Hazardous Earth is the OCR A-Level Geography (H481) unit on plate tectonics and the volcanic and seismic hazards that come with living on an active planet. It is one of five Geographical Debates on Paper 3; students study two, and each one is examined in all three sections of that paper. The specification requires case studies of two countries at contrasting levels of economic development — for the impacts of volcanic eruptions, for the impacts of earthquakes, and again for the strategies used to cope with each.
The whole of Hazardous Earth for OCR A-Level Geography (H481), built around the five enquiry questions.
What is the evidence for continental drift and plate tectonics?
What are the main hazards generated by volcanic activity?
What are the main hazards generated by seismic activity?
What are the implications of living in tectonically active locations?
What measures are available to help people cope with living in tectonically active locations?
Every specification bullet point is covered, clearly identified, and in one download. No more searching across your paper files, teacher PowerPoints, OneNote and Google Classroom assignments, or generic free notes you have found online.
Every process in the specification is covered in the way the exam asks for it: what causes it, what it produces, and why the effects differ from one place to the next. That is what the extended questions in Sections B and C need.
Examiner's Warnings — concise summaries of the common mistakes identified in the OCR Examiner's Reports, so that you do not make the same ones and do not need to go and read them yourself.
Past exam paper questions, and where to find them — every question OCR has already set on each topic, so that you know how this material is tested in the exam.
Potential Future Questions — written with the same command words and the same wording structure as the OCR questions, so that you can see what is likely to come up and prepare for it.
Revision Recall — retrieval practice questions, so that you revise actively rather than re-reading.
Hazardous Earth asks for more case studies than any other debate: two countries at contrasting levels of economic development for volcanic impacts, two more for earthquake impacts, and two more again for the strategies used to cope with each.
Nine are covered here, each one labelled, so that you revise the ones your school teaches: Eyjafjallajökull, Montserrat, Pinatubo, Nyiragongo, Merapi, Haiti, Tōhoku, Nepal and Christchurch.
What if my school teaches a different case study? Email jono@geographystudio.co.uk and say which one. I will reply, and it tells me which case study to write next.
Most students learn case studies as a set of facts, then find that the exam does not ask for facts. It asks for an argument. Every case study closes with a Big Picture: the story that case study tells, and the different arguments it can be used to build.
Paper 3 is the Geographical Debates paper. There are five topics; you study two, and you answer on both.
Your two topics each come up three times. Section A is based on the Resource Booklet. Section B is synoptic, so it asks you to bring in the rest of the course. Section C is an extended essay. One unit, examined three ways — which is why knowing a debate properly is worth more here than anywhere else on the course.
If you have not tested these notes yet, the complete Earth's Life Support Systems unit is free.