Review Questions for Test 4

1. Sketch the hydrologic cycle, labelling each part and indicating with arrows the direction of movement.

2. Who are competing users for the water in the reservoir behind a dam? How are they affected seasonally?

3. Where is most of the world’s water? How is it used?

4. Be able to sketch a confined aquifer (Bighorn Basin) and nconfined aquifer (Walnut Cove, NC).

5. What is the difference between porosity and permeability?

6. Be able to calculate a groundwater gradient, determining flow direction. Use Darcy’s Law to calculate velocity.

7. How do springs form?

8. How do caves form? What is karst?

9. What is subsidence? What causes it? What is a sinkhole?

10. What are three reasons oil prices are at their current level?

11. What happened at Lake Peigneur?

12. Explain the process by which petroleum forms.

13. Explain the process by which coal forms.

14. Where does the U.S. get much of its oil? Why?

15. Production of oil has greatly increased in the last decade. Why?

16. The U.S is still the largest consumer of oil in the world, and it imorts approximately 40% of its needs. Yet it also exports oil. Explain.

17. What is the difference between renewable and non-renewable energy? Provide examples of each.

18. Production of solar and wind energy vary considerably over time. Why? What is being done to overcome this problem?

19. What is the difference between nuclear fission and fusion? What is the current state of each?

20. What is the link between the OPEC oil embargo and third-world debt?

21. Provide examples of events in the Middle East that have affected oil production and prices.

22. What was the Overland Trail?

23. What was the Great American Desert? What turned it into part of the breadbasket of the world?

24. How do deserts form? Know the five ways. Be able to sketch a rain- shadow desert.

25. What is the greenhouse effect? Be able to sketch it. What role does carbon dioxide play?

26. What is the urban heat island effect?

27. What are the main current issues with respect to global warming? Give three examples of relevant data.

28. How has atmospheric carbon dioxide varied since the industrial revolution?

29. What are the differences between mechanical and chemical weathering? biological?

30. What are the main processes in soil formation? Be able to sketch a typical soil profile in a humid climate. How would it be different in a desert or rainforest environment?

31. What are the differences between the weathering of granite and limestone? How do the resulting soils differ?

32. How have we attempted to overcome soil erosion from water and wind?

33. How did the extermination of Haiti’s pigs relate to deforestation and soil loss?

34. What was the Dust Bowl?

1. How does energy policy relate to the growth of terrorism?

2. How does energy policy relate to the fall of the U.S.S.R.?

3. How does energy policy relate to global climate change?

4. If you had a few extra dollars, how could you best use them to make the world a better place?

5. What is the relationship between natural resources and population growth? What are the two most effective ways to slow human population growth?