← A given environment: geographic concepts and skills
Reading the notation
NZQA prints its own definitions of these concepts inside the papers — using their exact wording is free marks, and signals you are applying a concept rather than just describing.📖 The geographic concepts
6 termsCover the right column and check you can say what each one means, in NZQA's own wording.
- Environment
- May be natural and/or cultural, with particular characteristics and features that can result from natural and/or cultural processes.
- Location
- Where something is found — can be an advantage or a constraint, and can be described in absolute or relative terms.
- Pattern
- How values are distributed — spatially (clustered, dispersed, linear) or temporally (rising, falling, cyclical, a step change).
- Change
- Any alteration to the natural or cultural environment. Can be spatial and/or temporal, and occurs at varying rates, times and places.
- Interaction
- Elements of an environment affecting each other — movement, flows, connections, links, one- or two-way. "Landscapes are the visible outcome of interactions" — the sentence that licenses reading a photo or map as evidence of process.
- Perspectives
- Ways of seeing the world that shape people's values and decisions — bodies of thought built up over time, not just opinions.