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Geography SL/HL Thread


Forester

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There is no thread in this forum for Geography! And personally I think it is one of the most interesting subjects in the IB course.

Although I don't always get the marks I deserve for this subject, I think I learn the most from it.

As you all know, case studies are really important in Geo, and I think it would be good if we share some. Let me start of with some

Population

Pronatalist - Singapore

Antinatalist - China, Ethiopia

Arid Environments

Management - Grand Canyon

Land use - UAE

Reversal of Desertification - Tunisia

Please add more!

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Geog (SL) was the most boring IB subject I took yet ironically extremely easy to do well.

Off the top of my head though, the case studies we did:

Population - Singapore, Italy (pronatalist), Vietnam (anti - teacher thought China was too cliched)

Resources: water - China - Three Gorges Dam, Arial Sea, HEP dam in Vietnam

Development (I think...): Japan (post WWII), Vietnam (post war)

Rivers: Three Gorges Dam, lots of British rivers

Lithospheric hazard: LEDC: Pinatubo, Banda Aceh, MEDC: Mt St Helens, Kobe

Mass movement: human-induced: Alpes ski resorts, somewhere in Brazil, some coal mine landslide in Wales, gold mining in South America

Globalisation: North Korea (anti-globalisation), tourism in Vietnam (also development)

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Honestly? I think I studied least for Geog for my final exams and ended up with the highest grade.

It's a lot of memorising was what I found. I averaged about a 5/6 on my report cards because I did not study at all for class tests. But for all my semester exams, mock exam and final exam I got 7s. Maybe I just got good choices since usually it's the paper 2 that pulled up my paper 1.

The thing I find about Geog though is that the theory is one thing, but if you have a good case study with specific details to back it up, it helps a lot. It also helps if the case study you choose is from a slightly obscure/not-usually-studied country your examiner is less likely to have intensive knowledge about so that anything you say, if backed up with good theoretical knowledge, would score you lots of marks. I guess in a way, I was lucky as many of my case studies was on Vietnam (esp my field work). A Vietnamese examiner/examiner from VN can't mark my exam so chances are whoever marked my exams wouldn't be able to nitpick on the details of my case studies but would only mark on the general analysis. It's a trick, yes, but it's a way you can get easy marks. To be honest for my exams I studied case studies more than the theory.

Oh and if you get a good IA that shows you did a good fieldwork it helps a lot. I got 7 for my IA, which I thought probably was more because we gathered a huge amount of primary data and had awesome diagrams and sketches more than the analysis. We spent a whole weekend doing surveys at this beach resort to find out the effects of tourism in an area and then when we looked at the data, we found that the data didn't really help us that much with proving/disproving our hypothesis. In the end, I thought there wasn't really even a point in my analysis and that I spent more of the analysis talking about how our data didn't help much and evaluating the whole process of the field work. But apparently they liked it. *shrug*

Are you HL or SL?

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I am HL. So you got a 7 in your final IB grade?

From the internal exams I have done, I have gathered that for geography there's a trick to answer each type of question. I think my classmates haven't figured it out yet, that's why they are still receiving bad marks and putting the year mean down.

Oddly, I find paper 1 easier than paper 2?

Paper 2 is so broad, how can you cover everything?

Paper 1 is only on 3 topics and you study it intensively as it is the core...

I don't think my teacher knows what you are talking about HMS. We are studying the typical examples for each, just the ones listed in the Planet Geography book... But I know a lot of geography about the place I live in and it is a rather obscure place. (New Zealand) So I'm going to try to relate everything to here lol.

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Well, Forester, if you know a trick to answer specific type of question, can you be kindly enough to share with all of us?? So that we can benefit from it and one day, this might grow and we will have our own thread in this forum !! I will take geography SL so I'm kinda reading all the information, trying to understand what I expect to do next year :crying: Thanks in advance if you could help

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Um...from the top of my head I can think of...:

for the very first part of each question in paper 1, they always ask u to interpret a graph.

It depends on the marks allocated but 1 mark will be always allocated for quantification of data.

If there is two graphs, describe each graph and then compare and contrast if their is a relationship. Good words to use are "steadily""increase""decrease""fluctuating".

As for the last part of the question, it is always worth 10 - 15 marks which is a majority of the marks of that question. Therefore it basically determines your grade, if you do this well, you will be sweet. I find it always good to analyze it in terms of environmentally, socially, politically and economically.

Here is an example. i received 14/15. (no conclusion, must have misplaced it somewhere)

Explain why there is an imbalance in the global availability of food and, using specific examples, suggest ways to improve access of food for many LEDCs.

We globally produce enough food to give the whole world’s population an adequate and balanced diet. However, the food is not equally distributed. There are environmental, social, political and economic factors that lead to the current situation.

Environmentally, the area might be unsuitable for farming. The conditions there might include insufficient rainfall and infertility of soil. The area might lie in a semi-arid zone that is at high risks of desertification, reducing the land to zero productivity. Or even worse, it might lie in a desert. Areas that suffer from frequent droughts and natural disasters such as seismic activity are also less adequate to produce food. Using advanced technology and research, the LEDCs can prevent desertification of their land. This includes irrigation and fertilization.

