Geography: should I choose it?

Characteristics of hazards

Response to hazards and disasters

Characteristics of tourism

Impact of tourism: issues and challenges

Unit 3, Area of Study 1: Land cover change

Land cover is the natural surface of the earth — forest, ice, grassland, wetland — as distinct from what people do on it. You open with a global overview of cover types and how their extent has shifted over time, then study two processes in depth: melting glaciers and ice sheets, and deforestation. For each you need the distribution (where it is happening and where it is not), the natural and human causes, and at least one named location studied closely enough to quote figures, dates and local detail. From there the focus turns to the impacts on environments and on people at those locations, then to responses at local, national and global scale — treaties, protected areas, reforestation programs, monitoring by satellite. The area of study closes by asking you to judge one global response for each process, which means weighing what it has actually achieved against what it set out to do.

Unit 3, Area of Study 2: Land use change

Land use is what people do with land, and this area of study is built around your own fieldwork at a local site where that use has changed — farmland becoming housing, industry becoming apartments, bush becoming a road corridor. You frame a research question, then collect primary data in the field (field sketches, photographs, land use mapping, surveys, transects) and secondary data (census figures, historic aerial photographs, planning documents). Geospatial technologies matter here: GNSS to locate observations, GIS to layer and map them, remote sensing imagery to show the site before and after. You then explain the nature of the change, the processes driving it and its time sequence, and the impacts it has had on people and on the environment. The final requirement is evaluative: how well did each of your data sources actually answer the question you set?

Unit 4, Area of Study 1: Population dynamics

This area of study is the mechanics of population: where the world's people are, how quickly their numbers change, and why. You work with distribution and growth patterns at global scale, then with the two natural components — fertility and mortality — and how each has moved over time and varies between countries. Population structure is central: reading age–sex pyramids, describing the shape they take at different stages, and placing countries within the demographic transition model. Movement is the other half. You study internal migration, rural to urban and between regions, and international migration, along with the push and pull factors behind refugee and forced migration flows. It all converges on selected countries of origin and destination, where you trace how migration and natural change have altered population size and structure at both ends of the flow.

Unit 4, Area of Study 2: Population issues and challenges

Here the focus narrows to two contrasting problems and what has been done about them. The first is a country with a growing population, where you study the strategies governments and organisations have used — family planning programs, incentives or restrictions, education, urban planning, resource management — and what each actually produced environmentally, economically and socially. The second is a country with an ageing population, where the issue is the shifting balance between working-age people and dependants: pension and healthcare costs, workforce shortages, aged care demand. A key point is that these impacts are not spread evenly; rural regions, particular age groups and lower-income households usually carry more of the burden than national averages suggest. Responses come from governments, organisations and individuals, and you finish by evaluating them across environmental, economic and social dimensions rather than declaring them simply successful or not.

Geographical concepts and skills (cross-cutting, examinable in every question)

The key concepts — change, distribution, distance, place, spatial association, environment, sustainability, process, movement, scale, region and interconnection — are the vocabulary the whole study runs on, and they are examinable inside any question rather than on their own. Alongside them sit the skills: interpreting topographic maps, reading aerial photographs and satellite images, working with graphs, tables and statistics, and describing three-dimensional representations. Spatial association is the one that most often carries marks — the degree to which two distributions match, described in words and backed with paired data values taken from the resource. You also need to describe distribution patterns properly: where things concentrate, where they are absent, direction, extent and any anomalies. Geospatial technologies, meaning GNSS, GIS and remote sensing, appear as both a skill to use and a subject to evaluate.