I hope readers of my blog felt that the Biology paper 1B went well earlier this week.  For what it is worth, I thought it was a good but challenging paper but there is nothing at all on there that seemed unfair to me.  I am confident that it gave students a good chance to show the understanding and knowledge you have built up over three years.  But…..   you still have 33% of your marks still available to you, so my thoughts have now turned to paper 2B in a few weeks time.

I have been through the paper 1B carefully to look at which subject areas have been tested in the questions. This might allow you to focus your revision now onto topic areas that have not yet come up.  But the next point is very important:  there is absolutely nothing that says they cannot ask questions on the some of the same topics inboth papers.  Predicting exam questions is a dangerous game (!?!) and there is absolutely nothing in this blog post that should contradict the idea that you need to be fully clued up and ready for questions on every single specification point when you sit your paper 2B.

But there are some things we know about what is likely to appear in the paper 2B.

• Firstly there are some specification points in bold that cannot be assessed in paper 1 and can only appear in paper 2.  I have a blog post that lists these so I won’t type them all out again.  Have a look here to see a full list of the bullet points in bold….
• Listed below are some topic areas that were not tested at all in the summer 2018 paper 1B.  I would anticipate that several of these will definitely appear in paper 2B so if I were in your position, these would be my top priorities for revision in the coming weeks:

Variety of Living organisms and 5 Kingdom Classification 1.2

Viruses 1.2

Movement of substances into and out of cells – Diffusion, Osmosis and Active Transport  2.12, 2.13, 2.14, 2.15, 2.16

Transport in Plants – Xylem and Phloem 2.51, 2.52, 2.53, 2.54, 2.55. 2.56

Heart Structure and Circulatory Systems 2.63, 2.64, 2.65, 2.66

Human Nervous Systems 2.83, 2.84, 2.85, 2.86,

The Eye 2.87, 2.88, 2.89,

Hormones 2.90

Reproduction in Flowering Plants 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7

Reproduction in Humans 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12

DNA and Genetics – this must come up!!  3.13, 3.14, 3.15, 3.16, 3.17, 3.18, 3.19, 3.20, 3.21, 3.22

Ecology – Food chains and Webs, quadrats etc. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7

Carbon and Nitrogen Cycles 4.8, 4.9, 4.10

Selective Breeding 5.10, 5.11

Genetic Modification 5.12, 5.13, 5.14, 5.15, 5.16

Cloning 5.17, 5.18, 5.19, 5.20

The focus of your revision now should be looking at past papers and mark schemes.  I know many of you have done this already for paper 1B.

If you want more past papers and mark schemes, I suggest you download them for free from this website: http://www.physicsandmathstutor.com/past-papers/gcse-biology/edexcel-igcse-paper-2/

Please remember there are posts on my website for every single specification point above.  Just type in the specification code in the search box and it should (?!) take you straight to the relevant page.  Please do ask me questions or leave comments at the bottom of any posts.  It may take a while for them to be visible as I have to “approve” them to remove spam.  You would be amazed at some of the stuff I seem to attract from the depths of the internet…..

Keep working hard and good luck!