Socially, the literacy rate might be very low, meaning that less people gain a quality education. With less capable people entering the employment sector, less food production would also occur. The people must have the skills and knowledge to employ commercial farming, rather than subsistence farming. To solve this problem, the governments should have a higher expenditure on the education sector. This would give the country great returns and a workforce that can handle the technology.

Internal political crisis and inter-tribal conflicts often disrupt everyday life and sometimes produce thousands of refugees. This hinders the production of food drastically. During the latter part of the 20th century, many African countries have experienced such political upheavals. For examples, Rwanda, Somalia, Chad and Ethiopia are countries which have witnessed large scale population movements as people have been forced to flee from danger zones, abandoning their farms and homes.

Economically, some parts of the world have too little capital. They don’t have the base or infrastructure to be able to farm commercially and have great availability of food. Their access to advance technology is limited and therefore their production is also limited. The global markets are controlled by MEDCs and LEDCs can only struggle to survive. An answer to these problems would be the encouragement of organizations such as the FTO, to ensure that LEDCs produce is being sold at a fair price.

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We used the planet geography book as well (the north korea case study is in there but unless you do globalisation it won't help you and anti-globalisation isn't really something you get asked on a lot...it just happened to have appeared in my mock exam which was why i liked it).

thing about doing typical case studies is that everyone does them, and the examiner come to know it very well and can nitpick you more easily. if you get a small factual detail wrong...you risk losing marks. with case studies that there is chance of less people doing, you can quote some wrong stats but if you back your facts up with analysis then you're fine. that's the way i saw it anyway.

well i guess paper 2 would be harder for you at HL since you're doing 4 topics. i only had to do 2 questions, and did 3 options in class - rivers, lithospheric hazards and globalisation. actually I only studied the last two, thinking i'd do the mass movement question since i studied that a lot...but then i got a really **** mass movement question and ended up doing rivers which i literally looked at just 30 minutes before the exam. but it was all about fluvial features which required a lot of diagrams so I guess it wasn't too bad.

I suppose paper 1 is more structured and you know the kind of stuff they'd ask...but I liked paper 2 better.

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Well, for my case studies, I did

Population

Population distribution - Egypt

Anti natalist - China

Pro natalist - Australia

Migration - Darfur

Resources - Water - Nile

Aid - Ethiopia

Development - Nepal and Sweden

Sustainable development - Brazil - recycling cans

Rivers

Nile

Barwon, Australia

Murray-Darling Basin, Australia

Coasts

Hampton beach, australia

Corio bay, australia

Lithospheric processes

Tsunami - Asia tsunami, some PNG one

Volcano - Mt. Saint Helens

Earthquake - Loma Priata, Kashmir

Mass movement - Threadbo, australia

Settlements

Lara - commuter village

I like paper 2 way more than paper 1 it is heaps easier, in my opinion.

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  • 5 months later...

Hey all,

I'm going to start compiling a massive database (with all important info and figures) of the case studies that are important for HL (and I guess SL) geo.

I'll be doing it over the summer, and will stick it up on here when I'm done. In the mean time, if you'd like to contribute anything to the cause, PM me. I hope to turn out the "masterlist" of all relevant case studies... hopefully it should helpful for everyone!

Cheers

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  • 4 weeks later...

SL is much easier because you have to memorize less and geography is mainly about memorizing. There is not a lot of difference in terms of analytical ability, however HL students are expected to have more in depth and in detail answers, backed up with a lot of facts and statistics.

Topographic mapping is easy. The mean grades for that topic is the highest in geography.

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  • 1 month later...

sweet forum. Lol. Atleast there is some recognition for geography.

My case studies:

Population distribution - Tanzania / Australia

Anti natalist - Tanzania

Pro natalist - Australia

Migration - Rwanda to tanzania and congo

Resources - Water - Israel/palestine, colorado river(US/mexico), Angola/Botswana/Namibia

Aid - Ethiopia/Zimbabwe

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sweet forum. Lol. Atleast there is some recognition for geography.

My case studies:

Population distribution - Tanzania / Australia

Anti natalist - Tanzania

Pro natalist - Australia

Migration - Rwanda to tanzania and congo

Resources - Water - Israel/palestine, colorado river(US/mexico), Angola/Botswana/Namibia

Aid - Ethiopia/Zimbabwe

Globalisation - Bangladesh

World Health issues - Equatorial Guinea and Sierra Leone

all i can think of right now...

our diff in SL and HL, HL have more options, one more i tink, we write 1000 extra for our IA, that's pretty much it...so there is no big idfference, IMO, a larger word limit is better

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I agree. Writing the coursework in 1500 words souns impossible. Even 2500 word wasnt enough for me.

By the way, tee blake why is my post in quotes in your post?? lol

whoa...i actually don't know...

i got into a habit of replying to other people instead of just replying...but i dunno why i quoted yours...

but yeah..now i quote you because i agree...i had to cut out so much just to make the maximum..i cut out like a whole paragraph...

that was for my first practice field study...i got like 19/30, which was pretty good...

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