91934 · Natural processes

• This page is the first job of 91934, not the exam

  Achievement Standard 91934 is Geography 1.3, five credits, **external**. The achievement criteria are demonstrate / explain / examine how natural processes shape an environment. Explanatory Note 1 splits Achieved into three jobs: describe natural processes and the resulting phenomena within an environment; describe impacts on the environment from those processes and phenomena; include relevant evidence and geographic terminology. Merit lifts the first job to **explaining how natural processes create phenomena**, and the second to **wider** impacts. Excellence **examines implications** for people who live in or near the environment. This page teaches the words those jobs are about: process, phenomenon, sequence. It does not write a Merit explanation of a cone, and it does not write an Excellence implication. The other Topic 3 jobs have owners. Glacial and tectonic families, with official unpacking examples such as Tongariro, a u-shaped valley and a cone, belong on the later page that first-teaches glacial and tectonic families. Climatic, coastal and fluvial families, with official unpacking examples such as Omaha, a named awa, a floodplain and a spit, belong on the later page that opens those three drawers. Applying the same thinking to an unseen landscape is the later page on unfamiliar environments, which is Section One of the paper. Case-study impacts on cultural features and future implications for people are the later case-study page, which is Section Two. The 2026 specification is a printed two-section paper. Section One: choose **one of three** unfamiliar environments, each with distinctive characteristics from the EN3 families. Section Two: your own case-study environment, which must be **different**. Written answers, supported with annotated map(s) and/or diagrams. The 2025 live booklet asked you, on the unfamiliar resource, to name two processes, label a range of features those processes shaped, and explain how two labelled features were formed, as sequences, with geographic terminology. That command sequence is the live shape. It is not a prompt for this page to become a paper. You need the vocabulary before you sit the transfer. This page is not the exam. Practise here should stay deterministic: classify event versus process versus family; put steps of a given sequence in order; accept or reject a proposed phenomenon for 91934; say which family could actually operate in a described landscape. Those tasks are not a paper, and the checks below are not a paper. Grades are estimates. This unit never claims examiner authority. The 2024 paper was a submitted report: candidates chose resources themselves. 2025 and 2026 are sit-down. Do not practise 91934 as a take-home report.

• A process is a sequence of actions, not a name

  A process is a sequence of actions or steps. That is the official meaning, and every word in it is doing work. **Sequence** means the actions have an order: this happens, then this, then this, and the later step depends on the earlier ones. **Actions or steps** means you can say what is actually moving, wearing, carrying, dropping, lifting or freezing. A name without the sequence is only a label. Students arrive with labels. “Coastal processes.” “Erosion.” “Tectonics.” “The water cycle.” “Climate change.” A label is a drawer. A process is what you take out of the drawer and run, in order, in a named environment. Erosion is a step that appears inside several families; it is not, on its own, a 91934 process. The water cycle is a Science system diagram. Climate change worldwide is a slogan at the wrong scale. None of those sentences tells a stranger what happened *here*. The 2025 report’s Not Achieved list includes candidates who “identified processes rather than describe or explain them as being a sequence of events.” Achieved candidates “described a natural process by providing a sequence of events that occurs in their operation.” That is the floor. Merit then **links** the sequence to the phenomena it created. You cannot link a name. You can link a sequence. Write the steps so a classmate who has not stood in the environment could still follow them. Use the subject’s own words *inside* the steps — swash, backwash, point bar, cut bank, hanging wall — not as a glossary dump in the first sentence. Attach the steps to *this* place: this wind direction, this shore, this bend, this fault. A process that would be true on any coast is not yet a process that shaped this environment. The unpacking is explicit: if you look at a macro-process, you still have to show how a particular part of it is located in the specific environment and shapes it. A useful test, already owned by the evidence page and spent here on a sequence: if you deleted the place names and the steps still read like a textbook paragraph about “rivers in general”, you have not yet written the process for 91934.

