World Minerals, Industries and Major Crops: Exam Notes

The correct answer is B, Sweden. Kiruna lies in Swedish Lapland, inside the Arctic Circle, and works a high-grade magnetite deposit of the Baltic Shield. Its ore is carried by rail to Narvik in Norway, an ice-free port warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, and to Lulea on the Gulf of Bothnia.

Option A, Norway, is only the outlet: Narvik handles Kiruna's ore but the mine is not Norwegian. Option C, Finland, shares the same shield and has copper, nickel and chromium mines, but no deposit of this fame. Option D, Denmark, is built of young sedimentary rock and has no metallic mining worth the name. The useful habit here is to link the ore to the shield it sits in, which is why northern Sweden, the Canadian Shield and Western Australia all appear in iron ore questions.

The correct answer is C, Saudi Arabia. Ghawar, discovered in 1948 in the eastern province of the kingdom, has been the largest conventional oil field known anywhere, and it is the field most often named in exams along with Safaniya, the biggest offshore field, also Saudi.

Option A, Iraq, has the great Kirkuk and Rumaila fields, and Rumaila is among the largest in the world, but not the largest. Option B, Iran, has Ahvaz, Marun and Gachsaran in the Zagros foothills. Option D, Kuwait, has Burgan, which is usually named as the second largest conventional field and therefore the most tempting wrong answer. All four countries draw their oil from the same great sedimentary basin of West Asia, formed from the sediments of the ancient Tethys Sea.

The correct answer is A, copper in Chile. Chuquicamata, in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, is one of the largest open-pit copper mines in the world, and Escondida, in the same desert, is the other name to remember. The copper lies in the porphyry deposits of the Andes, which have made Chile the leading copper country for decades.

Option B is wrong because South African gold comes from the Witwatersrand basin, not from Chuquicamata. Option C names Bolivian tin, which comes from the Oruro and Potosi districts of the Bolivian plateau. Option D names Canadian nickel, which comes from Sudbury in Ontario and Thompson in Manitoba. The other great copper region to keep with Chile is the Central African Copperbelt of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Zambian towns beside it.

The correct answer is B, gold. The Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg has produced a large share of all the gold ever mined, from conglomerate reefs that dip deep underground, and the city of Johannesburg itself grew out of the gold rush of 1886.

Option A, diamond, is the wrong mineral for this place but the right one for Kimberley, also in South Africa, where the volcanic pipe gave its name to kimberlite rock, and for Mirny in the Russian republic of Yakutia. Option C, copper, belongs to Chile and to the Central African Copperbelt. Option D, tin, belongs to the South-East Asian belt through Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia and to Bolivia. South Africa should be remembered for gold at Witwatersrand, diamonds at Kimberley and platinum and chromium in the Bushveld Complex.

The correct answer is B, Osaka. Osaka, in the Kansai industrial region, became the leading cotton textile centre of Japan, helped by a humid climate suited to spinning, a good harbour, cheap labour drawn from the countryside and a large home market, and the comparison with Manchester in England, the original Cottonopolis, is standard in textbooks.

Option A, Tokyo, with Yokohama, is the heart of the Kanto region and is known for engineering, printing, electronics and consumer goods rather than for cotton. Option C, Nagoya, is the centre of the Chukyo region and of the automobile and aircraft industries, and also of pottery. Option D, Yokohama, is the port and shipbuilding city of the Tokyo region. Only Osaka carries the Manchester comparison, just as Ahmedabad is called the Manchester of India.

The correct answer is C, Lake Superior. The Mesabi Range in Minnesota lies on the western side of Lake Superior, and the ore is carried by lake steamer to the steel towns of the lower lakes, among them Gary, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where it meets Appalachian coal. That meeting of lake transport, ore and coal built the American steel industry.

Option A, Lake Michigan, has steel towns such as Gary on its shore but no iron ore range. Option B, Lake Erie, serves the Cleveland and Buffalo steel plants, again as a consumer of the ore. Option D, Lake Ontario, lies farthest east, below Niagara Falls, and is linked to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The habit worth forming is to pair an ore area with the route by which the ore reaches the furnace.

