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Class 12 Primary Activities: cheat sheet
CBSE Social Science. Getting resources directly from nature: gathering, nomadic herding and ranching, the main types of farming and where they are found, co-operatives, and mining.
Key ideas
- Primary activities depend directly on the environment; their workers are called red-collar workers.
- Gathering gives products like chicle, cork and gums, but synthetic products have replaced many of them.
- Nomadic herders move with their animals for pasture and water (transhumance is the seasonal move to mountain pastures); commercial ranches are fenced, with one kind of animal, kept within the pasture’s carrying capacity.
- Subsistence farming: primitive (slash and burn) and intensive (tiny holdings, high yield per hectare, low output per worker) in monsoon Asia.
- Commercial farming: plantations, extensive grain farms (low yield per acre, high per person), mixed farming, dairy, Mediterranean farming and market gardening.
- In co-operative farming farmers pool resources while keeping their land; Denmark is the classic example.
- Minerals near the surface are mined open-cast (cheap, safe); deep ores need shaft mining.
Remember
| Truck farm distance | speed × hours a truck drives overnight |
| Ranch capacity | hectares grazed at a time × animals per hectare |
| Output per worker | total output ÷ workers |
| Milk in a month | cows × litres each a day × 30 |
| Grain regions | steppes, Prairies, Pampas, Velds, Australian Downs, Canterbury Plains |
| Names for shifting cultivation | milpa in Mexico and Central America; jhuming in north-eastern India |
Watch out
- Saying intensive subsistence farming has high output per worker (it has high yield per hectare, but low output per worker).
- Calling viticulture citrus growing (it is grapes).
- Mixing up nomadic herding (subsistence, moving) and ranching (commercial, fenced).
Worked example
Suppose Farm A (paddy) has 3 ha, 3 workers and yields 7 tonnes per ha; Farm B (wheat) has 2,000 ha, 5 workers and yields 2 tonnes per ha. Which has the higher yield per hectare, and which produces more per worker?
Working: output = area × yield; ÷ workers
Answer: Farm A per hectare (7 vs 2 t); Farm B per worker (800 vs 7 t)
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