Tamil Nadu HSE Second Year Geography cheat sheet

Ratzel defined human geography as the 'synthetic study of the relationship between human societies and the earth's surface'; Ellen Semple called it the study of the changing relationship between 'the unresting man and the unstable earth'.

Vidal de la Blache described human geography as offering 'a new conception of the interrelationships between earth and human beings', stressing human choice within environmental limits.

Three classic approaches: environmental determinism (Ratzel, Semple, Huntington), possibilism (Vidal de la Blache, Lucien Febvre, Brunhes) and neo-determinism or 'stop-and-go determinism' (Griffith Taylor).

Core concepts to define and apply: areal differentiation, spatial distribution, density, concentration, pattern, diffusion, region, landscape and human-environment interdependence.

The subject carries dualisms: physical versus human geography, and general (nomothetic, law-seeking) versus regional (idiographic, descriptive) geography.

Major subfields: population, settlement, economic, cultural, social, political, historical, medical and urban geography, each with its own spatial questions.

Chorology, associated with Hettner, treats geography as the study of regions and areal differentiation rather than of universal laws.

Techniques include cartography, remote sensing, GIS, field surveys, sampling and statistical correlation; the quantitative revolution of the 1960s made spatial models central.

Human geography is applied in urban and regional planning, resource management, disaster risk reduction, population policy and location of services.

Arithmetic density = total population / total land area; physiological density = population / cultivated area; agricultural density = agricultural population / cultivated area.

Natural increase = births minus deaths; doubling time is approximately 70 divided by the annual growth rate in per cent.

About 90 per cent of the world's people live in the Northern Hemisphere and roughly 60 per cent in Asia; the ecumene covers only part of the land surface.

Demographic transition stages: I high stationary (high birth and death rates), II early expanding (death rate falls, growth fastest), III late expanding (birth rate falls), IV low stationary, V declining (birth rate below death rate).

Population pyramid types: expansive (broad base, high fertility), constrictive (narrow base, ageing population) and stationary (bell-shaped, stable).

Composition measures include sex ratio, age structure and dependency ratio = (population aged 0-14 plus 65 and above) / population aged 15-64 x 100.

HDI was created in 1990 by UNDP on the ideas of Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen; it is the geometric mean of a life expectancy index, an education index (mean and expected years of schooling) and a GNI per capita (PPP) index, ranging 0 to 1.

HDI groups: very high 0.800 and above, high 0.700-0.799, medium 0.550-0.699, low below 0.550.

Physical controls on distribution are relief, climate, soil and water; human controls are agriculture, industry, transport, urbanisation and government policy.

Four-sector classification: primary (extraction from nature), secondary (processing and construction), tertiary (services) and quaternary (knowledge and information); a quinary sector covers top-level decision-making.

Clark's sector model holds that as economies develop, the workforce shifts from primary to secondary and then to tertiary activities.

Farming systems to compare: shifting cultivation, nomadic herding, intensive subsistence rice farming, extensive commercial grain farming, plantation agriculture, mixed farming, dairy farming, horticulture and ranching.

Weight-losing industries (sugar, iron and steel, cement) process bulky raw material and locate near the raw material source; weight-gaining industries (beverages, bakery) locate near the market.

Weber's least-cost theory locates a plant where transport, labour and agglomeration costs are minimised, using isodapanes (lines of equal transport cost) around material and market points.

Location factors: raw material, power, water, transport, labour, market, capital, agglomeration economies and government policy.

Cottage industry uses local raw material and family labour at home; small-scale industry uses hired labour and power; both are labour-intensive and help decentralised development.

Footloose industries such as electronics and precision instruments are locationally flexible because they are neither strongly weight-losing nor weight-gaining.

MNCs, outsourcing, special economic zones and industrial corridors have produced a new international division of labour in manufacturing.

Modal comparison: road is door-to-door and flexible; rail suits bulk over long distances; water is cheapest for bulky goods but slowest; air is fastest and costliest; pipelines give continuous flow of liquids and gases.

