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Class 9 Life on Earth: cheat sheet
CBSE Social Science. Biomes of the world, biodiversity hotspots, ecotourism, GI tags, forest rights and India’s traditional water tanks.
Key ideas
- A biome is a large region with a similar climate, plants and animals, decided by temperature, rainfall and vegetation.
- The land biomes are forest, grassland, desert and tundra; water biomes cover about three-fourths of the Earth.
- Tropical rainforests lie between 23.5° N and 23.5° S and are hot and wet all year; the taiga is a belt of conifers; the tundra has permafrost.
- Temperate grasslands such as prairies and steppes have cold winters; tropical savannas in Africa are warm, with scattered trees.
- In a food pyramid, numbers, biomass and energy fall at each level, because energy is lost as heat.
- India’s biodiversity hotspots are the Himalaya, the Western Ghats, North-East India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
- Communities protect nature: Chipko villagers hugged trees, Mendha Lekha was the first village to win forest rights, and tanks store rainwater.
- A GI tag links a product to its place, like Tezpur Litchi (Assam) or Kandhamal Haldi (Odisha).
Remember
| Forest Rights Act | 2006: forest dwellers’ rights to minor forest produce |
| Traditional tanks | keres: Karnataka; eris: Tamil Nadu; ahar pynes: Bihar |
| Rann of Kutch | a salt desert in Gujarat |
| Thenmala | India’s first planned ecotourism destination (Kerala) |
| Permafrost | soil frozen almost all year, in the tundra |
Watch out
- Mixing up the taiga (coniferous forest) and the tundra (treeless, frozen ground).
- Thinking energy grows up a food pyramid: it falls at every level.
- Treating a GI tag as a brand name: it ties a product to the place it comes from.
Worked example
The Indian Fisheries Act was passed in 1897 and the Forest Rights Act in 2006. How many years apart were they, and how many years before 2046 was the Forest Rights Act?
Working: 2006 − 1897; 2046 − 2006
Answer: 109 years; 40 years
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