• The five families are a closed list

  Natural processes, on 91934, **can be**: glacial, tectonic, climatic, coastal, fluvial. Explanatory Note 3 is that short. The list is closed. You do not add biological, human, urban, anthropogenic, or “volcanic” as a sixth family sitting beside the five. What each name **points at**, without first-teaching the family: - Glacial — ice moving across rock: accumulating, flowing, plucking, abrading, carrying, depositing. Phenomena the later glacial page will unpack include a u-shaped valley and a glacier. The official unpacking pairs glacial with tectonic in a volcanic environment such as Tongariro. - Tectonic — the crust moving: strain, faulting, uplift, subsidence, folding, and the rise of magma that builds volcanic landforms. Phenomena the later tectonic page will unpack include a volcanic cone and a caldera. EN3 does not list “volcanic” separately. When the Ministry unpacking says “volcanic processes” create cones and calderas, it is describing tectonic-family work in a volcanic environment, not opening a sixth drawer. - Climatic — the atmosphere acting on the land: prevailing wind, orographic uplift, rainfall that loads a catchment, freeze–thaw, long dry spells that loosen a surface. A storm, a cyclone and sea-level rise are **not** climatic processes. They are phenomena or events. The climatic *process* is the sequence of atmospheric actions underneath them. - Coastal — waves, tides and currents acting on a shore: swash, backwash, longshore transport, constructive and destructive wave action. Phenomena the later coastal page will unpack include a spit, a dune and a stack. The official unpacking pairs coastal with climatic at Omaha Beach. - Fluvial — running water in a channel and across a floodplain: erosion of a cut bank, deposition of a point bar, overbank deposition, channel migration. Phenomena the later fluvial page will unpack include a floodplain, a meander and a waterfall. The official unpacking pairs fluvial with climatic on named awa. A flood is not the fluvial process. It is an event the fluvial sequence can produce. You need a **range** of environments so you can transfer. The Ministry unpacking says so, and the 2025 report rewarded candidates who had studied more than one environment rather than one extreme event. That is why later pages first-teach the five families in two groups, then ask you to transfer those sequences and write a case study, rather than treating each family as its own exam. Do not treat “volcanoes” or “climate change” as if they were the standard. Two families often operate in one environment. Omaha in the unpacking is coastal **and** climatic. Tongariro is glacial **and** tectonic. A named awa is fluvial **and** climatic. Naming two families is allowed. Writing neither sequence is not. Each process you claim still has to be a sequence of actions in *this* environment.

• A family name is not a process

  Family is a Whetū teaching word for the five EN3 headings. It is not an official NZQA glossary term, and you should not write “the family was coastal” in an answer as if that were terminology doing work. The official words are the five adjectives themselves. The mistake the word is there to stop is this: a student writes “coastal processes shaped the environment” and thinks the job is done. That sentence names the drawer. It does not open it. The 2024 report’s expected sequence for longshore drift is the official contrast. Wind direction sets the wave approach. Swash runs up the beach at that angle. Backwash returns down the steepest slope. Repeated wave action moves sediment along the shore. Where the coastline bends, sediment is dropped in quieter water. A ridge lengthens into a spit. Those are actions. The word “coastal” never had to appear for the process to be coastal. - “Glacial processes made a u-shaped valley.” - “Tectonic processes made a cone.” - “Climatic processes made the rainfall.” - “Coastal processes made a spit.” - “Fluvial processes made a floodplain.” Each of those may be *pointing* at the right drawer. None of them is a process. Replace the family name with the steps, then check that the steps actually happen in the environment you were given. A glacial sequence written onto a lowland floodplain is still a wrong process, however beautifully sequenced. “Erosion and deposition” is the little-sibling of the same mistake. Those are steps that live inside several families. Name the agent — ice, a fault, wind and rain, waves, a river — and put the steps in order for that agent, in this place.

