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I’m choosing my GCSE’s in a short while and I don’t know whether to pick history or geography. I’m good at both and have a target 6 (I’m in year 9) but I don’t really enjoy either?! Which should I pick?

Reply 1

PetitePanda

Study Forum Helper

Think about what content of each you would enjoy? For geography, there's physical and human; For history, it depends on what your school chooses to do so i would ask them what you'll be doing - I did Medicine through time, Queen Elizabeth, Amercian West and Amercia Home and Aboard (Civil rights and Vietnam War mostly). You could look at past papers to see what kind of questions you'll have to answer - for history, 2/3 of it is mostly essays while the 1/3 was source questions. I only did history so i cant really give an insight on both

(edited 4 years ago)

Reply 2

username5093898

I don’t have any experience with geography but I love history. Everyone does different topics for history (I do nazi Germany, Anglo Saxon and Norman England, crime and punishment through time and the Cold War), so is recommend asking what your school does and seeing if you’re interested in any of it. Just take whichever you prefer or if you can’t choose maybe take both? These are some past papers you could look at to see which you’d get on better with (Edexcel for history and aqa for geography but you can google to find the exam board you’d be doing):

https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/GCSE/History/2016/specification-and-sample-assessments/gcse-history-paper-1-specimen-papers.pdf

https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/GCSE/History/2016/specification-and-sample-assessments/gcse-history-paper-2-specimen-papers.pdf

https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/GCSE/History/2016/specification-and-sample-assessments/gcse-history-paper-3-specimen-papers.pdf

https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/geography/AQA-80351-SQP.PDF

https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/geography/AQA-80352-SQP.PDF

https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/geography/AQA-80353-SQP.PDF

Reply 3

lucexo-1

Hi, I took both at GCSE so hope I can help! It depends on your strengths; geography involves a lot of graphs and interpreting data, memorising case studies for different topics, understanding and describing physical processes etc, so you need an interest and understanding of the world around you. In history, you obviously need strong essay skills as the majority of the exam is essay based, depending on the exam board you'd also need to do some source analysis. You'd need to memorise specific years and a few statistics since the questions are usually focusing on a specified time period. Which other subjects are you thinking of choosing, and which subjects do you enjoy? I personally chose to continue history to A Level and I love it, but I do miss geography.