Leaving Cert geography students should take a little time away from their textbooks, switch on the radio or television or read the newspaper. This way, they can introduce some topicality into their answers in June, says geography teacher Des O'Leary.

"Most textbooks are a few years old. Getting up-to-date materials is especially important in the area of social geography," he says.

"A this stage, a good set of revision notes are very useful - your own set of notes is the best. Most textbooks are more than 300 pages long and there is no possibility of getting through them in the nights before the exam." So, to avoid last-minute panic, make sure you have some summaries or notes at hand.

Past papers are also very important, he says. These can be found on ScoilNet's site on the web or in most stationers. Take questions from these papers and prepare outline answers, advises O'Leary, who teaches in St Michael's in Navan, Co Meath, and is the author of several textbooks. There's no need to write out an entire answer.

This year, there's an extra 20 minutes for the geography exam. This translates into five minutes more per question. Should students spend the 20 minutes on their weakest question or, perhaps, on the long compulsory Ordnance Survey question? O'Leary suggests, instead, that students use the extra five minutes per question to plan their answer. Lack of planning is still one of the major problems when it comes to answering the geography paper.

"When you're planning your answer, base it around the key words in the question. See exactly what is required and, using the marks as a guide, plan your answer around these."

At this stage of the year, most students are worrying about priorities - what areas to concentrate on, how much time to spend on the various sections and the level of detail required.

In general terms, O'Leary says higher-level students often ignore an instruction to answer a question referring to three or four points. Instead, they answer a large number of points with very little detail given about any of them.

Students should, first of all, concentrate on the Ordnance Survey map, O'Leary says, as this is a compulsory question. It accounts for 25 per cent of the marks at higher level and 20 per cent at ordinary level.

The regional geography section is also compulsory at higher level. Students have a choice of one of four questions. "The regional geography is horrifically long in that students have to study 13 countries. It's pretty impossible to study all of these, so students might consider studying a number of the big countries such as France, Italy and Spain, as well as a couple of the smaller ones. You should also scatter the countries, perhaps choosing one Scandinavian country, one from the Mediterranean region and one from central Europe."

Questions have fallen into particular types in the past few years. There is no guarantee they will come up again but they make a useful division for revision. One type involves the core and periphery model, while the other is the "rather old-fashioned question dividing a country into regions. You might divide a country such as France, Spain or Germany into 10 or 12 regions, but a detailed knowledge of only three regions will be required. You should be able to write down this detailed information rather than giving a number of small points about a large number of regions."

The third type of question involves problem regions. To limit the amount of study required you could perhaps link this to other questions, so that, for instance, a peripheral region might also be a problem region. This way, a limited number of regions can be used in a number of different contexts, says O'Leary.

The remaining sections are physical, social and economic geography. You must answer one of four questions in each of two of these sections. Remember the advice regarding topicality here.

At ordinary level, students must do the Ordnance Survey map and four other questions. You can't do more than two questions from any one section. A typical range of questions would involve the map question, two physical geography questions, a social and a regional geography question, says O'Leary. If you do more than two questions from any section you will lose the marks for one of them, he warns.

The old chestnut about reading the paper correctly and answering what you're asked still holds true.