Great Geography!

Revision Guide for Year 13

2011-12-26T21:41:00.001+00:00

Tectonic Activity and Hazards Revision Guide 2012

When Sea Levels Attack!

2011-11-19T22:13:00.000+00:00

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Kiribati: Pushing against the tide (World Bank)

2011-11-13T21:45:00.004+00:00

As one of the most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change, Kiribati has been undertaking a range of adaptation strategies.

Read the full article from the World Bank here.
Geographers Follow @WorldBank on Twitter!

video platform video management video solutions video player

video platform video management video solutions video player

Stern Review

2011-11-06T21:26:00.003+00:00

In 2006, Sir Nicholas Stern carried out the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change.

The following articles and websites provide some excellent sources to research the findings and recommendations of the report...

Stern Review on the economics of climate change Directgov 30th October 2006
Climate change fight 'can't wait' BBC News 31st October 2006
At-a-glance: The Stern Review BBC News 30th October 2006
So what does the Stern Report mean for the world? The Independent 31st October 2006

Turkey earthquake

2011-10-29T18:17:00.008+01:00

On Sunday 23rd October, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit eastern Turkey. The epicentre of the quake was near the city of Van and Ercis.

Useful links (particularly for Unit 4 A2 Geographers!)...
Turkey earthquake death toll passes 500 The Telegraph, 27th October 2011
Turkey earthquake: Teenage boy found after four days BBC News, 28th October 2011
Boy Pulled Uninjured From Turkey's Quake Wreckage NYTimes, 28th October 2011
Turkey Earthquake: building negligence amounts to murder The Guardian, 26th October 2011 (excellent evaluative article - useful for analysis!)
Turkey Earthquake: Government will accept foreign aid BBC News, 26th October 2011
Photographs from National Geographic Turkey earthquake: Death toll passes 430 BBC News, 25th October 2011
Earthquake Adds Even More Pressure to relations between Turks, Kurds Voice of America, 27th October 2011 (good for Unit 4 'values and attitudes' part of the mark scheme!)
Timeline: major earthquakes in Turkey Reuters, 27th October 2011
A Geoglogist's Eye View of Van Earthquake Scientific American, 27th October 2011 (good explanation of tectonics and causes)
New Insights into the October 2011 Van Earthquake Earthquake-Report (CEDIM), 25th October 2011
Turkey Quake casts spotlight on political fault lines Monsters & Critics, 27th October 2011
After quake, Turkey has proven it can get by on its own Haaretz.com, 29th October 2011
Turkey still not ready for next big one The National, 17th August 2009
The Next Big Quake? Foreign Policy, 21st January 2010

Don't forget to check out the 'related articles' that feature in some of the links above. This will broaden your research, whilst still keeping it focused on the Turkey earthquake.

7 billion people and you: What's your number?

2011-10-27T12:08:00.002+01:00

Use this excellent resource from the BBC called 7 billion people and you: What's your number? to calculate where you fit into the world's population. Simply add your data of birth and it will tell you what your number is! Mine is the 4,658,544,579th person alive on Earth! What's your number?

Frozen Planet

2011-10-26T20:38:00.006+01:00

Tonight sees the start 'Frozen Planet', a seven-part series, on BBC1 at 9pm. Frozen Planet takes you on the ultimate polar expedition. This landmark series brings to the screen the frozen wildernesses of the Arctic and Antarctic as you have never seen them before, and may never see them again...

Mount Everest: Impacts of tourism

2011-10-24T20:21:00.002+01:00

"The committee says it brought back 25 tonnes of rubbish from Everest last spring – including 12,000kg of paper and plastic and 11,250kg of human waste."

Useful sources for Edexcel A2 Unit 4 Consuming the Rural Landscape
The Mission to clean up Mount Everest The Guardian
Calls for long term Everest waste management plan - starting with toilets The Guardian

How big was the world's population when you were born?

2011-10-24T17:28:00.004+01:00

As the world population fast approaches 7 billion, The Guardian has published this excellent resource where you can enter your date of birth to find out what the world's population was on that date, as well as information on how different countries were growing at that time.

Check it out here! This is what the world population was on my date of birth...

Climate change in Africa

2011-10-12T19:06:00.005+01:00

This is one of the compulsory case studies for Unit 1 Global Challenges. The following articles are particularly useful!

BBC News Climate change 'hitting Africa' 28th October 2006
Christian Aid The economic cost of climate change
The Independent Climate change will be catastrophe for Africa 16th May 2006
World Wildlife Fund Impact of Climate Change
The Guardian Climate change will devastate Africa 28th October 2009
Oxfam Horn of Africa drought: Climate change and future impacts on food security
BBC News Climate change 'will dry Africa' 29th November 2005

Geography in the News: Haiti Earthquake lesson

2010-01-24T20:45:00.002+00:00

The first of two lessons learning about the earthquake in Haiti. Note: The YouTube logo is hyperlinked to the videos!

