Briefly outline two long-term impacts of infrastructure damage that could be included in Box A.

Outline how one characteristic of a community’s population structure can affect its vulnerability to earthquakes.

Explain three strategies that could increase the personal resilience of community members to an earthquake event such as the one shown in the diagram.

Award [1] for each valid long-term impact on society (defined as persisting beyond the initial event, eg power supply disruptions lasting for weeks, or loss of schools harming education for many years).

Possibilities include:

• lack of schools/education for community children
• widespread mortality from long-term lack of hospitals / disease
• persistence of polluted water supplies
• homelessness due to destroyed buildings.

Award [1] for two impacts whose long term or community aspect cannot be inferred. For example “roads closed” and “no electricity” would together be worth [1] only.

Award [1] for a valid characteristic and [1] for outlining the effect on vulnerability.

For example: An elderly population structure [1] could mean larger numbers of people would be likely to suffer serious injuries due to their limited mobility [1].

Other possibilities include:

• Large proportion of children – could heighten vulnerability if a school is destroyed.
• High dependency ratio means that the population has disproportionately large number of young and elderly who would be less able to respond appropriately.

Resilience describes the ability to recover/resume normal operations following a hazard event. This can be achieved in various ways, before, during and immediately after the event.

In each case, award [1] for a strategy and [1] for the explanation of how resilience is increased.

For example: Some individuals have fitted their houses with automatic shutdown switches [1], which reduces their vulnerability/increases their resilience to the secondary hazard of fires [1].

Personal resilience is achieved through:

• increased preparedness (for example personal emergency kits, adaptations to homes)
• use of insurance
• adoption of new technologies (for example smartphone apps related to advance warning)
• education in use of bamboo to strengthen building design.

This was generally well answered, although sometimes the impacts were insufficiently developed to gain full marks.

This question caused a problem for the many candidates who did not understand the term "population structure", often writing about poverty or population density. There were some good responses relating to high dependency ratios, or large numbers of elderly/children in a population.

Many good responses, but some did not develop each point adequately or consider "personal resilience" in their answers.