36 exam-style questions on Changing urban systems — topic G.2 of Optional theme: Urban environments in the IB Geography syllabus — with answers and explanations. Samples below; the full set is free with an account.
A planner wants to show how many commuters enter the central business district along each of five main roads, drawing each line along its actual route with a width proportional to the number of commuters. Which mapping technique is this?
Answer: A flow line map
A flow line follows the real route and its width carries the quantity; a desire line is drawn straight from origin to destination and deliberately ignores the route taken. For a commuting study the choice decides whether the map shows which corridors are congested or only where the commuters live.
A student has counted how many shoppers in each of four districts travelled to the centre by bus, by car or on foot, and wants to know whether travel mode is related to district. Which statistical test is designed for this kind of data?
Answer: A chi-squared test on the observed and expected frequencies
Chi-squared compares counts in categories with the frequencies expected if there were no association, which is what nominal data such as travel mode require. Correlation tests need ranked or continuous variables, not categories.
A city's population grows by 3 % a year. Migration accounts for only a third of the increase. What accounts for the rest?
Answer: Natural increase, since migrants are concentrated in child-bearing ages
Rural-urban migrants are typically young adults, so their arrival raises the number of births in the city for years afterwards. Treating urban growth as migration alone is the standard error, and it leads to the wrong policy response.
Former industrial districts near a city centre are redeveloped as apartments, and the population of the inner city rises after decades of decline. Which process is this?
Answer: Re-urbanisation
Re-urbanisation is the return of population and investment to inner areas, usually following deindustrialisation and then redevelopment. Suburbanisation and counter-urbanisation both move people outward; sprawl describes the form of that outward growth.
Households with higher incomes move from a city to villages beyond the green belt, commuting back to work. What is the most likely effect on those villages?
Answer: House prices rise and local services shift towards commuter demand
Counter-urbanisation brings purchasing power but not local employment, so prices rise beyond the reach of local earnings and services reorient towards the newcomers. The characteristic loss is the shop, the school or the bus that served people who could not afford to stay.
A large factory closes in an inner-city district where it was the main employer. Which sequence best describes the downward spiral that can follow?
Answer: Lost jobs, less local spending, shop closures, out-migration, a smaller tax base
This is the multiplier working in reverse: wages withdrawn from the district cut demand for local services, so further jobs go and those with the means to move leave first, which lowers the revenue available to maintain the area. Cheaper rents attracting higher-income households describes gentrification, which may follow much later but does not follow automatically.
That was 6 of 36 Changing urban systems questions.
Practise all 36 freeExplainAO2 · 3–6 marks
Give reasons or causes: say what happens AND why, linking each step with 'because' or 'so that'.
OutlineAO1 · 1–3 marks
A brief account or summary: the main points in two or three sentences, no evaluation.
36 Changing urban systems questions — free with an account. Spaced repetition, streaks and full exam simulations included.
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