The Learning Cafe

Here is a copy of one of our smartboard pages from the unit. You might find it helpful when thinking about NCEA exam questions on ‘Differences between countries’ and ‘Differences within countries’. Tomorrow I hope to post some specific details about each factor for the United States and Tanzania. Until then….

disparities between countries

Howdy Team, Today we will focus on the different methods of comparing development. Your job is develop some paragraphs to address the following questions:

Name TWO different indicators that can be used to measure development. Explain the benefits and problems of each.

Name THREE methods of evaluating the relationship between two sets of development data. Explain the benefits and problems of each method.

You might find it helpful to check out some of the past posts about disparities in development.

Test your knowledge of America’ states. This will help you with our second disparities in development case study.

Click Here

This site has heaps of other great geographic games - Purpose Games , this one made by David

As part of our course we need to descirbe the differences in living standards between countries and be able to explain why they exist. We will be comparing Tanzania and the Unted States.

The first job will be to compare statistics in key areas between the countries. You will have to memorise these!

GDP per Capita (US$) - Tanzania: 335, USA: 44,190

Infant Mortality (per thousand births) - Tanzania: 72.4, USA: 6.8

Life Expectancy (years) -

Literacy Rate (%) - Tanzania: 78.7, USA: 99.9

I wrote these from memory after we looked them up on the net in class. Please correct me if I made a mistake, and if someone could remind me what the life expectancies were it would be great.

Here is a great little podcast discussing some of the main reasons for differences in development. The person talking has a strong Irish accent. I always think Irish people are telling a joke when they speak, but this guy is giving you quality information! FYI when he says ‘purr’ he is actually saying ‘poor’

To play it now just click the little box below, or right-click ‘Download’ to download it to your mp3 player if you want. What a great way to study!

Download by Mr Manson : www.thinkgeography.org.uk

In the last few lessons we have been comparing development statistics or indicators.

Geographers use three main methods for testing the relationship between indicators, and as we have found out, each have their advantages and disadvantages:

Chloropleth Mapping

colour coding a map with different intensities of the same colour to show areas of with high values and low values for a given statistic.

Advantages

• can see physical patterns easily
• easy for people to interpret

Disadvantages

• difficult to see relationships between two statistics
• results can easily be distorted depending on the colour brackets used
• suggests that major/instant differences occur when crossing a border

Scattergraphs

A simple graph with a variable on each axis. A point is plotted for each country to show both the vale of the Y and the X axis at the same time. Once all countries have had their data plotted, the grouping of plotted points is analysed. If the grouping tends to go from the bottom-left to the top-right of the graph, then the relationship between the statistics is positive. This means that as one value increases, so does the other. If the plotted points form a grouping from top-left to bottom-right of the graph, then the relationship is negative.

Advantages

• easy to see if a relationship between the statistics exists.
• easy to construct
• more ’scientific’ than identifying a pattern from chloropleth maps

Disadvantages

• can not see physical patterns - where there are differences
• different units/scales can distort the spread of plotted points

I’ll post some comments about Spearman’s Rank Correlatio Coefficient tomorrow