision revision notes.