Development and inequality is the part of Geography where you measure how well people are doing and ask why places differ. You use indicators such as income per person, life expectancy and infant mortality, then explain differences with chains of cause and effect. Check the exact content for your exam year on the Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 page.
What do you need before you start?
You need comfortable arithmetic: averages, percentages, ratios and reading a table or bar chart. You also need the habit of quoting figures with units and years. Population evidence from population and settlement is useful background, because rates and densities rely on the same skills.
An orienting example
All figures below are invented for practice. A source says Country Z has a gross national income (GNI) per person of US$9,000.
Five households in a small sample earn 2, 2, 3, 4 and 34 (thousand US dollars). The mean is (2 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 34) ÷ 5 = 45 ÷ 5 = 9, so the average matches the source. The middle value is 3, though, and four of the five households earn far less than 9.
The indicator is accurate, but it hides how income is shared. That is the core habit of this module: read the number, then ask what it leaves out.
In what order should you study the lessons?
- Use an indicator with its limitations: start here, because every other lesson uses indicators.
- Compare indicators without ranking populations’ worth: practise comparing two or three countries on more than one measure.
- Explain a mechanism linking access and outcomes: build the chain of reasoning that longer answers need.
- Interpret a supplied inequality graph: read shares, ratios and cumulative figures from a table or chart.
- Separate a causal claim from a correlation: judge what the evidence can and cannot support.
Finish with the original mixed practice set, then record slips in the mistake log and retest queue.
What are the common traps?
- Quoting an average as though every person receives it.
- Saying a country is “better” or “worse” instead of naming the measure.
- Writing “access leads to better outcomes” with no steps between the two.
- Reading a cumulative figure as the share of one group.
- Treating two things that rise together as cause and effect.
How should you use real case studies?
Describe real examples neutrally. Record the place, the year, the source and the measure, and keep facts apart from interpretation.
If you cannot recall a figure exactly, describe the pattern and say that you are not quoting a precise value. The statistics and distribution explorer helps you see how an average and a spread can tell different stories.
Students who want help turning these skills into tidy written answers can look at online one-to-one Geography tuition.