Haiti Earthquake KS3 Lesson

View more presentations from JoBlack.

Choosing GCSE Geography

2010-01-17T19:09:00.000+00:00

The time to decide your GCSE options is quickly approaching with the options evening on Thursday 21nd January! Check out the PowerPoint below to find out if Geography might be the right decision for you!

GCSE Geography Promotion

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

To find out more about GCSE Geography, speak to Mr Gurney or Miss Blackmore.

Case Study Template for A2 Unit 4 Tectonic Activity

2009-09-06T19:45:00.002+01:00

Here is a copy of the case study template for you to download. Once you have gathered your research in relation to a tectonic event, sythesise it down to the main points using this document!

Remember the four areas:
1. Causes
2. Physical impact
3. Human impact
4. Response

Your colour coding system should be well established by now, and will help you to quickly identify the four key areas within your research.

Case Study template for A2 Edexcel Unit 4 Tectonics

View more presentations from JoBlack.

Little Britain: If the UK was a village of 100 people...

2009-07-23T20:01:00.004+01:00

If England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were condensed to a single community of 100 people, what would that community look like?

The Daily Mail has trawled acres of spreadsheets and data-sets published by government and other statistical authorities to produce a snapshot of Britain in the 21st century. Here are just a few statistics:

EACH person would generate 495kg of waste every year. The village would generate 163kg of waste every day, of which just 47kg would be put out for recycling.
THE villagers would have 118 mobile phones among them (66 of which would be pay-as-you-go).
TWENTY-ONE villagers would have watched Andy Murray beat Stanislas Wawrinka at Wimbledon this year; 32 people would have watched Susan Boyle lose Britain's Got Talent.
THIRTY people would have a Facebook account.
THERE would be a total of 74 voters, but only 26 of them would have gone to the polls at this year's European elections.

To see the rest of the statistics, click here.

Breathing Earth

2009-07-22T13:33:00.003+01:00

www.breathingearth.net

I had forgotten about this great site until I saw it mentioned on Funky Geography. It is a simulated world map showing the CO2 emissions and birth and death rates by country happening in real time.

New Zealand moves closer to Australia!

2009-07-22T12:24:00.005+01:00

A massive earthquake last week has brought New Zealand closer to Australia, scientists say. The 7.8 magnitude quake in the Tasman Sea has expanded New Zealand's South Island westwards by about 30cm (12in). New Zealand frequently suffers earthquakes because it sits on the meeting point of the Australian and Pacific continental plates.

See the full BBC report here.

650 million years in one minute!

2009-07-19T21:37:00.003+01:00

A great find, ideal for the first lesson of the new GCSE starting in September 2009!

650 Million Years in 1 Min. and 20 Sec. - Watch more Funny Videos

Coastal Management at Sidmouth

2009-07-04T21:17:00.003+01:00

A good local example...what forms of coastal management can you see??

Sidmouth seafront west in England

Glacier melt changes Italian border

2009-06-22T12:38:00.001+01:00

The border between Italy and Switzerland is being redrawn as glaciers along the frontier melt. The border was last changed in 1861 when Italy became a unified state, but this time the shift is being blamed on climate change.

A2 Level: Issues Analysis (synoptic)

2009-05-28T13:54:00.004+01:00

The following resource and websites are those already highlighted by Mr O'Callaghan of The Kingdown Geography Blog...

1. Tourism in the Cairngorms, Scotland (from SAC - Scottish Agricultural College).
The Cairngorms became Scotland's second National Park in September 2003. The area is also used for a number of tourism activities. The Cairngorm funicular is a means of transport, pulled by cables over a track bed, allowing visitor access from the car park area up the mountain plateau. It was designed primarily for winter sports enthusiasts (skiers and snow-boarders) to replace the outdated chairlift system, but is in use all year round. In summer, however, visitors are not allowed to leave the restaurant viewing platform area, due to the potential damage their walking would inflict on the fragile mountain environment and local ecosystem. Much controversy surrounded the granting of the permission for the development to take place, with heated conflicts between conservationists and the developers.

2. The Cairngorms Campaign
The Cairngorms Campaign is a membership organisation, welcoming individuals and groups as members who support its aims of protection and appreciation of the area. The Cairngorms Campaign strives to prevent unsustainable, damaging developments and argues for better management of the Cairngorms area. It works with landowners, managers, local authorities, government and agencies to this end.

