Friday 13 December 2013

Cryptic Christmas Crossword 2013

Here it is ... the Geography Cryptic Christmas Crossword ... all of the answers are place names ...
Good luck and share and enjoy!
Happy Christmas
NLM

Y8 Scholars Holiday Work 2

These questions are to go with the Economic Activities booklet ...

Economic Activities:


1.    For each of the following categories of economic activities, explain what they mean and give an example of an industry in each category: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, Quaternary

2.    What differences would you expect to see in the percentage of people working in Primary, Secondary and Tertiary sectors between the Rich World (MEDCs) and Poor World (LEDCs)?

3.    What do each of the following types of farm produce:

a.     Arable

b.    Pastoral

c.     Dairy

d.    Plantation

e.     Market Gardening

f.      Mixed

4.    Explain how each of the following factors affect which type of farming occurs where in the UK:

a.     Latitude

b.    Relief

c.     North Atlantic Drift (NAD)

d.    Growing Season

e.     Aspect

f.      Transport

5.    Why is most of the market gardening found in Kent and near to major cities?

6.    Draw a diagram to show how a simple factory system. Include labels for Inputs, Processes and Outputs

7.    What are the main factors that need to be thought about when a new factory is going to be built? (there are six)

8.    For each of the following types of industry, explain what it means and give an example …

a.     Market-orientated

b.    Material-orientated

c.     Footloose

9.    For an industry that you have studied (ideally, Iron and Steel in South Wales), describe how and why the ideal site has changed. (CE Question)

10.  How has manufacturing industry contributed to the following environmental issues?

a.     Global Warming

b.    Acid Rain

11.  Why is manufacturing in decline in the UK and increasing rapidly in countries such as India and China?

12.  Where are the 13 National Parks in England and Wales?

13.  Why were National Parks set up? When were they set up?

14.  Name four groups of people that use National Parks?

a.     How might conflict occur between these groups?

b.    How might the conflict be resolved?

15.  What is a Honeypot attraction in a National Park?

16.  Why are tourists important for National Parks?

17.  How do tourists damage the natural environment?

18.  What is sustainable development ?

19.  How can National Parks be developed in a sustainable way?

20.  What is meant by stewardship?

Y8 Scholars Holiday Work 1

Revision:

We are going to use this time to review your notes in your file ... do not panic if you accidently left all of you notes in school as there is a spare copy in this DropBox folder.

If you write your answers in an email then I can give you some quick feedback as I am around for almost the whole holiday period ...

NOTE: If you cannot send diagrams then do not spend hours trying to ... we will look at them when we get back.

Questions:

Plate Tectonics:

Part 1


1. Draw a clearly labelled diagram to show the structure of the earth (PowerPoint is good for this).

You should include the following labels:
Oceanic crust, continental crust, inner core, mantle, outer core. 


2. What is a tectonic plate?

3. What is the relationship between where earthquakes occur and plate boundaries?

4. Draw a clearly labelled diagram of a destructive margin.

You should include the following labels: 
oceanic plate, continental plate, mantle, direction the plates are moving, fold mountains, subduction zone, earthquake foci, explosive volcanoes


5. What piece of equipment measures the strength of an earthquake?

6. What is a tsunami?

7. Why do earthquakes and volcanic eruptions seem to cause more damage in LEDCs than MEDCs?


Part 2


1.     Case Studies:  Chose four case studies one earthquake and one volcano each from an MEDC and an LEDC. Copy and complete the table below:

 
Earthquake
Volcanic eruption
MEDC


 
LEDC


 


E.g. Icelandic Volcano for an MEDC eruption; Kobe or Sendai for a MEDC quake; Haiti for an LEDC quake; Merapi for an LEDC eruption. Choose ones that you know best …

For each of your case studies answer the following questions
a.     Where did it happen?
b.     When did it happen (year and perhaps month)
c.     What type of plate margin is it on?
d.     What were the primary effects?
e.     What were the secondary effects?
f.      Important notes: such as …
                                          i.    Why is the event important?
                                         ii.    How did this event help future prediction?
                                        iii.    What could be done to minimise the impact of a similar event in the future?
2.     Give an example of a place in the world where there is …  
a.     A destructive margin
b.     A constructive margin
c.     A conservative margin
d.     A collision zone
 
3.     Name three positive impacts of volcanic eruptions for the people who live nearby?
 
4.     What piece of equipment measures the strength of an earthquake?
 
5.     What is the difference between the quake’s focus and its epicentre?
 
6.     What scale do we measure earthquakes on?
 
7.     For an earthquake that you have studied …
a.     Name where and when it occurred.
b.     Why did it occur?
c.     What were the primary effects?
d.     What were the secondary effects?
e.     What did people do to minimise the effects of future quakes?
 
