Business Paper 4 — Global Business

Vocabulary Precision List

Compiled 2026-09-29, from research/veridian/WBS14-verified-facts.md (the verified-facts bank; every citation below traces to a real Pearson mark scheme or examiner/principal-examiner's report it verifies) and cross-checked against this folder's own codex-definitions-and-application-bank.md, forge-exam-technique-guide.md and forge-battle-card.md so nothing here just restates them — see "What this document is (and isn't)" below for exactly how it differs. Also checked against content/veridian/curriculum/wbs14/ (the seven real lesson files) and content/veridian/question-bank/wbs14.ts to confirm no full worked exemplar is duplicated. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Pearson Edexcel. Direct quotation from Pearson's own copyrighted wording is kept to short, attributed fragments (under ~15 words) throughout; everything else is paraphrased.

#WBS14 Vocabulary Precision List — Unit 4: Global Business

#What this document is (and isn't)

Every other reference file in this folder organises WBS14 by topic (CODEX: definitions and application paragraphs by spec sub-section; FORGE: timing and trap-taxonomy by tariff; SIGNAL: frequency and grade boundaries; the Battle Card: one-line cues). This one organises the paper by word. It is a list of command words and technical terms this paper's real mark schemes and examiner reports are demonstrably precise about, each entered as a pair or a single term with the exact distinction that costs marks when it is blurred.

It does not repeat:

the full command-word → mark-tariff table (already in the facts bank, the Battle Card §2, and the technique guide §1) — this document only adds the qualitative distinctions between the words that table doesn't capture;
the full trap-taxonomy entries already named and mechanised inside the seven curriculum lesson files (five-forces-vs-porters-strategic-matrix, roi-dismissed-without-development, employment-patterns-means-shift-not-total, local-becomes-generic-national, and others) — this document names the same underlying real confusions where they are genuinely about a word or term pair, but as a compact contrastive entry, not a worked mechanism or level-exemplar. Go to the named lesson file for the full teaching treatment of any entry below.

Every entry below is anchored to a real, named series and question in the verified-facts bank. Where the facts bank itself flags a claim as lower-confidence or as sourced from a candidate's own outside-knowledge answer rather than Pearson's indicative content, that flag is repeated here rather than dropped.

#1. Command words: the same paper, four different evaluative depths

The mark-tariff table (Define through Evaluate) is already reproduced elsewhere in this folder. What it doesn't spell out on its own is why the paper's recurring examiner checklist singles out "Assess"/"Evaluate" being ignored as a stable, repeated failure — worded near-identically across the June 2022, October 2023 and January 2024 reports the facts bank samples. The three words that matter most here are not synonyms for "write about the topic":

Discuss asks for chains of reasoning in context, plus only a brief assessment — not a conclusion. The paper's real Discuss table has three levels (1–2 / 3–5 / 6–8), confirmed at both June 2022 Q1(c) and January 2026 Q1(c).
Assess asks for a balanced assessment that leads to a supported judgement — a genuine weighing of both sides, not a brief one. The paper's real Assess table has four levels (1–2 / 3–4 / 5–8 / 9–12), confirmed independently across three mark schemes (Jan 2023 Q1d, June 2022 Q1d, June 2022 Q1e).
Evaluate asks for full awareness of the validity and significance of competing arguments, plus a perceptive conclusion that proposes a solution or recommendation — not just a judgement, a recommendation.

The precision point: a candidate who answers a 12-mark Assess with a brief, undeveloped assessment has answered it like an 8-mark Discuss; one who answers a 20-mark Evaluate with a supported judgement but no proposed recommendation has answered it like a 12-mark Assess. Both are documented, repeated examiner complaints on this paper (see the recurring checklist in the facts bank), not a hypothetical risk.

A second, narrower precision point inside the word "Assess" itself: on this paper (Unit 4), Assess is worth 12 marks. On Units 1/2, the identical command word is worth 10. Content or technique ported from a Unit 1/2 build onto this paper under the same command word will be pitched at the wrong length and the wrong level-table shape if this distinction is missed.