Trade forms: bilateral, multilateral, entrepot, re-export and invisible trade in services; balance of trade = visible exports minus visible imports, while balance of payments also includes invisibles and capital flows.

WTO came into being in 1995, succeeding GATT (1948); major trade blocs include the EU, ASEAN, USMCA, SAARC and OPEC for petroleum.

Rural settlements are dominated by primary occupations and low density; urban settlements by secondary and tertiary occupations, high density and built-up land.

Site factors for settlements are water supply, fertile land, defence, transport nodes and raw materials; situation refers to location relative to routes, resources and other settlements.

Settlement patterns: compact or nucleated, dispersed, linear, rectangular, radial and star-shaped.

Urban hierarchy: hamlet, village, town, city, metropolis, megacity (10 million and above), conurbation, megalopolis.

Christaller's central place theory uses hexagonal complementary regions; range (maximum distance consumers will travel) and threshold (minimum demand for a service to be viable) generate a nested hierarchy of towns.

Census 2011: population 1,210.9 million; decadal growth 17.7 per cent (2001-11); density 382 persons per sq km; sex ratio 943; literacy 74.04 per cent (male 82.14, female 65.46); urban share 31.16 per cent.

Most populous state Uttar Pradesh; least populous Sikkim; highest density Bihar (1,106 per sq km); lowest density Arunachal Pradesh (17 per sq km).

Highest sex ratio Kerala (1,084 females per 1,000 males); lowest Haryana (879); highest literacy Kerala (94.0 per cent); lowest Bihar (61.8 per cent).

Migration streams: rural-to-rural is the largest stream overall and dominates female migration for marriage, while rural-to-urban dominates male migration for work.

Intra-district migration is the largest category in India, followed by inter-district and then inter-state movement; seasonal and circular migration is common in agriculture and construction.

Push factors include poverty, unemployment, drought and land pressure; pull factors include jobs, education, health care and higher wages.

There were 53 million-plus urban agglomerations in Census 2011; Greater Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai are the largest.

Indian settlement types: compact or nucleated (plains), dispersed (hills and tribal areas), hamleted (eastern Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal) and segmented (Kerala and Himalayan valleys).

Within India, Kerala ranks first among states on HDI and Bihar last; HDI combines longevity, education and income.

Land use: net sown area is about 46 per cent of the reporting area; recorded forest area is about 23 per cent of geographical area (actual forest cover near 21-22 per cent); the rest is barren, fallow, pasture and culturable waste.

Soil types: alluvial (largest, about 40 per cent of area, fertile, Indo-Gangetic plain), black or regur (Deccan, cotton), red (crystalline rocks), laterite (heavy rainfall, leached), arid, forest and mountain soils.

Himalayan rivers are perennial, fed by snow melt and monsoon rain; peninsular rivers are rain-fed, seasonal and flow in broad shallow valleys.

Irrigation: wells and tube wells supply the largest share, followed by canals and then tanks; Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh show serious groundwater depletion.

Multipurpose projects: Bhakra-Nangal (Sutlej), Damodar Valley (Damodar), Hirakud (Mahanadi), Nagarjuna Sagar (Krishna), Tehri (Bhagirathi) and Sardar Sarovar (Narmada).

Minerals: iron ore in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Jharkhand; coal in Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal; bauxite in Odisha; mica in Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.

Coal grades by descending carbon content: anthracite, bituminous, lignite, peat; Gondwana coal in the Damodar, Mahanadi, Son, Godavari and Narmada valleys provides most of India's coal, while Tertiary coal occurs in Assam, Meghalaya and Nagaland.

Petroleum: Mumbai High, Gujarat (Ankleshwar, Khambhat), Assam (Digboi, Naharkatiya) and Rajasthan (Barmer); natural gas: Mumbai High, Krishna-Godavari basin and Assam.

