Geographical skills
Geography · GCSE · The School
OS maps
FOUR-FIGURE grid references name a square; SIX-FIGURE ones locate a point within it. Read ALONG the corridor then UP the stairs — eastings before northings, always. Contour lines close together mean steep ground; far apart means gentle. Scale converts map distance to real distance, and getting the units wrong is the commonest lost mark.
Graphs and figures
Know which graph suits which data: line for change over time, bar for comparing categories, scatter for a relationship, choropleth for values by area, proportional symbols for size at a place. Quote figures WITH units when you describe a trend — 'rose from 12% to 34% between 1990 and 2020' beats 'went up a lot'.
GIS thinking
A Geographic Information System layers data on a map: flood risk over housing over transport. The skill examined is not software operation but the question — which layers would answer this, and what would overlapping them show? Naming the layers you would use is usually the mark.
Contours 10 m apart, and on one side of a hill they are packed almost touching — say 100 m of height in 200 m of ground, a gradient of 1 in 2, very steep. On the other side the same 100 m of height is spread over 2 km: 1 in 20, a gentle walk. Close contours mean steep, wide contours mean gentle, and where they form tight V shapes pointing uphill you have found a stream valley.