Hi A Level students
These are comprehensive revision notes for Cambridge International AS & A Level Biology 9700, free and open to anyone. All nineteen topics are covered — the eleven AS topics and the eight added at A Level — together with both practical papers, which between them are worth over a third of the A Level and are the part most often left until last.
Biology at this level is not a memory test, whatever it looks like from the outside. Two of the three assessment objectives — handling, applying and evaluating information and experimental skills — are worth 60% of the marks, and neither can be revised by reading. Every page here therefore ends with a worked example, the specific mistake that costs marks on that topic, and six questions with full answers.
Please take note that although succinct notes are essential towards your revision, they should not be the only materials you cover — working through past paper questions is just as important, and in this subject so is time in the laboratory.
Happy revising. — Mr. Suta
🧭Start here
Which of the five papers you sit, what each is worth, the three routes through the qualification, and which syllabus version applies to your examination year. Five minutes here will save you an argument with yourself in March.
📚The topics
Use the rail on the left, or the cards below, to open any topic. AS candidates study topics 1–11; A Level candidates study all nineteen, and the AS content is assumed knowledge throughout the A Level papers.
AS Level — topics 1 to 11
Cells, the molecules they are built from, the enzymes that run them, and how substances move into and out of them — then the same logic scaled up to whole organisms in transport, gas exchange and defence against disease. Everything here is examined again at A Level, so it is worth getting right the first time.
A Level — topics 12 to 19
Energy and its capture, the control systems that hold an organism steady, and then inheritance, evolution and what we can now do with genes deliberately. This half of the course is more quantitative than the first: chi-squared, the t-test, Hardy–Weinberg and Simpson’s index all live here.
Practical assessment
Papers 3 and 5 assess AO3 and nothing else, and together they are 34.5% of the A Level — more than Paper 4. They are also the two papers students most often assume cannot be revised. They can: the mark schemes reward a small, stable set of skills, and these two pages set out what those are.
🧩How to use these pages
Every topic page follows the same shape: what you need to be able to do, then the biology broken into the syllabus sub-topics, a worked example, six practice questions with full answers, and a clearly separated list of other people’s resources.
The worked examples end by naming the specific mistake that costs marks on that topic — saying urea is added to the filtrate, reporting the Bohr shift as a reduction in oxygen capacity, writing that bacteria “became resistant because of the antibiotic”. Those paragraphs are the most useful part of the page and the easiest to skip.
Where a topic connects to another, the link is there in the text. Follow them: biology is marked on the connections, and questions on Paper 4 routinely start in one topic and finish in another.
🎓Official Cambridge resources
These are the documents that actually govern the course. Your school has access to all of them through the Cambridge School Support Hub, so ask me if you cannot reach one.
- The 9700 syllabus document — check you have the version for your examination years. The learning outcomes are listed sub-topic by sub-topic, and they are the definitive statement of what can be asked.
- The practical assessment section of the syllabus — sections 5 for Papers 3 and 5. It lists the expectations for each skill in detail, and almost nobody reads it.
- Examiner reports — the single most under-used resource. Examiners describe, in plain language, exactly what candidates got wrong last session.
- Specimen papers and mark schemes — written for the current syllabus.
📜A note on past papers
Past papers are the most valuable revision you can do in this subject, and your school can give you properly licensed ones. Ask me and I will get you past questions by topic.
Two warnings when you use them. First, mark your own work against the mark scheme rather than against a model answer — biology mark schemes award specific points, and you cannot see which ones you missed by comparing prose. Second, watch the command words: describe, explain, suggest and discuss ask for different things, and a correct answer to the wrong command word scores nothing.