#2. The vocabulary of "assessment" itself: three different rungs, not one bar

This paper's own real level descriptors use graded language for how much assessment an answer has attempted — and conflating "an assessment" with "a balanced assessment" costs marks even when the underlying economics is accurate.

No assessment at all — pure description of what changed, with no attempt to weigh it. This sits below even the lowest assessment-bearing level on every level table this paper uses.
"An attempt at an assessment... unbalanced" — a real, one-sided assessment attempt. This is enough to reach the mid-band on the paper's 4-level Assess table (Level 3, 5–8/12, confirmed at Jan 2023 Q1d, June 2022 Q1d and June 2022 Q1e) but is explicitly not enough to reach the top band.
"Balanced, wide ranging... leading to a supported judgement" — the top-band language on that same Assess table (Level 4, 9–12/12).

The exact same three-rung structure is what the June 2022 Q1(c) Examiners' Report is describing when it says, of an 8-mark Discuss question, that "balance (assessment) is definitely needed" even though the question sets no explicit requirement for a conclusion — description alone does not clear even that paper's lowest assessment-bearing level.

Why this belongs in a vocabulary list rather than a trap-taxonomy entry: the word "assessment" is doing different work depending on which level of which table it sits in. Treating "I gave an assessment" as a single, cleared-or-not checkbox — rather than a rung a candidate has climbed partway up — is a precise, documented way to misjudge your own answer's level before submitting it.

#3. Term pairs the mark schemes are precise about

#Porter's five forces (spec 4.3.2.2.b) vs Porter's generic strategies / "Porter's matrix" (spec 4.3.3.1.d)

These are two different tools sitting at two different spec sub-points, and Pearson's own Principal Examiner's Report names the exact substitution candidates make between them:

"a significant number of candidates" who "knew little, or nothing, about Porter's matrix" and "confused it with Porter's five forces" — Principal Examiner's Report, WBS14, October 2023, Q3

Five forces (4.3.2.2.b) diagnoses how attractive/competitive a market is: rivalry, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, buyer power, supplier power. It is a market-assessment tool.
Generic strategies (4.3.3.1.d) — what the mark scheme itself calls the framework, not "Porter's matrix" — is a positioning choice: cost leadership, differentiation, or focus. The mark scheme's own wording is worth knowing directly: "Porter identified three generic strategies... Cost leadership, Differentiation and Focus" (WBS14, October 2023, Q3 indicative content). The classroom shorthand ("Porter's matrix") and the mark scheme's own indicative-content term ("generic strategies") are not the same words — a candidate scanning a mark scheme for "matrix" may not find it.

What it costs: answering a generic-strategies question with five-forces content (or vice versa) supplies the wrong tool's structure entirely — not a partially-right answer, a different spec point's worth of content on the wrong question.

#"Return on investment" as a location factor (spec 4.3.2.3) vs return on investment as an investment-appraisal calculation (QS6)

Many candidates "either misunderstood what 'return on investment' meant as a location factor, or conflated it with investment-appraisal calculation technique" — and those who did understand the term often "dismissed it without development" — Examiners' Report, WBS14, October 2023, Q1(e)

As a location factor (4.3.2.3), "likely return on investment" is a qualitative comparator: how much benefit a location is likely to generate relative to the cost of establishing there, weighed against other location factors.
As investment appraisal (quantitative skill QS6), it is a numeric technique for evaluating a specific project — a different content point entirely, tested elsewhere on this paper.

The facts bank records this as the worse-answered of the two 12-mark Assess questions that series — worse than the other one, not just imperfectly answered.

What it costs: a candidate who reaches for a calculation method when the question wants a qualitative comparator (or names the term correctly but never develops it) forfeits marks on a question built entirely around one term's precise meaning.

