Geography: Resources, Economic Activities and Map Reading
This domain tests how resources are classified, which soil and climate suit which crop, where industries locate, and whether you can read a map accurately.
Classifying resources
Natural or human-made; renewable or non-renewable; potential, actual or reserve. Coal and petroleum are non-renewable; solar, wind and water are renewable. Sustainable use means matching extraction to regeneration.
Soil and crops
- Alluvial: Khadar (new) and Bhangar (old); the base of rice and wheat cultivation in the plains.
- Black (regur): from Deccan Trap lava, moisture-retentive, ideal for cotton.
- Red: from crystalline rock, often low in fertility.
- Laterite: heavy rainfall leaches the topsoil; used as building brick, poor for most crops.
- Cropping seasons: kharif (sown with the monsoon - rice, cotton, jowar, groundnut), rabi (winter - wheat, gram, mustard), zaid (short summer crops). Rice needs roughly 100 cm or more of water; wheat about 50–75 cm.
Industry, transport and maps
Agro-based industries cluster where raw material, capital and ports coincide - as cotton textiles did in Mumbai. Reading maps requires scale, direction, conventional signs and contours: closely spaced contours mean a steep slope, and a V-shaped contour points upstream along a valley.
Worked example
A map has a scale of 1 cm = 50 km. Two towns are 4.5 cm apart on the map. Find the ground distance. One centimetre represents 50 km, so 4.5 × 50 = 225 km. When the scale is given as a representative fraction (1:5,000,000), divide the measured distance by the denominator and convert centimetres to kilometres.
Traps
Swapping kharif and rabi crops; calling coal renewable; claiming laterite is highly fertile; describing contours as rainfall lines; forgetting to convert centimetres to kilometres in scale sums; ignoring the direction of a contour V when locating a stream.