AP Human Geography › Unit 5
Unit 5 explores where food comes from and how farming has changed. It covers the origins and diffusion of agriculture, the Second Agricultural Revolution and the Green Revolution, intensive and extensive practices, rural settlement patterns, the von Thünen model, and the global food system. You will relate land use to distance from market and weigh the costs and benefits of new technology. Students often equate intensive farming with large farms, when it really means high inputs per unit of land. Many also ignore the model's limits today.
These are taken from the Regular set, with the answer and explanation shown.
1. During land reforms in Denmark in the late 1700s and early 1800s, scattered village strips were consolidated into single farms, and many families moved their houses out of the old villages onto their new fields. How did the rural settlement pattern change?
Answer: C. Before the reforms, families lived together in villages and walked to scattered strips. Consolidation gave each family one block of land, so many built new homes on it. Homes spread out across the countryside, which is a dispersed pattern.
Common trap: Students pick 'township-and-range grid.' That is a U.S. survey system created in 1785. Denmark's reform consolidated existing strips; it did not lay out a square federal grid.
2. In remote parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, many families with fertile land grow crops mainly for their own meals. Which economic factor best explains why they do not farm commercially?
Answer: E. Commercial farming depends on reaching markets at a reasonable cost. Where roads are few and poor, transport takes days and eats any profit, so families grow mostly for themselves. Market access shapes whether a region is subsistence or commercial.
Common trap: Students pick 'High land prices force them to farm intensively.' Remote land is usually cheap. The barrier is the cost of reaching buyers, not the cost of land.
3. Bt cotton is genetically modified to produce a protein that kills bollworms, a major cotton pest. It spread to most cotton farms in India after 2002. Which statement best captures the debate over this crop?
Answer: B. Supporters point to fewer insecticide sprays and, in many places, higher yields. Critics point to expensive seed bought every season and to pests, such as pink bollworm, that evolved resistance. Both sides cite real effects.
Common trap: Students pick 'developed by crossbreeding during the Green Revolution.' Green Revolution seeds came from crossbreeding. Bt cotton was made by genetic engineering decades later, which is why it is called a GMO.