8.     What is a tsunami?
 
9.     Why do earthquakes and volcanic eruptions seem to cause more damage in LEDCs than MEDCs?

 


Y8 CE Holiday Work


Global Location

Not much this time for the Common Entrance candidates. You are going to learn the whole CE global Location list. If you have misplaced your sheet, another copy can be found here.

You need to be able to locate each of the features on a map so I have stuck in a couple of blank ones to help you.


Remember: You can only be asked questions based upon this list in the final paper but there is no harm in knowing  little more!

Thursday 21 November 2013

Volcano creates new Japanese island

There has been a new island made just off the coast of Japan as an underwater volcano breaks the surface.

Find out more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25032329 

Wednesday 23 October 2013

Cheer up Sussex!

Come on Sussex, we need to follow Hampshire's example!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24635183

Or do we? 
What do these stats actually show?
How reliable are they?

Australian Bush Fires

The unseasonally warm, dry spring has meant that bush in southeastern Australia is tinder dry. Wildfires are common in this part of the world but the normally occur towards the end of their summer time.
Is our climate changing?
Is it natural?
Is it our own fault?


Read this BBC report. The bit about Eucalyptus trees is useful.

Sunday 20 October 2013

Giraffes and Words

Chapel Sermon by NLM: Sunday 20th October 2013

We have been looking at bullying this week and looking at ways that it can be stopped before it really begins. Bullying causes a terrible legacy: the victims are changed forever, their confidence is frequently destroyed; and the child bully at school, often becomes the adult bully at work or at home, picking on their spouse or children.   

Bullying is evil ... and it nearly always starts with words.
 
Words.  Words are powerful ...They can really hurt ...
 
"Cheat! Thief! Pig! Nobody likes you! Who cares what you think?  I hate you!"

They can also go some way to mend the hurt ...

"It's ok. You're my best friend! You are brilliant! I love you."
 
As we found out in our anti-bullying workshops yesterday, words can cause internal pain that takes a lot more time to heal than cuts and bruises ... 
 
In fact, if we move the 's' from the end of 'words' and stick it at the beginning, what do you get? 
 
Sword ... and swords were only really designed for one purpose ... causing harm.
 
"Sticks and Stones may break your bones but words will never hurt you!"
 
We have all heard this phrase or used it when people say unkind things and upset us. It is true that Sticks and stones can cause short term physical damage but words can cause longer-term damage ... sometimes that never heals. Unkind words can shake your confidence and bring your world tumbling down around you.
 
An example: now, as promised, cue the Giraffe. Say "hello" to Gerald.
 
Gerald is an elegant giraffe. He is tall and handsome, but his legs are rather thin and his knees quite bandy.  
This sermon is very much based
on this book, "Giraffes can't dance"
by Giles Andreae

 
Now, a while ago Gerald wanted to join in with all of the other animals in the Jungle Dance, he tried to rhumba with the Rhinos, tango with the Tigers and Lambada with the Lemurs, but everyone knows that, just like Hairy Bikers, "Giraffe's can't dance!" and when he tried to join in Gerald's long limbs got tangled up and he collapsed in a heap on the floor. Everybody laughed at him and told him that he was useless. "Everyone knows that Giraffe's can't dance!" they all told him. 
 
Gerald slunk off into the undergrowth and did what all right thinking giraffe's do when they are feeling down. No, he did not reach for a pot of ice cream or a chocolate bar, he looked at the moon and felt really sorry for himself. He even shed a little tear or two ... or three ... or four.  Actually he cried quite a lot. 
 
Until a little cricket came up to him and had a chat with him. The cricket turned out to be quite a talented violinist and played some wicked tunes on his fiddle for Gerald in order to try and cheer him up. Gerald liked the music and started to sway in time. He closed his eyes, his hooves started making circles in the ground and soon he was dancing ... really dancing.    
 