Nuclear plants: Tarapur (Maharashtra), Rawatbhata (Rajasthan), Kalpakkam and Kudankulam (Tamil Nadu), Narora (Uttar Pradesh), Kakrapar (Gujarat), Kaiga (Karnataka); non-conventional sources include solar (Rajasthan, Gujarat) and wind (Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra).

Cropping seasons: kharif sown with the south-west monsoon in June-July and harvested in September-October; rabi sown in October-December and harvested in March-April; zaid is a short summer season.

Leading producers: rice West Bengal; wheat Uttar Pradesh; cotton Gujarat; sugarcane Uttar Pradesh; groundnut Gujarat; soyabean Madhya Pradesh; tea Assam; coffee Karnataka; rubber Kerala; jute West Bengal.

Green Revolution: high-yielding seeds, irrigation, fertiliser and credit raised wheat and rice output in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, but widened regional inequality and increased groundwater use and soil salinity.

Other revolutions: White (milk, Operation Flood, Verghese Kurien), Blue (fish), Yellow (oilseeds), Golden (horticulture) and Pink (prawns).

Iron and steel plants: TISCO Jamshedpur (1907, private), Bhilai (Chhattisgarh), Rourkela (Odisha), Durgapur (West Bengal), Bokaro (Jharkhand), Visakhapatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Salem (Tamil Nadu).

Cotton textiles: Mumbai (first mill 1854), Ahmedabad, Coimbatore ('Manchester of South India') and Kanpur; jute mills concentrate along the Hooghly in West Bengal.

Sugar mills locate in the cane tracts of Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra because cane loses sucrose and weight after harvesting; rice and oil mills also favour raw material areas.

Software and IT services concentrate at Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Noida and Gurugram; Chennai is called the 'Detroit of India' for automobiles.

Make in India (2014), special economic zones, the National Manufacturing Policy and industrial corridors such as Delhi-Mumbai and Chennai-Bengaluru aim to raise manufacturing's share of GDP.

Planning Commission was set up in 1950 and replaced by NITI Aayog on 1 January 2015; the First Five-Year Plan (1951-56) stressed agriculture under the Harrod-Domar model, the Second (1956-61) stressed industry under the Mahalanobis model, and the Twelfth (2012-17) was the last.

Sustainable development milestones: Brundtland Report 'Our Common Future' (1987), Rio Earth Summit and Agenda 21 (1992), Kyoto Protocol (1997), Paris Agreement (2015) and the 17 SDGs with 169 targets to be achieved by 2030.

Highways: Golden Quadrilateral of 5,846 km linking Delhi-Mumbai-Chennai-Kolkata; North-South corridor Srinagar-Kanyakumari; East-West corridor Silchar-Porbandar.

Railways are organised into 18 zones including Kolkata Metro; gauges are broad, metre and narrow; the Konkan Railway links Roha with Mangaluru along the west coast.

Inland waterways: NW-1 Ganga (Haldia-Allahabad), NW-2 Brahmaputra (Dhubri-Sadiya) and NW-3 West Coast Canal (Kollam-Kottapuram).

Ports: Kandla (Gujarat), JNPT (largest container port), Visakhapatnam (deepest landlocked), Paradip, Haldia, Chennai, Tuticorin, Kochi, Marmagao and New Mangalore.

Exports: petroleum products, gems and jewellery, engineering goods, chemicals and textiles; imports: crude petroleum, gold, electronics and coal; main partners include the USA, China and the UAE; India usually runs a trade deficit.

Environmental issues: air and water pollution, deforestation, land degradation, biodiversity loss and groundwater depletion; responses include the Ganga Action Plan and Namami Gange, Project Tiger (1973) and the Chipko movement.

Hazard zones: floods in the Ganga-Brahmaputra plains, cyclones along the Bay of Bengal coast, drought in Marathwada and Rayalaseema, earthquakes in the Himalaya and Kachchh, and landslides in the Himalaya and Western Ghats.