Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. What is the main difference between secondary and tertiary activities, according to the chapter?
Answer: Tertiary activities rely more heavily on the specialised skills, experience and knowledge of the workers, while secondary activities rely more on production techniques, machinery and factory processes.
Q. Define trade and commerce as given in the chapter.
Answer: Trade is essentially the buying and selling of items produced elsewhere; the towns and cities where such trade and commerce activities are concentrated are known as trading centres.
Q. Why are periodic markets organised in rural areas?
Answer: Periodic markets are organised in rural areas where there are no regular markets, so that people can meet their temporally accumulated demand at weekly or bi-weekly intervals; these markets are held on specified dates and move from one place to another.
Q. Name the three types of large-scale retail innovations described in the chapter’s ‘More on Stores’ box.
Answer: Consumer cooperatives, departmental stores and chain stores.
Q. How does wholesale trading differ from retail trading?
Answer: Wholesale trading constitutes bulk business carried out through numerous intermediary merchants and supply houses rather than through retail stores; retail stores, in turn, often depend on the wholesaler’s capital because wholesalers extend credit to them.
Q. Define a node and a link in a transport network.
Answer: A node is the meeting point of two or more routes, a point of origin, a point of destination, or any sizeable town along a route. A link is every road that joins two nodes.
Q. Why are all forms of transport also referred to as ‘lines of communication’?
Answer: Because messages were historically carried by hand, animals, boats, roads, rail and air, the same means used for transport, so all forms of transport also came to be called lines of communication.
Q. Distinguish between low-order and high-order services, with one example of each.
Answer: Low-order services, such as grocery shops and laundries, are more common and widespread; high-order or more specialised services, such as those of accountants, consultants and physicians, are less common.
Q. Why might a golf course be located away from the Central Business District (CBD) while a multiplex is located near it?
Answer: A multiplex or restaurant benefits from locating within or near the CBD, close to customers, while a golf course needs a large area of land and so chooses a site where land costs are lower than in the CBD.
Q. How does the trend in tertiary-sector employment compare with that in the primary and secondary sectors?
Answer: Employment in the tertiary sector has been increasing, while it has remained unchanged or has been decreasing in the primary and secondary sectors, and in more developed countries a higher percentage of workers is employed in providing services than in less developed countries.
Q. Name any four countries where outsourcing has led to the opening of a large number of call centres.
Answer: India, China, Israel and the Philippines (the chapter also names Costa Rica, and the region of Eastern Europe; any four countries).
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. What are tertiary activities? Give three examples given in the chapter.
Answer: Tertiary activities are activities related to the service sector, involving the provision of services that are consumed rather than the production of tangible goods. Examples given in the chapter include the work of a plumber, an electrician and a teacher (the chapter also names technician, launderer, barber, shopkeeper, driver, cashier, doctor, lawyer and publisher).
Q. Distinguish between rural and urban marketing centres.
Answer: Rural marketing centres are quasi-urban centres catering to nearby settlements; they are the most rudimentary type of trading centre, mostly consisting of mandis (wholesale markets) and retailing areas, with personal and professional services not well developed. Urban marketing centres, by contrast, have more widely specialised urban services, offering manufactured goods along with specialised markets and professional services such as those of lawyers, physicians and consultants.
Q. What is retail trading? Give two examples of non-store retail trading mentioned in the chapter.
Answer: Retail trading is the business activity concerned with the sale of goods directly to the consumers, mostly through fixed establishments or stores devoted to selling. Non-store retail trading examples given in the chapter include street peddling, handcarts, trucks, door-to-door selling, mail-order, telephone selling, automatic vending machines and the internet.
Q. Explain the three ways of measuring transport distance given in the chapter.
Answer: (i) Km distance: the actual distance of the route length. (ii) Time distance: the time taken to travel on a particular route. (iii) Cost distance: the expense of travelling on a route.
