6.2 Business Exam Skills

Summary — What This Chapter Covers

• Knowledge and Understanding: recalling business facts and terms accurately — no explaining needed, just remembering correctly.
• Application: taking that knowledge and using it on the specific business/data/case study in front of you, not in the abstract.
• Analysis: building a chain of reasoning — showing how one effect leads to another, with clear cause-and-effect links.
• Evaluation: weighing up both sides of an argument and reaching a justified, supported conclusion — the top-mark skill.
• Each skill has its own "command words" (the verbs examiners use) that tell you exactly what kind of answer is expected.
• Higher-mark questions (9 and 12 markers) usually need all four skills layered together in one answer.

1. Knowledge and Understanding

This is the foundation skill — and the easiest one to get full marks on, if you actually learn your definitions. Think of it like this: the examiner isn't asking you to think hard here, they're just checking whether the fact is sitting in your brain, ready to be pulled out. There's no explaining, no linking to a business, no weighing up pros and cons — just accurate recall.

A useful way to picture it: imagine your business knowledge is a filing cabinet. Knowledge and Understanding questions just want you to open the right drawer and hand over the correct file — they don't want you to explain why the file matters yet.

Command Words to Know

Worked Example

Practice Questions

2. Application

Application is where students most commonly lose marks — not because they don't know the theory, but because they write the definition and stop there, forgetting to actually connect it to the business in the question. Examiners call this "context" — and it's non-negotiable at this level.

Joe stand-up paddleboard business, Loco

Command Words to Know