3. Building ban on second homes in the Cairngorms - Times Online
WEALTHY outsiders are to be banned from building new holiday homes in the Cairngorms National Park under plans aimed at stopping rural communities from becoming tourist “ghost towns”.

The park wants to restrict the sale of new housing within its 1,467-square-mile boundaries to people who live, work or have family links in the area. It means that outsiders will no longer be allowed to buy or build new housing for use as second homes or as holiday homes for rent.

The Cairngorms is Britain’s largest national park, with a vast mountain wilderness at its heart. It encompasses large areas of the Highlands, Moray, Aberdeenshire and Angus and is home to 17,000 people and 25 per cent of Britain’s threatened species.

Its spectacular scenery is a magnet for tourists, but in property terms has resulted in an epidemic of wealthy second-homers, who now own one-in-five of all houses within the park. That figure rises to about half in some small villages such as Braemar. The knock-on effect has been a steep rise in property prices, up by as much as 13 per cent a year, placing even the most modest, semi-detached family home beyond the financial reach of locals.

GCSE: Terminal examination on Tuesday 2nd June

2009-05-28T13:53:00.010+01:00

This post will contain any further resources or pieces of advice that might be useful for Tuesday's exam.

Examiners tips (from 2007 and 2008 Examiners reports)
a) Where two suggestions/ideas are asked for, use two paragraphs. Remember the framework, write your first idea followed by a detailed explanation. Then, in a new paragraph, write your second idea followed by a detailed explanation.
b) Use PEE (Point, Evidence, Explanation) paragraphs for parts c, d and e of each question.
c) Practise diagram skills - can you draw sketch maps or diagrams to show volcanoes, regional differences, how global warming is caused, types of rainfall etc? Remember labels!
d) Use the first 5-10 to carefully select the best 4 questions to answer (remember, 2 questions from Section A, 1 question from Section B and 1 question from Section C).
e) Don't stereotype or generalise and have some idea of where places are - the South of Italy is NOT an LEDC, Africa is NOT a country. Know where your case studies are and be able to use the correct geographical area example.
f) Know key vocabulary, for example, economic activity, climate, physical processes. Remember that the Ozone layer is nothing to do with global warming!
g) Short and snappy answers for 2 mark questions - not paragraphs!
h) Look at command words and target the precise wording - son't just regurgitate all you know about a particular case study.
(Thanks to Mr Gurney for putting this list together)

Bearing in mind that natural hazards always appears in both Section A and Section B, make sure that you revise it in detail. Check the tectonic activity section of Bitesize. Pay special attention to the diagrams of volcanoes as we did not cover that very much in the lesson time. Make sure you know the diagrams of the plate boundaries and labels to go with them. You are often asked to explain in your labels, so they need to be good quality! Also, check the section on managing tectonic activity.

Use of your green revision guides for OCR C Geography. Not one question will be a surprise tomorrow if you have made good use of the revision guide!

To remind yourself of the layout of the exam paper and see some example questions, there is a higher tier paper here.

Some of you were requesting more of the case study templates last week. Although we had no more photocopied, don't forget that you can download a copy from here...
Case Study Template for GCSE
Case Study Template for GCSE joblack

Publish at Scribd or explore others: School Work How-to-Guides & Manu english resume

GCSE: DME on Tuesday 9th June

2009-05-28T13:51:00.002+01:00

Another teacher has shared a huge volume of resources to help prepare students for the DME exam. You can find them on 4shared in the folder named DME June 2009.

Tower block adverts

2009-04-19T09:41:00.004+01:00

Two adverts featuring tower blocks which could be useful for lessons based on housing issues in MEDCs.

Edexcel AS Geography: Global Hazards

2009-04-17T18:48:00.003+01:00

Finally I've finished the revision guide for the Global Hazards section of the AS course. For year 12, it is your responsibility to ensure that you have revised the Climate Change section of the course, as there will not be a specific guide produced by us. Although you will get a paper copy of the guide, it will not show the key diagrams in colour so please ensure that you have downloaded an electronic copy as well.

Global Hazards Edexcel AS Revision Global Hazards Edexcel AS Revision joblack

Publish at Scribd or explore others: School Work Study Guides, Notes, history global

There be pirates...

2009-04-17T11:01:00.003+01:00

On our return to school next week, year 8 and 9 will be having a lesson on the recent spate of ship hijackings by Somali pirates. The lesson has been produced and kindly shared by Tony Cassidy here.

I have made a movie to go with the lesson.

Some useful BBC News clips...
Somali pirates seize another boat
Pirates continue to hold hostages
On the trail of Somali pirates