Q. Name any four services that the chapter says are often regulated by governments or companies.
Answer: Highways and bridges, fire-fighting departments, education and customer-care services, and the transport, telecommunication, energy and water-supply services supervised through state and union corporations (any four).
Q. What are personal services? Illustrate with the example given in the chapter.
Answer: Personal services are made available to people to facilitate their work in daily life; they are largely provided by unskilled workers who migrate from rural areas and are employed, for example, as housekeepers, cooks and gardeners, a segment of workers that is generally unorganised. The chapter’s example is Mumbai’s dabbawala (tiffin) service, which serves about 1,75,000 customers across the city.
Q. Why has tourism become the world’s single largest tertiary activity?
Answer: Tourism, travel undertaken for recreation rather than business, has become the world’s single largest tertiary activity in total registered jobs (250 million) and total revenue (40 per cent of total GDP); it also employs local people in accommodation, meals, transport, entertainment and special shops, and fosters the growth of infrastructure industries, retail trading and craft industries.
Q. What are quaternary activities? Give two examples given in the chapter.
Answer: Quaternary activities involve the collection, production and dissemination of information, or even the production of information itself; they centre on research and development and may be seen as an advanced form of services requiring specialised knowledge and technical skills. Examples given in the chapter include the work of mutual fund managers and tax consultants (the chapter also names software developers and statisticians).
Q. What are quinary activities? Why are they sometimes called ‘gold collar’ professions?
Answer: Quinary activities are performed by the highest level of decision makers or policy makers and focus on the creation, re-arrangement and interpretation of new and existing ideas, data interpretation, and the use and evaluation of new technologies. They are called ‘gold collar’ professions because they represent the special and highly paid skills of senior business executives, government officials, research scientists, and financial and legal consultants.
Q. Distinguish between outsourcing and off-shoring.
Answer: Outsourcing, or contracting out, is giving work to an outside agency to improve efficiency and reduce costs; when outsourcing involves transferring work specifically to overseas locations, it is described by the term off-shoring, although the two terms are often used together.
Q. Give one example, from the chapter, of a data-processing service being outsourced overseas, and name a small country that has also benefited from outsourcing.
Answer: The chapter gives the example of a company in Hyderabad or Manila carrying out work on a GIS-based project for a country like the U.S.A. or Japan, because IT-skilled staff with good English-language skills are available at lower wages there, and overhead costs are lower. Even a less populous country like Botswana in Africa has benefited from such outsourcing.
Q. What is the digital divide? Give an example of how it exists within a single country.
Answer: The digital divide is the uneven distribution, across the globe, of the opportunities emerging from Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based development, because developed countries have surged ahead in providing ICT access to their citizens while developing countries have lagged behind. Digital divides also exist within a single country: in a large country like India or Russia, metropolitan centres tend to have better connectivity and access to the digital world than peripheral rural areas.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. What factors affect the development of transport, according to the chapter?
Answer: Demand for transport is influenced by the size of population: the larger the population, the greater the demand for transport. Routes themselves depend on: the location of cities, towns, villages, industrial centres and raw materials; the pattern of trade between them; the nature of the landscape between them; the type of climate; and the funds available for overcoming obstacles along the route.
Q. Describe the role of telecommunications, mass media and the internet in modern communication, as given in the chapter.
Answer: Telecommunications, linked to modern technology, have revolutionised communication by reducing the time needed to send a message from weeks to minutes; recent advances like mobile telephony make communication direct and instantaneous from anywhere, while older forms like the telegraph, morse code and telex have almost disappeared. Radio and television relay news, pictures and telephone calls to vast audiences and are termed mass media, vital for advertising and entertainment; newspapers cover events from all corners of the world, and satellite communication relays information from earth and space. The internet has truly revolutionised the global communication system.
