What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0460 Geography papers and filtered to environmental risks of economic development. 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 environmental risks of economic development, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Naming a whole country as the area. Two separate mark schemes say the location must be smaller than a country. "China" is capped at 5. "The Pearl River Delta manufacturing zone" is not.
- Naming only one place on a global warming or desertification question. The double cap holds you at 6 out of 7. Name two.
- Naming a place on the Oct/Nov 2024 style question that asks for named examples of economic activities. There the mark scheme says place names do not count, and it wants factories, transport, deforestation, grazing, rice paddies or fracking.
- Explaining causes when the stem says describe the damage. The Oct/Nov 2020 mark scheme warns about exactly this.
- Writing "damages the ecosystem" and stopping. The mark scheme prints that as too vague. Say which organism, and what happens to it.
- Writing "enhances the greenhouse effect" as the whole explanation. Also printed as too vague. Give the chain: gases build up, form a layer, the Sun's rays pass through, heat is trapped and cannot escape.
- Writing only about air and water pollution. The syllabus names four types and a related mark scheme caps development on each type, so noise and visual pollution are free marks that most candidates leave on the table.
- Writing only about the natural environment. The syllabus statement says "the natural environment and people", and the questions do too.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Environmental risks of economic development revision notes.