All exercise questions and in-text questions from the NCERT textbook Fundamentals of Human Geography, Chapter 5, “Secondary Activities”, exactly as the English edition prints them, with a full model answer for each. Try your own answer first, then check it against this one.
1 Choose the right answer from the four alternatives given below
Q. Which one of the following statements is wrong?
(a) Cheap water transport has facilitated the jute mill industry along the Hugli. (b) Sugar, cotton textiles and vegetable oils are footloose industries. (c) The development of hydro-electricity and petroleum reduced, to a great extent, the importance of coal energy as a locational factor for industry. (d) Port towns in India have attracted industries.
Answer: (b) Sugar, cotton textiles and vegetable oils are footloose industries: this is the wrong statement. Sugar, cotton textiles and vegetable oils are agro-based industries. The chapter names sugar among the industries located close to the source of their cheap, bulky, weight-losing raw material, and says agro-processing is done close to the sources of farm produce, so these industries are tied to their raw material. Foot-loose industries, by contrast, are explicitly described as industries that are NOT dependent on any specific raw material and can be located in a wide variety of places, since they depend on component parts obtainable anywhere. Statements (a), (c) and (d) are all consistent with the chapter’s own account of transport, energy and location factors.
Q. In which one of the following types of economy are the factors of production owned individually?
(a) Capitalist (b) Mixed (c) Socialist (d) None
Answer: (a) Capitalist. The chapter states that in capitalist countries, industries are generally owned privately, that is, by individual investors, which is exactly what individual ownership of the factors of production means.
Q. Which one of the following types of industries produces raw materials for other industries?
(a) Cottage Industries (b) Small-scale Industries (c) Basic Industries (d) Footloose Industries
Answer: (c) Basic Industries. The chapter defines a basic industry as one whose products are used to make other goods by using them as raw materials: its own example is iron/steel, which becomes machines for the textile industry, which in turn make clothes for consumers.
Q. Which one of the following pairs is correctly matched?
(a) Automobile industry … Los Angeles (b) Shipbuilding industry … Lusaka (c) Aircraft industry … Florence
Answer: (a) Automobile industry … Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a genuine centre of automobile (and aerospace) manufacturing. Lusaka is the landlocked capital of Zambia, so it cannot host a shipbuilding industry, and Florence is an Italian city known for art and history, not aircraft manufacturing: both (b) and (c) pair a real industry with a place that could not plausibly host it. Note: the English edition of this exercise prints only three lettered options, (a)-(c), with no fourth option (d); this is how the book itself prints the question.
2 Write a short note on the following in about 30 words
Q. High-Tech industry.
Answer: High-tech industry is the latest generation of manufacturing, built on intensive research and development to make advanced scientific and engineering products. Professional (white-collar) workers greatly outnumber production (blue-collar) workers. Silicon Valley and Silicon Forest are examples of such technopolies.
Q. Manufacturing.
Answer: Manufacturing covers the full array of production, from handicrafts to moulding iron and steel, stamping out plastic toys, and assembling delicate computer components or space vehicles, using power, mass production and specialised labour to make standardised commodities.
Q. Footloose industries.
Answer: Footloose industries are not tied to any specific raw material; they depend on component parts obtainable anywhere, produce in small quantity, employ a small labour force, are generally non-polluting, and locate wherever a good road network gives them accessibility.
3 Answer the following in not more than 150 words
Q. Differentiate between primary and secondary activities.
Answer: Primary activities are directly dependent on the environment, since they involve extracting or producing natural resources directly, such as agriculture, fishing, forestry and mining; their output is used more or less as it is drawn from nature. Secondary activities, by contrast, add value to these natural resources by transforming raw materials into more valuable finished products. The chapter’s own examples: cotton in the boll has limited use, but once transformed into yarn it becomes valuable enough to make clothes; iron ore cannot be used directly from the mines, but once converted into steel it becomes valuable enough to make machines and tools. Secondary activities are therefore concerned with manufacturing, processing and construction (infrastructure) industries, while primary activities are concerned with the direct extraction or production of resources from land, water and forests, without this transformation step.
Q. Discuss the major trends of modern industrial activities especially in the developed countries of the world.
Answer: Modern large-scale manufacturing, which first developed over the last 200 years in the United Kingdom, north-eastern U.S.A. and Europe, is marked by a shift from the old craft method (a few made-to-order pieces, high cost) to mass production of large quantities of standardised parts, with each worker performing one task repeatedly. This needs complex machine technology, extreme specialisation and division of labour, vast capital, large organisations and an executive bureaucracy, so that more goods are produced with less effort and lower cost. A second major trend, especially visible in developed countries, is the growth of high-technology industry: the application of intensive research and development to make products of an advanced scientific and engineering character, using robotics on the assembly line, computer-aided design (CAD) and manufacturing, and electronic process control. In high-tech industry, professional (white-collar) workers greatly outnumber production (blue-collar) workers, and the industrial landscape has shifted from massive assembly structures to neatly spaced, low, dispersed office-plant-lab buildings organised into planned business parks; where such industries cluster regionally, they form technopolies such as the Silicon Valley near San Francisco and the Silicon Forest near Seattle.
