At a glance
Individual · one period, written, on Unit 3, Day 1 · no notes · everything from the ecosystems unit, weighted the way we spent the time
This is the only test in the course, and it is here on purpose. The Final Examination in January is three hours long and, for most of you, the first examination you will ever have written. Meeting that format once, in seventy-five minutes, on one unit you have just finished, is a much better introduction than meeting it cold at the end.
What is on it
| Part | Roughly | What it asks you to do |
|---|---|---|
| A. Systems | 25% | Read a food web; say what happens upstream and downstream of a change |
| B. Cycles | 30% | Trace carbon, water, or nitrogen through a real place, with the step that returns it |
| C. Human impact | 25% | Explain what an activity does to a system, using a mechanism rather than a word like “pollution” |
| D. Climate evidence | 20% | Read a graph honestly: what it shows, what it does not, and what would change your reading |
Success criteria
| Quality | What that looks like on the paper |
|---|---|
| Explaining rather than naming | ”It is a chemical change” earns little; the evidence that makes it one earns the marks. The same is true of every part of this paper |
| Claims with their evidence attached | Every “because” points at something — a number off the graph, an arrow on the web, a step in the cycle |
| Diagrams that carry information | Arrows labelled with what moves along them, not just drawn. An unlabelled cycle is a picture of a circle |
| Honest limits | Where a graph or a food web does not support the claim you were asked about, saying so is the right answer, not a dodged one |
How to prepare
- Draw all three cycles from memory, then check them. The arrow you cannot draw is the one that will be on the paper.
- Redo the questions you got wrong on the Unit 2 checkpoint. That revision list is what the class before this is for.
- Read one climate graph you have not seen and write two sentences about what it does not show. Interpreting Climate Graphs has more of them.
- The Concepts pages for this unit are the study guide. Nothing on this paper comes from anywhere else.
In the period
Budget by the weightings above. Where a question asks you to explain, write the mechanism even if you are unsure of the name — a described process with the wrong label earns far more than a right label with nothing under it.
Curriculum connection
B2.2
explain how naturally occurring phenomena, including the cycling of matter and the flow of energy, contribute to the dynamic equilibrium within and between ecosystems
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B2.4
investigate factors and processes, including biodiversity, air and water quality, soil health, and succession, and explain how they contribute to ecosystem sustainability
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B2.5
explain the effects of various human activities on the dynamic equilibrium of ecosystems
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B2.6
identify and use various indicators of climate change to describe the impacts of climate change on local and global ecosystems, and analyse how human activities contribute to climate change
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