• Phenomena on 91934 are created by natural processes — and more than one

  Phenomena, for the purposes of this standard, are types of geographic features, objects or events that can be mapped, **created by natural processes**. They can exist at local, regional, national or global scale. Official examples: u-shaped valley; volcanic cone; floodplain. The standard then says the thing students skip: “Phenomena are more than one phenomenon, for example, a u-shaped valley and a glacier within an environment.” Three official kinds still sit inside that sentence — feature, object, event — but the extra clause does work the 91932 definition does not. On 91932, a nature walking trail is a legitimate phenomenon. On 91934, you are looking at what the natural processes made. The trail, the surf club, the marae, the state highway, the packhouse — those are cultural features of the same environment. People are part of the environment (EN2). Cultural features matter later, when you describe impacts. They are not a substitute for the landform the process created. More than one is a number requirement, not a style preference. A u-shaped valley *and* a glacier. A cone *and* a caldera. A floodplain *and* a meander. A spit *and* a lagoon. The 2025 Achieved schedule example identifies a spit and a floodplain and describes a coastal and a fluvial process. Merit adds beach and meander. Excellence can add mountain and orographic cloud. You do not need that schedule in front of you. You need the habit: name a range, and keep every named feature inside the processes you claimed. One famous landform is the 91934 version of the 91932 single-site failure. “My environment is the cone.” “My environment is the spit.” The environment is the area. The cone or the spit is one phenomenon inside it. The standard wants the processes *and the resulting phenomena* — plural. Expected Level 1 feature vocabulary, from the 2024 report’s own examples: stack, spit, meander, U-shaped valley, floodplain, vent, stratovolcano. Those are working words. They are not a closed official checklist, and this page will not invent one. Use the word that names the feature in front of you. Do not empty the list into the first sentence. A phenomenon can be an event. Earthquake activity, a mapped flood peak, a recorded slip — those can be mapped. They still have to be *created by natural processes*, and they still are not themselves the process. The next concept is the one the 2025 report asked schools to teach.

• Events that are not processes

  The 2025 assessment report, in the commentary on 91934, writes this as guidance, not as a hint: > It is important to note that sea level rise, storms, cyclones and > earthquakes are not processes, they are phenomena or events. > Candidates need to show an understanding of the processes that cause > these if they include them in their responses. The report’s other half of the same warning is about case-study choice. Many candidates “selected major natural events” and then explained the impacts of the event rather than the processes behind it and how those processes lead to impacts. Contexts that put the **environment** at the centre were the ones that transferred. An environment is a particular geographic area within te taiao that has its own characteristics, and people are part of it. A named night in 2016 is not an environment. You may still *use* an event, if you must, as a phenomenon the processes produced. “Repeated tectonic slip on the Rook Fault has raised Bench Three about four metres above present high water; one mapped event in the constructed record was felt in Glassmere.” The event is evidence inside the sequence. The sequence is the process. The terrace and the raised strand are the phenomena. “The earthquake shaped the coast” has collapsed all three of those into a headline.

• How to write a sequence

  A sequence on this standard has a recognisable shape. The 2024 report’s longshore-drift example is the official model, not because every environment is a spit, but because the markers said out loud what they wanted to see: an order of actions, named with geographic terminology, that ends in a phenomenon. **1. Name the family only so you can choose the right agent.** Coastal, not “nature”. Then stop using the family name as if it were a step. **2. Start from a condition that actually exists in this environment.** Prevailing wind from the south-east. A low-gradient reach below Ledger Bend. Strain along the Rook Fault. If the condition is not in the resource or the case study, you are inventing. **3. Put the actions in an order a stranger can follow.** This happens, which causes this, which is repeated, which produces that. Each step should be something that moves, wears, carries, drops or lifts. “And then erosion” is not a step. “Swash runs up the beach at the angle of the approaching wave” is. **4. Repeat.** Most landforms are not made by one wave, one flood or one slip. The official longshore-drift example includes “repetition of wave action”. A floodplain is repeated overbank deposition. A flight of terraces is repeated uplift. If you skip repetition you will accidentally turn the process back into an event. **5. Arrive at more than one phenomenon in this environment.** The spit *and* the lagoon. The floodplain *and* the meander. The terrace *and* the raised strand. The last step should make those features inevitable, not just adjacent. **6. Stay inside the environment.** “Rivers deposit sediment when they lose energy” is Science. “On the inside of Ledger Bend the Fern River loses energy, drops its coarser load as a point bar, and has shifted the channel six metres toward the cut bank between the constructed 2004 and 2024 surveys” is Geography. You will practise this habit on short sequences in the worked examples. You will first-teach the full glacial, tectonic, climatic, coastal and fluvial sequences on the next two pages. Do not steal those pages by turning this one into a landform encyclopaedia. Steal only the *habit*: condition → actions in order → repetition → phenomena, here.