The correct answer is C, Indonesia, where shifting cultivation, together with Malaysia, is called ladang. The practice means clearing a patch of forest, burning the slash for ash, cropping it for two or three years until the soil is exhausted and then moving to a fresh patch.

Option A, Mexico, and Central America call it milpa, a system in which maize, beans and squash are grown together. Option B, Sri Lanka, calls it chena. Option D, Brazil, calls it roca, practised in the Amazon basin. The other names worth memorising are jhum in north-east India, taungya in Myanmar, chitemene in parts of central Africa and masole in the Congo basin. Questions on this topic are almost always a straight match between the local name and the country.

The correct answer is B, the Amazon basin. The rubber tree is native to the equatorial forests of Brazil, and the boom of the nineteenth century made Manaus a wealthy city. Seeds taken to Kew Gardens in London were raised and sent to Ceylon and Malaya, and the plantations of South-East Asia soon overtook wild rubber from the Amazon.

Option A, the Congo basin, has a similar climate and produced wild rubber under a brutal concession system, but the tree is not native there. Option C, the Malay peninsula, is where the plantation industry grew largest, so it is the most tempting answer, but the tree is an introduction there. Option D, the Western Ghats, is a region of Indian rubber estates in Kerala, again a plantation area and not the home of the species. Rubber needs more than 200 centimetres of rain and no dry season.

The correct answer is A, Iowa and Illinois. The Corn Belt lies in the central lowland of the United States, where warm summer nights, 50 to 100 centimetres of summer rain and deep well-drained loam suit maize, and most of the crop is fed to pigs and cattle, so the belt is also a livestock and meat region.

Option B, Texas and Louisiana, belong to the old Cotton Belt of the south, now also a region of rice, sugarcane and oil. Option C, California and Oregon, are Mediterranean and marine west coast in climate, known for fruit, vines, vegetables and timber. Option D, Florida and Georgia, grow citrus fruit, groundnut and tobacco. Keeping the Corn Belt, the Cotton Belt, the Wheat Belt of the Great Plains and the Dairy Belt of the north-east apart is the real work in this question.

The correct answer is B, wheat. All three are temperate grasslands with 50 to 75 centimetres of rain, a cool moist growing season and a warm dry harvest, which is exactly what wheat needs, and all three are farmed on large mechanised holdings for export. The Ukrainian steppe and the Canadian Prairie provinces belong to the same group.

Option A, rice, needs high heat and over 100 centimetres of rain with standing water, so it belongs to the deltas and plains of monsoon Asia. Option C, rubber, needs equatorial rain throughout the year and grows in South-East Asia. Option D, coffee, needs frost-free tropical highland slopes, as in the Brazilian plateau and the Colombian Andes. The grasslands question is answered by remembering that temperate grassland means grain and ranching.

The correct answer is A, West Africa. Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria grow most of the world's cocoa, on small farms under shade trees in the hot, wet equatorial belt along the Gulf of Guinea. The crop came from tropical America, where it was first used by the Maya and the Aztecs, and was brought to West Africa in the nineteenth century.

Option B, South-East Asia, grows rubber, oil palm, coffee and spices, and Indonesia does grow cocoa, but the region is not the main source. Option C, Central Europe, is too cold for a tree that cannot bear frost, though it is a great processing region for chocolate. Option D, Central Asia, is dry continental land of cotton and wheat under irrigation. The pairing to remember is cocoa with the Gulf of Guinea coast, as coffee goes with Brazil and tea with Assam and Sri Lanka.

The correct answer is A, nickel. Sudbury in Ontario, Canada, works a nickel and copper deposit of the Canadian Shield formed in an ancient impact structure, and it is the first name in any question on nickel, with Norilsk in Russia and New Caledonia in the Pacific as the others.

Option B, bauxite, is mined at Weipa and Gove in Australia, in Guinea, Jamaica and Brazil, and bauxite forms by the weathering of rock in a hot wet climate rather than in a shield intrusion. Option C, manganese, is associated with South Africa's Kalahari field, Gabon, Australia and India. Option D, mica, is associated with the Koderma belt of Jharkhand and with Bihar and Rajasthan in India, and with Brazil and Madagascar. Sudbury belongs with nickel alone.