Paper 4 — The Global Economy

Night Before Guide

Provenance: compiled 2026-09-29. This document does no new primary-source extraction. It is a short, evening-before-only distillation sitting on top of work already verified in this folder: research/veridian/WEC14-verified-facts.md (the provenance-checked facts bank), forge-forty-eight-hour-checklist.md (the fuller T-48-to-T-0 schedule, including its own T-8-to-T-1 wind-down block and §4's "what not to learn fresh" list), forge-spaced-repetition-schedule.md, forge-vocabulary-precision-list.md, and signal-frequency-and-boundaries.md §1–§2. Where this repeats a fact already stated in one of those, it cites the section rather than re-deriving it. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Pearson Edexcel. No likelihood percentage, no "confirmed in every series" claim, and no grade boundary appears below.

#WEC14 — The Evening Before

This is not a fourth revision session. The 48-hour checklist already owns the wind-down block and the "don't learn this fresh" list (§4 there) — this document doesn't repeat either in full. It answers one narrower question: of everything already built for this paper, what's actually worth a five-minute glance tonight, and what should stay closed.

#Worth a last look (five minutes each, at most)

Ranked by the strongest real evidence in the archive, not by topic importance generally:

Terms of trade. Independently named the single weakest-answered Section A question in 5 of 13 examiner reports read — the strongest single recurring finding in this paper's evidence base (facts bank, §4.3.2.3). Glance at the index formula (export price index ÷ import price index × 100) and the percentage-vs-percentage-point distinction — the most-repeated numerical slip on the whole paper, flagged across at least five series.
Devaluation/revaluation vs depreciation/appreciation. A vocabulary pair built directly into MCQ distractors in at least four series (Jan 2021, Jan 2022, Oct 2020 — facts bank §4.3.3). Fixed/managed regimes get the first pair; floating regimes get the second. Cheap to check, costly to blur.
Customs union's two-part definition. "Free trade between members" alone scores one of two marks; the credited answer needs the common external tariff too (Jan 2022, Q7(c) — examiner report: most candidates who dropped the second half "were only able to access 1 mark"). A ten-second check against forge-vocabulary-precision-list.md Part 2 if you're not certain you'd write both halves.
Absolute vs relative poverty. Only 6% of candidates scored full marks defining relative poverty in one real series (Jan 2021, Q7(c)) — the sharpest single failure rate in the archive, and the standard error is defining it as "below the median" rather than a stated fraction of it.
Where evaluation is and isn't credited on Section B. Not new content — it's Tier 0 in the spaced-repetition schedule and already in the 48-hour checklist's T-48 block — but it's the single highest-return re-read precisely because it changes how you spend marks you already have, not what you know: no evaluation on the 6-mark "analyse/examine two" part; required from the 8-mark part upward (confirmed four years apart, Jan 2021 and Jan 2025).

If you're confident on all five already, stop — there's nothing else this list is trying to add.

#What to deliberately leave closed tonight

The 48-hour checklist's §4 already states the fuller reasoning; the short version for tonight specifically:

Don't open a curriculum lesson file you haven't already studied, to "get a first look" at Harrod-Domar, the Lewis model, or Prebisch-Singer. Forty-eight hours was already argued as too late to build first understanding of a named model from zero; this evening is not the exception.
Don't start reading about 4.3.2.4(d) (blocs vs the WTO) — a genuine, searched-for-and-not-found gap in this course's own archive. There's nothing here to cram because no matching real question has been found.
Don't try to memorise a new real-world case study (a country, a currency crisis, a trading bloc) you don't already know. The application bank already holds grounded ones; reaching for an unfamiliar one under pressure risks getting the mechanism half-right, which scores worse than a familiar, simpler example fully right.
Don't attempt a new past paper or a new essay tonight. That's T-30-to-T-8 territory in the 48-hour checklist, not this one.

#Honest limits

Every claim above traces to a specific series and question already cited in the facts bank, the vocabulary list, or the frequency table — nothing here is a new finding. This document adds only the ranking and the "five minutes, then stop" framing; it does not add new evidence.