• Factor versus process, and why the boundary matters here

  A factor is a characteristic or circumstance. A process is a sequence of actions. Topic 0 introduced that pair. The 91932 page on factors and processes owns it for the internal, where you need at least two factors, or two processes, or one of each, to explain a *distribution*. On 91934 the same pair still matters, because students hide a missing sequence inside a factor. “The prevailing wind is from the south-east” is a circumstance. It helps to explain why the swash angle is what it is. It is not the coastal process. “The Fern River’s gradient falls to about 1 in 800 below Ledger Bend” is a circumstance. It is not the fluvial process. “The Rook Fault is reverse” is a circumstance. It is not the tectonic process. Use the factor as the first step’s setting. Then write the actions. If your whole “process” is a list of circumstances — wind, rock type, slope, rainfall total — you have written factors and called them a process. That may be enough somewhere on 91932. It is not a 91934 sequence.

• Label the feature, not the process

  The 2025 report’s first Not Achieved bullet is practical, and it is easy to miss in a Learn page that has no map: candidates “labelled processes rather than features on the resources or did not label the resources at all.” On a topographic sheet or a photograph, the things you can point at are phenomena and cultural features: the spit, the lagoon, the meander, the floodplain, the cone, the caldera, the terrace, the surf club, the road. You cannot point at “longshore drift”. You cannot point at “fluvial processes”. Those are sequences you write in sentences. Whetū will not generate the sheet. Until a licensed figure exists, you practise the same distinction in words. “I would label the curved sand ridge attached to Tern Head and the quiet water behind it, not the words *coastal processes* in the inlet.” That sentence is already the right habit. A later unfamiliar-environment page will spend it on a described unseen landscape. Do not invent a map so you can practise arrows. The same bullet explains a second failure: not labelling at all. A process with no named phenomena is a lecture. Phenomena with no process are a list. 91934 wants both, linked.

• The process must operate in this environment

  The 2025 report’s transfer story is specific. Resource A was Aoraki / Mt Cook. It is not a volcanic environment. Candidates who had studied Tongariro and then applied volcanic processes to Aoraki failed the transfer. Section One distinguished students who understood processes from students who had rote-learned one case study. That is a classification job before it is a writing job. Look at the environment. What families could actually operate here? A high alpine valley with hanging ice and truncated spurs is a candidate for glacial, and often tectonic uplift underneath. It is not a candidate for a stratovolcano sequence you memorised in Term 2. A lowland meander belt with levées and an oxbow is a candidate for fluvial, and often climatic rainfall that loads the channel. It is not a candidate for longshore drift. An open east-coast embayment with a sand ridge growing across the mouth is a candidate for coastal, and often climatic wind that sets the wave approach. It is not a candidate for a glacier. Wrong-family errors are not only volcanic-on-Aoraki. They include coastal sequences written onto an inland floodplain because “water”, glacial sequences written onto a Northland harbour because “erosion”, and tectonic sequences written onto a dune field because the student had only one case study. The later unfamiliar page will train the transfer. This page trains the refusal: if the family cannot operate here, do not write it. If you only know one environment, you will force it onto every resource. The unpacking asked kaiako to teach a range. The report confirmed why. Two further paper rules sit on the same hinge, and they are named only so you do not practise the opposite. Do not use the **same** environment for both sections. The 2024 report treated that as a failure of the paper’s intent. Do not dump a rote case-study paragraph onto the unfamiliar resource. Section One is transfer. Section Two is the case study. This page does not write either answer.

External · grade-score marked.

This standard is assessed as an end-of-year external paper.

A mock paper is available in Whetū: Mock paper · Natural processes.

5 authored Learn units for this standard.

