KS3 GEOGRAPHY GEOG.

3 ‘YOUR TURN’ ANSWERS CHAPTER 01

KS3 Geography Geog.3 ‘Your Turn’ Answers

CHAPTER ONE: FROM ROCK TO SOIL

1.1: Your rocky home

1. a) Rock is a mixture of minerals.

b) Students may say that the stuff under the ocean does not let water soak away. What else
could it be, other than rock? They may also remember from geog.1 that when water levels fall,
the ocean / sea floor is exposed as land.

2. a) Ways in which we use rock: to construct buildings, walls, roads, and so on; to make decorative
facades for buildings, outside and inside (including wall and floor tiles, and worktops); as roof
covering (using the rock called slate); to make cement (from mudstone and limestone); as a source
of diamonds, rubies, and other precious and semi-precious stones; as a source of metals and metal
ores, including iron ore and bauxite; for sculptures and gravestones. (Note that coal is sometimes
referred to as a rock. But it is an organic substance, and strictly speaking, minerals are inorganic.)

b) It is usually dug or blasted from the ground, at quarries and in mines. Gravel (small bits of rock) is
scooped from the sea floor.

3. a) A mineral is a natural compound found in rock. Minerals are solid, and usually exist as crystals.

b) quartz

4. They contain silicon and oxygen.

5. There's plenty of scope for students' imagination here. You'd expect structures made of rock to get
eaten up (some buildings, pavements, walls, gravestones, statues, slate roofs). The fungus would
attack exposed rock on hillsides and mountains and work its way down till it reached Earth's metal
core. (You could direct students to the first diagram on page 86 of their books.) Eventually, even if
the fungus did not eat concrete, all built structures would topple as the rock below disappeared.
And if Earth got lighter, its place in the solar system would be affected too.

1.2: The three rock groups

1. a) Students could draw diagrams like the two in the upper row on page 8.

b) The rock is in fact called siltstone.

2. Marble is a metamorphic rock.

3. a) As it is pushed down, the sedimentary rock will have changed into other forms of rock:
metamorphic or igneous.

b) The fossils will have been distorted by pressure.

c) The rock they were trapped in will have melted, before it hardened to form igneous rock. So
you'd expect the fossils to have been destroyed.

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KS3 GEOGRAPHY GEOG.3 ‘YOUR TURN’ ANSWERS CHAPTER 01

1.3: Weathering

1. Because much of it is due to elements of weather: temperature and rainfall.

2. Sample drawings are shown below:

3. Physical weathering breaks rock down into smaller bits — but the substances in the bits do not
change. Chemical weathering changes the substances into different substances, through
chemical reaction.

4. Limestone is easily attacked by acid. (Students will probably have seen calcium carbonate
reacting with acid in the lab.) Rain is slightly acidic, so it reacts with the surface of limestone
and dissolves it away. Limestone rock has natural vertical joints (cracks), so the rain will run
down these, dissolving rock as it goes. So the joints get wider, and eventually the rock looks
like a rough pavement. (See photo C on page 18 of the students' book.)

5. By the reaction of water with feldspars in rock. (The reaction with water is called hydrolysis.)
Remember, feldspars are very common in rock, so clay is a very common product.

6. Weathering by living things (roots, burrowing animals).

7. The big benefit is that it produces clay — a major component of soil, which we depend on
for food. We also use clay to make pottery, cement, and other things. Weathering produces
sand, giving us beaches to enjoy. We use sand to make glass, concrete, bricks, and many

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other products. Weathering also produces dramatic landforms to enjoy, and which often
give opportunity for sports: rock climbing, potholing, and skiing, for example.

1.4: The rock cycle

1. Expect a drawing somewhat similar to the drawing on page 12 of the students' book.

2. This will happen if quartzite gets pushed up to Earth's surface, then weathered.

3. a)Plates are the big slabs which form Earth's hard outer part.

b) They are dragged around by the currents in the hot soft rock below them.

c) When plates are pushed into each other, one plate (the heavier one) dives downwards. Any
sedimentary rock on it will get buried. (As students will see on page 90 of Chapter 5, the plate
carrying ocean is heavier, since oceanic crust is heavier.)

1.5: The British Isles on their travels

1. Any three of: Gondwana, Laurentia, Siberia, Baltica

2. Expect students to state that those continents no longer exist because the plates they were
carried on have moved around, joined together, and broken apart, over many millions of years
(as they are still doing today).

3. a) the Devonian period

b) No; giant insects did not appear until the Carboniferous period.

