AQA GCSE Business Studies Paper 1: Influences of Operations and HRM on Business Activity June 2023 question paper 8132/1

Which of the following is true for a public limited company?

Which of the following costs is an example of a variable cost?

Which of the following statements describes job production?

If an employee changes from full-time employment to job sharing, which of the following is true?

Which of the following is likely to be an effect of delayering in an organisation?

Which statement is most likely to be correct when interest rates rise?

Identify two stakeholders of a business.

Explain one cost of maintaining quality during the production of a product.

Explain one disadvantage to a business of poor customer service.

Describe one characteristic of an entrepreneur.

Explain what is meant by ‘induction training’.

State and explain two financial methods of rewarding employees.

Item A: Xanthe’s Tech-Academy

Explain what is meant by ‘off the job’ training.

Xanthe has set a target to make 200% profit on top of costs each time the new course is run.

Two trainers will run the four-hour course with 30 people attending.

Using Table 1 calculate the selling price per person.

Xanthe believes increasing the range of courses offered will keep the business competitive.

Recommend whether XTA should introduce the new course ‘Using Web Conferencing Effectively’. Give reasons for your answer.

Item B: Xanthe’s Tech-Academy

Explain one benefit of internal recruitment.

Xanthe uses delegation to give employees greater levels of responsibility.

Analyse one benefit to XTA of using delegation to motivate employees.

Xanthe involves her employees in some decision making but she makes all major decisions herself.

Recommend whether Xanthe should create a taller organisational structure. Give reasons for your choice.

Item C: NIST cars

The factory uses flow production. Employees are specialists, trained in one specific role of the production process. All the employees have responsibility for checking if faults exist. Employees are trained to check their work thoroughly. Mistakes must be identified before a car moves to the next stage of production. The total production of a car takes 28 hours.

The factory in the UK recently won an award for being ‘The UK manufacturer of the year’. Quality standards are exceptionally high. In the last five years every car has reached the end of the production process without a fault present.

Recently the business has experienced issues with car parts. A supplier providing engine parts to NIST had to shut down for a day. As a result, NIST had to halt production of its cars for several hours. NIST orders parts from suppliers when a customer orders a car. Many suppliers are near to the factory. Some suppliers will deliver parts in less than two hours and there are frequent small deliveries throughout the day. The production of a car relies on parts arriving precisely when they are needed.

Table 3: Electric cars and changes in exchange rates

Identify one sector of production.

Using Table 3, explain one benefit for NIST of a fall in the value of the pound when selling cars in Europe.

NIST orders parts from suppliers when a customer orders a car.

Analyse one drawback to NIST of using just-in-time (JIT) stock control for parts needed to produce its cars.

In the last five years every car has reached the end of the production process without a fault present.

Analyse one benefit of using total quality management (TQM) to maintain standards in the production of cars at the NIST UK factory.

Item D: NIST cars

Using the data in Figure 1, describe what happened to global car sales from 2019 to 2021.

NIST used the graph to help forecast its profits for 2022.

Explain how information from Figure 1 may have helped NIST forecast that profits will fall in 2022.

Using Item D, explain how global demand for new cars may be affected by changes in levels of employment around the world in 2020 and 2021.

Item E: NIST cars

In the current economic climate, the selling price for a car cannot be increased. To improve profits NIST must sell more cars next year. To increase the number of cars sold NIST will be using these two options:

1. Produce the new electric car, the NIST March, at its factory in Spain.

2. Set up an e-commerce website to sell the existing Folio electric car to businesses in the UK.

Analyse the effect of each of these two options for NIST.

Evaluate which of these two options will have the biggest impact on the number of cars sold by NIST.