To cut a long story short, Gerald found out that he could dance to this music. The rhumba, the lambada and the tango were just not his thing! He demonstrated his new found skill to the other animals, who were suitably impressed and revised their opinions on the dancing potential of giraffes: "Giraffe's can dance!", they all cried.    
 
The sudden reversal of opinion of the other animals and the kind words that they eventually used did make Gerald feel good about himself ... but did he really trust the other animals? Were they just humouring him? 
 
Telling someone that they cannot do something or that they are useless can be just as destructive as name calling.  There is a passage in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 29 that sums it up well...
 
"Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to use in edyfing, that  it may minister grace unto others"
 
Another piece of advice was given to me when I was in Upper 2 (Year 6 ... I think in New Money!)
 
"If you have got nothing nice to say ... then say nothing!"
 
Tim Minchin
Tim Minchin, the Australian wordsmith, he who wrote the words and music for the hit musical Matilda, put the whole sticks and stones thing quite nicely in his song 'Predjudice':
 
"Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can break hearts."

NLM


Friday 18 October 2013

Converting Latitude and Longitude

We have been putting our river data from our fieldtrip into Google Earth using the GE Graph program.  It is great fun, but we have hit a little glitch: getting the coordinates into a suitable format in Excel which is easy to copy and paste into the graph program was a real fiddle. The graph program wants it in a decimal format; GE gave us degrees, minutes and seconds.

I found this nice little converter and it works well. If you are feeling more adventurous you could just type the formula into your spreadsheet (follow the link on the converter page).

Good Google Earthing!

Saturday 5 October 2013

The Geography of Curry


Tonight I am giong to wow the Brambletye parents and pupils with a talk on the Geography of Curry. Well, maybe not exactly wow them, but at least give them some food for thought.

The talk is giong to be in three main sections:

1. Defining terms: What is Geography? What is Curry?
Just like in a good discursive essay, I will define the key words in the title. The principal reason for me giving this talk is to share my views of 'good geography' with the parent body and as such I will be explaining what geography is from first principles.


2. Where does curry come from?
I will look at the global pattern of curry consumption and the distribution of ingredients and aim to explain the reasons for this pattern.

3. Investigation into the spatial distribution of Indian Restaurants in the East Grinstead area
This looks to see whether or not there is a spatial pattern of curry houses within a 10 mile radius of East Grinstead. Also, I will apply the OB Index to see if there is a pattern in the cost of the meals provided.

Thursday 26 September 2013

Pakistan Quake

The quake's epicentre

There was a massive earthquake in Pakistan: 7.7 on the Richter scale. As well as a significant loss of life (currently in excessof 300), a new island was creasted just off the coast.

The new island created by the quake lifting up the sea floor.

LINK: BBC Asia

Presentation at RGS

Off to the Royal Geographical Society near to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. 

I am going to give a presentation on the importance of Global Location in the prep school curriculum ... and Milton Jones and the Animaniacs are going to help!

My basic premise is that we need to teach children a rudimentary locational knowledge; a generic framework upon which they can hang the locational knowledge which is useful to them.

In other words, children should know the relative position of the continents and oceans; the key lines of latitude and longitude; and where they live in this grid.

How to teach this is much more fun! 

Thursday 4 July 2013

ILTID 4: Industrial Farming

Industrial Location Theory is Dead: Part 4


On the Land


As the towns became cities, a similar revolution was happening in the countryside. The younger generation were leaving to find their fortune in the expanding cities leaving behind an increasingly aging rural population.  The Victorian period (1837-1901) was a period of British history which was full of inventions such as radio, vacuum cleaners, the camera and the flushable toilet. The Victorians sought to solve all problems and improve efficiency and output with technology. This applied to all aspects of Victorian life: medicine, transport, waste disposal and farming.