4. a) in the Triassic

b) There was one super-continent: Pangaea.

c) i) For example the footprint was probably made in mud, which dried out and hardened. Later
a layer of sediment (sand) was washed into the area and filled the footprint (for example,
during a flood, or after a new river formed through land movements, or when sea levels
rose). Over time, the sediment turned into sedimentary rock, preserving the shape of the
footprint. And then at some point the footprint got exposed, through a combination of land
movements (eg uplift) and weathering.

ii) It ended up far from where it was made because the plate carrying the footprint moved.

5. The dinosaurs died out around 66-65 million years ago (at the end of the Cretaceous period).

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1.6: Rock around the UK

1. Because rock got folded upwards as land masses were forced together, when plates collided.
(Look back at globes 2 and 3 on page 14 of the students' book.)

2. a) Northwest Highlands

b) metamorphic

c) Because its rock would have been under enormous pressure when Laurentia, Avalonia and
Baltica came together. (At that time Scotland was at a plate edge.)

3. Students should notice that the rock has been buckled and folded.

4. Most of the bedrock is sedimentary. But remind students that if they could bore down through
the sedimentary rock they would eventually come to metamorphic or igneous rock. (See the
diagram on page 9 of the students' book.)

5. a) at X: mudstone; at Y, limestone

b) at X (Jurassic)

c) Mudstone weathers more readily than limestone does. But students may have difficulty with
this question because of the time difference. (The mudstone could be as much as 60 million
years older than the limestone so you might expect it to be more eroded.)

A big clue to the ease of weathering of mudstone is that the land is low and flat around X, as
image B shows. In general, the mudstone areas in the UK are lower-lying than the limestone
areas.

1.7: Rock and landscapes

1. a) Students are likely to note more similarities than differences:

both landscapes look exposed, and undulating, with bits of rock sticking up, and wiry grass. Not
much growing except grass. (There are some bushes in B.)

b) The rock sticking up is more massive in A. There are stone walls in B.

2. a) D has a regular arrangement of fields, with hedges. It is obviously rich farmland. Several fields
have been planted with crops; others are used as pasture, and one (near the top) has been used
for making hay. There are trees dotted around. Overall, the land looks flat. In contrast, the only
sign of farming in B is the sheep; there are stone walls instead of hedges, and only a few bushes;
the land appears to be more undulating than in D and gives the impression of being more
exposed (but hard to confirm this as we do not see the horizon in D).

b) The main reason for the differences is the rock type. The bedrock in D is mudstone, which
weathers rapidly to clay. Limestone rock may contain clay and sand particles — but the calcium
carbonate itself dissolves away, so the soil is thin.

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3. Acidic rainwater dissolves the surface of the limestone. It runs down the natural joints in the
limestone, and as the rock is dissolved the joints get wider.

4. granite; limestone; mudstone

5. a) X, limestone: Y, mudstone: Z, granite

b) Evidence that X shows a limestone area:

— disappearing streams, eg in squares 7572, 7573, 7673, 7674 (Gaping Gill in 7572 is a famous
spot where a river plunges down into a cavern)

— potholes, eg in squares 7372, 7472, 7572, 7672

— caves in square 7673.

But note that the steep slopes (contour lines close together) indicate that limestone is not that
easily/rapidly weathered, overall. The main effect is where water runs down the joints.

Evidence that Y shows a mudstone area:

— the land is flat (contour lines far apart), suggesting that this rock weathers readily

— many farms, suggesting thick soil (containing clay).

Evidence that Z shows a granite area:

— steep slopes (granite does not weather easily);

— many tors are marked; one is High Willhays, also shown in the foreground in photo A, with
Yes Tor in the distance

— the reservoir indicates that the rock is impermeable

— there is boggy land in square 5889, suggesting that the water can't drain away.

1.8: Soil…and you

1. a) It's a mixture of clay, sand, and rotting vegetation.

b) The clay and sand are produced by the weathering of rock. The rotting vegetation forms when
plants die.

c) Nutrients are substances which plants must take in, to grow and be healthy. They include
elements such as nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.

2. As the humus rots away ('eaten' by bacteria), the nutrients in it are returned to the soil, so can
be used by other plants.

3. the topsoil

4. a) Each crop takes nutrients from the topsoil. So eventually it may not have enough nutrients to
support further crops.

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b) Fertilisers are substances added to soil to make it more fertile; they can be chemicals made in
factories, or materials such as animal manure and rotting vegetation.

5. Rock will continue to weather, so in theory we won't run out of soil. But as the population
grows, we need more soil for growing food. At the same time, as students will see in Unit 2.5, we
are not looking after it. In some places, soil is being degraded far faster than new soil can form.
So these places are already short of fertile soil.