Q. Discuss the factors that make a region attractive to tourists, as given in the chapter.
Answer: Climate: warm, sunny weather draws people from colder regions to beach holidays, which is a major reason for tourism in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, while winter-holiday tourists seek either high temperatures or snow suitable for skiing. Landscape: attractive environments such as mountains, lakes, sea coasts and landscapes not completely altered by human activity draw holidaymakers. History and Art: ancient or picturesque towns, archaeological sites, castles, palaces and churches attract visitors interested in a region’s history. Culture and Economy: tourists with an interest in ethnic and local customs are drawn to a region, and cheap-cost destinations become popular; home-stays such as heritage homes in Goa and Madikere-Coorg in Karnataka have become a profitable business.
Q. Explain medical tourism with reference to India’s position, as described in the chapter.
Answer: When medical treatment is combined with international tourism, it is called medical tourism. About 55,000 patients from the U.S.A. visited India for treatment in 2005, a small number compared with the millions of surgeries performed each year in the U.S. healthcare system, yet India has emerged as the leading country of medical tourism in the world, with world-class hospitals in metropolitan cities catering to patients from all over the world. Medical tourism brings abundant benefits to developing countries like India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia; beyond medical tourism itself, hospitals in India, Switzerland and Australia also perform outsourced medical services, such as reading radiology images and interpreting MRI and ultrasound tests.
Q. Explain KPO and how it differs from BPO, with examples given in the chapter.
Answer: Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) is information-driven knowledge outsourcing that is distinct from Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) because it involves highly skilled workers; KPO enables companies to create additional business opportunities. Examples of KPO given in the chapter include research and development (R&D) activities, e-learning, business research, intellectual property (IP) research, the legal profession, and the banking sector. The chapter names KPO and ‘home-shoring’ as the new trends in quinary services, home-shoring being an alternative to outsourcing.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss the different types of tertiary activities described in the chapter, covering trade and commerce, transport and communication, and services, with named examples.
Answer: Tertiary activities cover a wide range of services. Trade and commerce includes rural marketing centres (quasi-urban, with mandis and retailing), urban marketing centres (specialised professional services), periodic markets (weekly/bi-weekly, moving from place to place), retail trading (fixed-store and non-store, such as street peddling, mail-order and internet selling), wholesale trading (bulk business through intermediaries), and innovations such as consumer cooperatives, departmental stores and chain stores. Transport is a service that physically carries people, materials and goods, measured by km, time and cost distance, and organised as networks of nodes and links; it is influenced by population size and route determinants such as landscape, climate and funds available. Communication involves the transmission of words, messages, facts and ideas, historically tied to transport (hence ‘lines of communication’), and now including telecommunications, mass media, satellite communication and the internet, which have made communication faster and increasingly independent of transport. Services themselves range from low-order (grocery shops, laundries) to high-order (accountants, consultants, physicians); some are government-regulated (highways, fire-fighting, education), some are professional (health care, engineering, law and management), recreational and entertainment services are located according to the market (a multiplex near the CBD, a golf course where land is cheaper), and some are personal, such as Mumbai’s dabbawala service. Finally, tourism, the world’s single largest tertiary activity in jobs and revenue, and medical tourism, in which India is a global leader, are also major tertiary activities.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark What is a link in a transport network?
Answer: A link is every road that joins two nodes in a transport network.
(B) 1 mark Give one example, from the definition, of what can act as a node.
Answer: A point of origin, a point of destination, or any sizeable town along a route can act as a node (any one).
(C) 2 marks What does a developed network with many links indicate about the places it connects?
Answer: It indicates that the places are well-connected, since a developed network is made up of many links joining its nodes.
(A) 1 mark According to the extract, what do quaternary activities centre around?
Answer: Quaternary activities centre around research and development.
(B) 1 mark According to the extract, who performs quinary activities?
Answer: Quinary activities are performed by the highest level of decision makers or policy makers, such as senior business executives, government officials, research scientists, and financial and legal consultants.
(C) 2 marks Why are quinary activities referred to as ‘gold collar’ professions?
Answer: Because they represent special and highly paid skills of senior business executives, government officials, research scientists, and financial and legal consultants, hence the ‘gold collar’ label, distinguishing them from other categories of workers.