Industrial Farming


Technology was seen as the answer to improving yields on the nation’s farms. Nature was very much treated as a system which could be understood and harnessed for increased profitability. Highly selective breeding programmes redirected evolution along a path towards bigger animals. Cattle, poultry, sheep, goats, dogs and all manner of far animals were carefully bred using techniques honed the country’s racing stables to produce animals that were more specialised. Some were bred to be bigger for their meat, others stronger for working or more aggressive for fighting, either way there was a focus on particular breed of animals being bred for a particular purpose. The history of the Holstein-Friesian (high milk producing cows from the Friesian Islands, Netherlands) breeding stock in the UK can be traced back to the importing the progeny of one famous dairy bull, Ceres 4497, in the first years of the 20th Century. (British Friesian Breeding Society)



This Stubbs painting of ‘The Lincolnshire Ox’ was painted in 1790 and is part of the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It is of a Shorthorn prize bull, bred at the village of Gedney in Lincolnshire by John Bough in November 1782 and subsequently owned by John Gibbons of Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, a neighbouring village. The bull was 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 205½ stone: some 2,880 lbs. Having grown to this enormous size in Lincolnshire where his fame began to spread by repute, the ox was taken to London where it was put on show to paying spectators from February 1790 , first at the Lyceum in the Strand and then briefly at the Duke of Gloucester’s riding stables in Hyde Park. This royal interest in the ox earned it the title ‘The Royal Lincolnshire Ox. (Ref)



At the same time, ingenious machines were being invented to increase efficacy of farming and reduce the amount of physical labour required. 


Ingenuity in action:The Fisken Steam Cultivating Machinery as explained in its brochure used in its 1871 trials at the Marquis of Tweeddale's home farm at Yester, and at Offerton Hall, near Sunderland.
The Fisken Steam Cultivating Machinery is a good example of how over-complicated some of the solutions were becoming.  The stationary tractor engine at the bottom of the field pulls the rope which winds in on the two ‘windlass’ pulley wagons automatically dragging the plough across the field.  Letters show that the contraption was bought by several farmers and, although they came across a variety of issues with the setup and local conditions (Source). It is important to note that the chief selling point of the equipment at the time was comparing its speed and running costs with ‘old fashioned’ horses and their feed.

Just as in the cities, where factories were filtering society into a well-defined system of class based upon the type of work done and level of affluence, a similar process began to show itself in the countryside. The wealthy became wealthier at the expenses of an increasingly poor working class. The farmers who could afford to buy and maintain the new technology found themselves rising to the top of rural society. They could afford to buy more land from their profit and invest in more efficient machinery. The poorer tenant farmers found themselves being pushed into further poverty and eventually away from the land as new machines took away their livelihood.  Many land-owning farmers experimented with the new technology but either made unwise choices or else could not afford to keep up the maintenance of the new machinery. Sometimes they were just sold ‘white elephants’. Either way, their utopian vision of mechanised and highly profitable farming came crashing around them and they too had to live in abject poverty or migrate to the city in search of work. The net effect was that the wealth gap expanded and the landed farmers thrived at the expense of the poorer labourers. 

In the same way that Luddites raged against the industrial machines that were replacing the need for their skilled work, so the same protests appeared on the farms of Britain. A well-documented example of people destroying the new technology was in 1830, when farm labourers in East Anglia rose up and smashed threshing machines in what became known as the Swing Riots.

ILTID 3:Going Global

Industrial Location Theory is Dead: Part 3

Going Global


The wage cost of the domestic labour force and their increasing militancy in the 20th Century caused companies to start looking overseas for cheaper, less unionised workers. The improving cost-efficiency of transport meant that these companies could pretty much look anywhere in the world and their eyes alighted on the Less Economically Developed Countries (LEDCs) which at the time included both India and China. The huge workforce available meant that products could be manufactured very cheaply, vastly undercutting domestic labour costs, and imported cheaply to the UK.

Another major technological shift enabled the globalisation of manufacturing in the 1950s: containerisation. It might not seem world shattering at first, but the simple use of standard sized (2.4m x 2.4m x 3.0m) boxes for transporting cargo meant that it could be pulled by lorries or trains and transferred on and off enormous ships quickly and, consequently more cheaply. The boxes could be stacked like Lego blocks and loaded quickly. This meant that docklands like those in London’s East End, which had been the beating heart of Britain’s global trading Empire, became obsolete almost overnight. The new system meant that much bigger ships could be used and these did not fit into the old docks and the journey up the Thames Estuary wasted time. It made much more sense to use a custom built deep water port at Felixstowe. The London Dockland’s huge extended labour force became superfluous and expensive as one man in a crane could load the new cargo containers more quickly: the turn-around time for a cargo boat was slashed from days to a matter of hours.