#"Employment patterns" (spec 4.3.1.1) vs employment totals

"The term 'employment patterns' was widely misunderstood"... "Most discussed employment totals which is not the same thing at all" — Examiners' Report, WBS14, June 2022, Q1(c)

Employment patterns means the sectoral distribution of a workforce and how it shifts — primary → secondary → tertiary — as an economy develops. This is the actual developmental indicator spec 4.3.1.1 is testing.
Employment totals means a raw headcount of people employed. It is a real, measurable figure, but it is not what this term refers to.

The examiner's own report is explicit that this was not a minor point-loss: "far too many candidates failed to score any marks at all" on this question specifically because of the misreading.

What it costs: an entire answer built on the wrong reading of one phrase can score close to zero, regardless of how accurate the surrounding economics is.

#Local economy vs national/wider economy (spec 4.3.4.1, impact of MNCs)

Verified at January 2024 Q3 (TotalEnergies), a 20-mark Evaluate asking specifically about impact on the local economy: some candidates wrote generically about the wider/national economy instead. Any wider-economy material had to be explicitly tied back to the local level to gain credit — it was not enough for it to be broadly relevant to "the economy."

Local = the immediate community/area an MNC's investment physically sits in — direct and indirect jobs, local suppliers, local infrastructure, and (per the mark scheme's own indicative content) local tax spent locally.
National/wider = country-level aggregates — GDP, balance of payments, national tax revenue, employment nationally.

What it costs: correct MNC-impact content pitched at the wrong geographic scale for the question asked is not partial credit by default — it has to be actively reconnected to the scale the question specifies to count at all.

#Tax revenue (an impact outcome, spec 4.3.4.1) vs legal/governmental control (a control mechanism, spec 4.3.4.3)

This pair is not a Pearson-documented candidate error in the same way as the three above — it surfaced during this course's own cross-mark-scheme audit of the two spec points, not from an examiner's report naming a candidate mistake. It is included because it is a real, mark-scheme-level distinction the two spec points draw, and the surface vocabulary ("government") is genuinely shared between them:

Tax revenue (4.3.4.1) is one of the real, indicative-content-credited economic benefits an MNC generates for the country or locality it operates in — an outcome of the MNC being there.
Legal/governmental control (4.3.4.3) is a mechanism by which a government restrains or directs an MNC's behaviour — for example, the mark scheme's own named case of Shell facing a Dutch court (Jan 2023 Q2). It is an instrument acting on the MNC, not a benefit produced by it.

What it costs: these sit at two different spec sub-points that both involve government, so an "impact of MNCs" answer that drifts into describing government control mechanisms (or a "controlling MNCs" answer that drifts into describing tax-revenue benefits) is answering adjacent content, not the question actually asked.

#Where to go deeper

Full mechanism, trap-taxonomy entry and level-exemplar for each pair above lives in its named lesson file: assessing-global-markets-and-locations.ts (five forces, ROI), global-marketing.ts (generic strategies), globalisation-and-growing-economies.ts (employment patterns), and mncs-impact-ethics-and-control.ts (local/national, tax revenue vs control). The full command-word → mark-tariff table lives in forge-battle-card.md §2 and forge-exam-technique-guide.md §1.

#Sources

research/veridian/WBS14-verified-facts.md in full, specifically its citations to: Principal Examiner's Report, WBS14, October 2023 (Q3 — Porter's matrix/five forces); Examiners' Report, WBS14, October 2023 (Q1(e) — return on investment); Examiners' Report, WBS14, June 2022 (Q1(c) — employment patterns, and the "balance (assessment) is definitely needed" note); mark schemes for January 2024 Q3 (WBS14_01_MS_2401 — TotalEnergies, local vs national economy), January 2023 Q1(d)/Q2 (WBS14_01_2301 — the 12-mark Assess level table; Shell/Dutch court), and June 2022 Q1(d)/Q1(e) (the same 12-mark Assess level table, independently confirmed a second and third time); and January 2026 Q1(c) (the 8-mark Discuss level table, independently confirmed a second time). No new primary source was fetched for this document — it is a word-level re-cut of citations already verified in the facts bank, cross-checked against the seven curriculum lesson files to confirm the same underlying confusions are already taught in full elsewhere and not duplicated here.