With the credit crunch and related economic difficulties, this year’s Higher paper was more topical, despite being set months ago.
Donald Farquhar, a business education teacher at Oban High, predicted that pupils would have been challenged by Question 1 in the first section as they traditionally find foreign-exchange questions tricky.
The next compulsory section, B, covered earnings and prices, interest rates and unemployment, and pupils would have found it more accessible, he thought.
Section C asks pupils to answer two out of six essay questions. The first was a classic on the basic theories of economics but, unusually, there were two questions on the Eurozone and the EU. On the whole, this section was slightly trickier than usual, but still offered a choice of questions, he added: “The section didn’t tend towards micro-economics as much this time and had more to do with international economics. But these areas are all there to be covered in questions.”
Mr Farquhar was pleased overall with the spread of questions in the Intermediate 2 exam.
