35 exam-style questions on HL extension: Power, places and networks with answers and explanations. Six real samples below — the full set is free with an account.
A state funds language institutes abroad, scholarships for foreign students and an international broadcasting service, and finds that graduates of these programmes later favour its firms when awarding contracts. Which source of global power is being used?
Answer: Cultural, or soft, power exercised through attraction
Soft power works by making a country's language, values and institutions attractive, so the outcome is obtained without coercion or payment. Hard power buys the outcome with investment or forces it through military and diplomatic pressure.
OPEC members meet to set production quotas for crude oil so as to influence the world price of a single commodity, while each member keeps its own tariffs and trade rules. Which kind of global grouping is this?
Answer: A producer cartel based on one commodity
Groupings differ by what they coordinate: OPEC coordinates the supply of one export, whereas trade blocs coordinate tariffs and a customs union adds a shared external wall. Reading OPEC as a trade bloc is the standard error in Paper 3 answers.
An emerging economy hosts assembly plants owned by foreign firms and exports finished electronics to high-income markets, but it holds almost no patents and imports its high-value components. In world-systems terms, which position does it occupy?
Answer: The semi-periphery, between the core and the periphery
The semi-periphery combines peripheral features, such as foreign ownership and low-value tasks, with core features such as industrial exports, which is why the category exists at all. Exporting manufactures is not evidence of core status if the profits and the patents leave.
A German car maker closes a component line at its home plant and opens its own wholly owned factory in Slovakia to make the identical parts. Which term describes this decision?
Answer: Offshoring within the same company
Offshoring moves an activity across a border but keeps it inside the firm, whereas outsourcing hands the activity to a different firm, which may well sit in the same country. The two are independent choices and only one of them changes ownership.
Nepali construction workers employed in Qatar transfer part of their monthly wages to their households in Nepal through a money transfer operator. Which global flow is this?
Answer: Remittances from migrant workers
Remittances are household-to-household income transfers, so they reach families directly instead of passing through governments or firms, which is why they are the steadiest external flow for many lower-income economies. Repatriated profits travel in the opposite direction, from a host economy back to a parent company.
Almost all intercontinental internet traffic between Europe and North America in 2023 travelled through which infrastructure?
Answer: Submarine fibre-optic cables on the sea bed
About 99 % of intercontinental data crosses the ocean floor in fibre-optic cables, because they offer far greater capacity and far lower latency than any satellite link. The shrinking world therefore rests on a physical network with a very concentrated geography and a small number of landing points.
35 HL extension: Power, places and networks questions — free with an account. Spaced repetition, streaks and full exam simulations included.
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