314
Modern Business Geography
tion, as well as their own poverty, makes the people unable to pay for
goods from a distance. Among the majority of the Chinese and In-
dians, eighty per cent of a family’s entire income is often represented
by the rice, millet, beans, and other food products on which they live.
5. Map exercise. On an outline map of Asia, insert in their proper places in
each country the names of all products which are produced there abundantly
and of which Asia produces at least 20 per cent of the world’s total.
Use Table V. What parts of Asia have the greatest variety of products?
6. Judging from Table V and your map, state the kinds of foods that you
would expect to be most common in the following regions :
(a) West central Siberia (¢) Southern Japan (f) Java
(b) Manchuria (d) Northern India (9) Turkey
(e) Central India
Verify your answers from reference books.
What indications do you see in Table V that most of the people of
Asia live on a vegetable diet? What products are most widely eaten?
What ones take the place of meat?
rd
In India, where the Asiatic cattle are most abundant, and to a less
extent in neighboring countries, cattle are used largely as draft ani-
mals and beasts of burden.
2
What effect does this have on people’s diet? How do the figures for
dairy products in Table V bear out your conclusion? What is the
effect of the use of cattle as draft animals upon the number of hides avail-
able from a given number of animals?
Effect of climatic and physical conditions on production in Asia and
Australia. Climatically Asia and Australia are alike in having a vast
central area too dry for extensive human occupation, and in having
the chief agricultural areas along the east coast and in the peninsulas
that project equatorward. There heavy summer rains of the monsoon
type permit a dense population to find a living. Both continents also
have a western region more than 30° from the equator, where winter
rains permit a moderately dense population to support itself by agri-
culture in spite of summer droughts. On the side away from the
equator Asia projects into latitudes so high that agriculture is impossible
in a large Siberian region, but Australia has nothing corresponding to
this. Its southeastern corner, however, together with Tasmania and
New Zealand, is like the best or western part of Siberia in being
traversed by cyclonic storms, at least in winter, so that it has a fair
amount of rain in winter as well as in summer.