Q. Explain why high-tech industries in many countries are being attracted to the peripheral areas of major metropolitan centres.
Answer: High-tech industry is organised very differently from old-style large-scale manufacturing: instead of massive, congested assembly structures, it needs neatly spaced, low, modern, dispersed office-plant-lab buildings, grouped into planned business parks, a form of layout that a crowded, already built-up city centre cannot easily provide, but the more open land on a metropolitan periphery can. At the same time, the periphery of a major metropolitan centre still gives these industries access to the same core locational advantages the chapter names for any industry: a large nearby market with strong purchasing power, transportation and communication links, a supply of the highly trained professional (white-collar) workforce that high-tech industry depends on far more than ordinary production labour, and, since many high-tech firms benefit from agglomeration economies, nearness to other linked high-tech firms and a leading firm in the same field. The periphery of a metropolis is therefore where the planned, spacious layout high-tech industry needs meets the market, labour and linkage advantages a big metropolitan region already offers.
Q. Africa has immense natural resources and yet it is industrially the most backward continent. Comment.
Answer: The chapter’s own locational factors, applied to Africa, explain this gap between resources and industry well. Access to raw material alone does not create an industry: the chapter’s own factors state that industries also need access to a large market with real purchasing power, access to skilled labour, access to sources of energy, a developed transportation and communication network, supportive government policy, and the benefit of agglomeration economies from nearness to other linked industries: the chapter names Western Europe and eastern North America precisely because their highly developed transport systems have “always induced the concentration of industries” there. Many parts of Africa still lack this combination of a well-developed transport and communication network, large-scale industrial capital, and a market with strong purchasing power, even where the raw material itself is abundant. Owning natural resources is therefore only one of the several factors the chapter says must operate together to attract large-scale industry; without the others in place, immense natural wealth alone does not by itself turn a continent into a major manufacturing region.
4 In-text Questions (asked within the chapter)
In-text Q1. You have seen some machines and tools made of iron or steel. The raw material for such machines and tools is iron and steel, which is itself an industry. Can you identify the links? (Iron/steel → machines for textile industry → clothes for use by consumers)
Answer: The iron and steel industry makes iron and steel. These are used as raw material by the machine-making industry to make machines for the textile industry. The textile industry then uses these machines to make clothes, which are bought and used directly by consumers. So the iron and steel industry is a basic industry (its products are used to make other goods), while the clothes are the product of a consumer goods (non-basic) industry.
In-text Q2. Joint sector industries are managed by joint stock companies or sometimes the private and public sectors together establish and manage the industries. Can you make a list of such industries?
Answer: In India, examples of joint sector enterprises are Maruti Udyog Limited (set up jointly by the Government of India and Suzuki of Japan, now Maruti Suzuki India Limited) and Oil India Limited (OIL), which was a joint venture of the Government of India and Burmah Oil until 1981 and has been a Government of India company since then. Many state governments have also set up industries jointly with private companies through their industrial development corporations.
In-text Q3. The Silicon Valley near San Francisco and Silicon Forest near Seattle are examples of technopolies. Are some technopolies developing in India?
Answer: Yes. Bengaluru (called the “Silicon Valley of India”), Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and the National Capital Region (Gurugram and Noida) have grown into concentrations of information technology and other high-tech industries, with planned technology parks of the kind the chapter describes: neatly spaced, low, modern office-plant-lab buildings on the edges of large cities.
The book’s Project/Activity exercise asks students to: (i) survey the factory-made goods used by students and staff in their own school; (ii) find out the meaning of “bio-degradable” and “non-biodegradable” and judge which is better to use, and why; (iii) look around and list global brands, their logos and products. These are personal/field project tasks with no single “correct” answer, and are not directly asked in the exam as written questions, though the underlying ideas (manufactured goods in everyday use, and biodegradability) are examinable concepts in their own right.
Q1(i) is frequently repeated as a direct objective question: remember that “footloose” and “raw-material-based” are opposites, and sugar/cotton-textile/vegetable-oil industries belong in the second group, not the first. Q1(iv) is genuinely a 3-option question in the book itself; do not go looking for a missing (d). Questions 3(i) and 3(ii) are the most direct basis for long-answer questions: learn the value-addition examples (cotton→yarn, iron ore→steel) and the seven locational factors in order.