• Processes, phenomena, and sequences

  This page teaches the first job of Achievement Standard 91934: hearing the difference between a natural process, a phenomenon, and a sequence. The official title of the standard is longer — *Demonstrate understanding of how natural processes shape an environment* — and the later Topic 3 pages take the rest of that title. You are not writing the whole external on this page. You are learning the words the rest of the standard is about. If you cannot tell a process from an event, and you cannot write a process as a sequence of actions that actually operate in a named environment, nothing that follows will be Geography.

• Glacial and tectonic processes

  This page teaches the two families the previous Topic 3 page named and then left shut: glacial and tectonic. Achievement Standard 91934 still wants the same job you already know — a sequence of actions that creates more than one phenomenon in a named environment — but the sequence now has to be the one ice actually runs, or the one the crust and its magma actually run. “Glacial processes made a u-shaped valley” is still only a family name. This page opens the drawer.

• Climatic, coastal and fluvial processes

  This page first-teaches three of the five families in Achievement Standard 91934: climatic, coastal and fluvial. The official title of the standard is longer — *Demonstrate understanding of how natural processes shape an environment* — and you are still not writing the whole external here. The previous Topic 3 page taught you to hear a process as a sequence of actions, to keep events in the phenomenon column, and to refuse a family name worn as if it were a sequence. This page opens three of the drawers. If you cannot yet tell a process from a storm, go back. This page will not rescue a family you never wrote as actions.

• Applying processes to an unfamiliar environment

  This page teaches the job that makes Achievement Standard 91934 a sit-down external rather than a case-study recital: taking the sequences you already have and running them on an unfamiliar environment. The official title is still *Demonstrate understanding of how natural processes shape an environment*. Earlier pages taught you the words, then opened the five drawers — glacial, tectonic, climatic, coastal and fluvial. This page assumes you have those pages first. It does not first-teach the sequences. It asks whether you can open the right drawer when the landscape in front of you is not the one you revised.

• Case-study environments: impacts and implications

  This page first-teaches the second half of Achievement Standard 91934: how natural processes that already shape an environment change that environment — including the cultural features people have put in it — and what those changes imply for people who live in or near it, now or later. The official title is still *Demonstrate understanding of how natural processes shape an environment*. You are still not writing the whole external on one page. Earlier Topic 3 pages taught you to hear a process as a sequence of actions, to keep events in the phenomenon column, and to write the five EN3 families as sequences that actually operate here. The sibling exam-assessed page owns transfer to an unfamiliar landscape. This page is the other exam-assessed job. If you cannot yet write a sequence, go back. This page will not rescue a spit you explained as “coastal processes,” a floodplain you explained as “the 2019 flood,” or a cone you explained as “the eruption.”

36 Practise questions in “Natural processes”. Feedback here is formative and is not an official NCEA grade.

• Process versus phenomenon

  A process is a sequence. An earthquake or cyclone is not a process

• The five families

  Glacial, tectonic, climatic, coastal, fluvial — written as actions

• An unseen landscape

  Classify first, then attach sequences to this resource only

• Impacts and implications

  What processes do to cultural features, then what people may do next

• A verbal landscape, not a drawn map

  Whetū describes the unseen environment in words. Do not invent a topo sheet

Sample questions

1. On 91934, what is a natural process?
2. The 2025 assessment report treated earthquakes, cyclones and sea-level rise as which of these?
3. Match each constructed item to the column it belongs in.
4. In a sentence or two, explain why that is not yet a process, and name the first two actions a longshore-drift sequence would need.
5. EN4 says phenomena are more than one phenomenon. Which pair actually meets that rule in one environment?
6. A student lists “volcanic, glacial and tectonic” as three EN3 families. What is the official move?
7. Match each official process family to a sequence that actually belongs in that drawer.
8. Put the official longshore-drift shape in order for constructed Wren Bar.

Practise 91934 in Whetū

464 original exam-style questions in Whetū. These are practice papers, not official NZQA assessments.

• Iron Notch · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Salt Ledge · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Quartz Rift · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Peat Bend · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Cinder Lip · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Kelp Bar · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Scree Gate · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Willow Reach · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Basalt Stair · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Dune Hollow · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Fault Ford · Processes, phenomena, and sequences
• Kettle Bench · Processes, phenomena, and sequences