ILTID 2: Industrial Cities

Industrial Location Theory Is Dead: Part 2

Industrial Cities


Some towns’ locations were ideally suited for certain industries to develop. Those near the coalfields tended to specialise in iron and, after importing some clever knowhow from a Henry Bessemer in the middle of the 19th Century, steel as the coal (How the Bessemer Process works). Coal was the scarcest ingredient required for the smelting process as limestone, being similarly laid down as a sedimentary deposit, is often found nearby and iron ore of varying quality is fairly ubiquitous across our isles. Towns in the Midlands which were near to coal and not far from the upland regions where sheep farming was the main economic activity, were quick to develop a thriving textiles industry. Those with excellent clay nearby tended to found a plethora of potteries.

Ports such as Liverpool and London’s Docklands which were already important conduits for goods from the expanding British Empire, grew rapidly as Britain became the most industrialised nation. The ports facilitated the export of manufactured goods from Britain around the world and the importing of new and exotic raw materials from around the world. Some of these were becoming the mainstays of not only polite society, but for everybody: namely tea and coffee. There was intense competition from our European neighbours to source new products from overseas and it was considered important to secure a constant supply for our domestic market and so the process of colonisation increased apace and the trading empire developed rapidly. Iron, textiles and other manufactured goods were taken from Britain to the Gold Coast of Africa and beyond, round the Cape of Good Hope and to Kenya, India and the Far East. Each of these places had goods which could be traded: tea, coffee, spices, silks and, unfortunately, slaves. The slaves were shipped from Western Africa back across the Atlantic to the Caribbean archipelago where they were used to set up more plantations to produce the volume of luxury goods that the increasingly wealthy urban upper classes demanded.

Industrialisation meant that sail power could be replaced by steam power and ships that were formerly constrained by the eccentricities of the capricious wind, could reliably follow a timetable. The large fleet of ships meant that the cost of transporting goods became cheaper. This meant that not just goods but people too began to move around the world more freely. The invention of steel-hulled ships meant that the seas wrecked fewer craft but also they were harder to attack. The flipside of this was of course that they were better to attack with and a fleet of steel-hulled ships soon became the vital tool in any country’s arsenal.  Also, the mass-production of precise steel and iron work meant that firearms could be made quickly and in huge numbers. They also could be made bigger, giving them a greater range and accuracy. The nation with the biggest and best guns generally won through.

Britain’s towns began to grow, attracting unskilled workers from the fields with the promise of well-paid employment and a higher quality of life: the ‘Dick Whittington’ effect. In reality, the majority of jobs were poorly paid, dangerous and had no security.  The new factory workers worked extremely long hours for very little remuneration. Many swapped rural poverty for urban poverty. There were exceptions, such as Cadbury who took a philanthropic interest in his workforce, building a whole town for them, ensuring that their families had healthcare and education. The successful factory owners became incredibly wealthy, investing their profits into other enterprises and multiplying their assets still further. They bought huge estates in the country to be away from the industrial noise and grime that funded their luxurious lifestyles.

As the technology developed throughout the early 19th Century, the skilled labour that was required was gradually replaced by cheaper, low-skilled labour.  Around 1811, in the Nottingham textile mills, a group of handloom workers took matters into their own hands and began burning and smashing the new mechanised looms that threatened their job security. The group, known as ‘Luddites’, grew in size and organisation, and over the next two years they caused significant damage to mills across the North Ridings of Yorkshire (1812) and Lancashire (1813). The army was sent in to quell the uprising and several pitched battles most noticeably at Burton's Mill in Middleton and at Westhoughton Mill, in Lancashire. Eventually, Parliament took action making machine breaking a capital crime in the Frame Breaking Act in March 1812. There was a mass trial in York in 1813 and many of the 60 men tried were hanged or deported to penal colonies. 

The fear of new technology replacing skilled jobs was not confined to the Luddite attacks on textile mills. The mechanisation was forcing change on the pattern of labour and, despite the Luddites and their ilk raging against the machines, the change was unstoppable.

In the middle of the 19th Century, the workers began to get more organised. They formed Unions which argued for a reasonable wage and fair treatment for their members. If the Unions were upset, then they withdrew their labour en masse and went on strike.  The Trade Union Movement was formalised in 1871 and the Unions continued to grow in power through to the middle of the 20th Century.