Paper 1 source skills — Climate and innovation

On Paper 1 you get a set of sources — usually three, labelled A, B and C — all about one inquiry question from your focused study. You never answer that inquiry question directly.

Instead, you always answer the SAME three questions about the sources themselves. Learn this pattern once and it works for every focused study, including Climate and innovation.

Content = what it says: Content is simply the information inside the source — names, numbers, events, descriptions. For Q1, your job is to pull out specific details and explain how each one helps answer the inquiry question.

Here is a worked example. Imagine a source set exploring the inquiry question 'What innovations took place?' for Norse exploration.

Source A (saga extract): 'Leif took his ship west from Greenland and found a land of wild grapes, which he named Vinland.' Source B (archaeological report): 'Excavations at L'Anse aux Meadows uncovered Norse-style turf buildings, iron rivets, and a smithy — evidence of a temporary settlement.'

To answer Q1, you take a detail from EACH source and explain how it answers the question. Source A's content shows the Norse were exploring new sea routes westward and naming new lands. Source B's content shows they built real settlements with their own technology, not just camped briefly. Together, both details show innovation was both in navigation AND in settlement-building.

Never use just one source: Using only Source A OR only Source B caps your Q1 mark at 3 out of 6. The examiner wants to see you connect content across two different sources, not describe one in detail.

Every source has a provenance — a background story about who created it, when, where, and why. That background is its context, and it is the whole focus of Q2.

Context isn't a side note — it directly shapes what a source is USEFUL and NOT useful for. A source can be reliable for one thing and shaky for another, depending on its origin and purpose.

Worked example: imagine a source exploring 'How did climate conditions shape innovation?' for the Aztec Empire.

Source C: an account written by a Spanish friar around 1570, describing Aztec responses to the drought and famine known as 'One Rabbit', drawing on interviews with elderly survivors decades after the events, intended to record Aztec history for a European readership.

For Q2, you would explain: its origin (a friar interviewing elderly survivors) gives it value as a record that preserves Indigenous memory that might otherwise be lost. But its purpose (writing for a European audience) and the decades-long time gap are a limitation — memories fade, and details may be shaped to suit what Spanish readers expected to hear.

Context ≠ just naming facts: Don't just state 'this source was written in 1570 by a friar' and stop — that only describes context. You must ANALYSE how that origin and purpose shapes what the source can and can't be used for. That's the difference between a low mark and a high one.

Perspective is about whose viewpoint a source represents — and Q3 asks you to examine how perspectives across ALL the sources compare on the inquiry question.

Perspectives can corroborate each other (agree and support one another) or they can contradict each other. Both outcomes are useful — you just have to explain WHY they agree or disagree.

Worked example: two sources on the inquiry question 'What factors prompted innovation?' — one Norse, one Aztec-style, to show the comparison skill.

To answer Q3, you'd explain that the two sources give different but not necessarily contradictory perspectives: one focuses on individual ambition, the other on economic necessity. Together, they show the inquiry question has more than one valid answer — innovation was driven by both push (land shortage) and pull (ambition) factors.

Cover every source for top marks: The markbands cap your score if you leave sources out: using only one source caps Q3 at 6/12, and only two sources caps it at 9/12. To reach 10–12, you must examine the perspective of every source in the set.