What question would you ask a Geography teacher if you were back at school?
11) What was the Biggest Island before Australia was discovered?
Ahh, another good question, what do you mean by discovered and discovered by whom as well as how do you define "island"? Discover can be defined as finding something unexpectedly or find during a search. So did Captain James Cook discover Australia onthe 22nd of August 1770, well he discovered the south coast and claimed it as New South Wales. But did he know it was an island when he first discovered it or when the crew member up in the crow's nest shouted "Land ahoy!".I presume we have to a person to discover an island and then when did the Aborigines discover Australia - a cumulative population of 1.6 billion has been estimated to have lived in Australia 70,000 years before the English colonisation.
But how do we define an island - the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines an island as "any area of land smaller than a continent and entirely surrounded by water." (Source:http://www.britannica.com/science/island). So how do you define a continent otherwise we could have added current day Antarctica, the combined North and South American continents or what about Gondwanaland or even the Indian sub continent as it travelled from Africa to the Eurasian plate with its cargo of evolving rhinoceri and Asiatic lions. The Britannia site defines a continent as "one of the larger continuous masses of land" and it includes Australia as a continent, not an island.Greenland is defined as an island and is one-fourth the size of Australia and no smaller kangaroos. But to answer your question, I guess the Vikings found or discovered Greenland (as an island) and that was the biggest island before Australia (as a continent) was discovered as a coastline in 1770. Hope that helps, when are you going out in your boat?
12) Where did I leave my leather hat?
First of all we need to ascertain if this hat has been lost in the past or in the future, if it is the latter then we need to think where the leather, presumably a cow (unless you are going exotic with some form of antelope, crocodile or ostrich then look to the savannah and rivers of equatorial and southern Africa), is produced. Argentina was estimated to have produced 81.3 million pieces of bovine hide and leather (source). But if the leather has been constructed and bought lost, it is best to visualise the last time you wore it and replay that day in your mind's eye, best to do it at night just before falling asleep as this will help the unconscious mind to work on it when you are asleep. It is a bit like getting your computer to work on a background programme whilst destroying nine shades of pigs using angry birds as a form of flighted ammunition.
13) What cool careers can geographers do?
What careers don't use geographical skills - navigation to get to work to navigation within a game's artificial landscape and remember to add realistic cloud forms and tidal patterns so that the player is fully immersed. What about using the social harmonies you learnt in the sitting arrangements of a classroom and put that forward as a way of reducing stress in planning a sustainable community. What about copying the architectural patterns of a communal courtyard surrounded by houses so that each neighbour has to say hello to their neighbours after the night before - Zanzibar, Venice and even the hidden gardens around a square in London have these forms.
What about using your lack of Brazilian Portuguese but your working knowledge of limestone cave features to explain the difference between stalactites and stalagmites. What about an alphabetical list of jobs that doesn't even cover 1% of the jobs that use geographical skills -
Architect,
Banker,
Chemist,
Dentist,
Egyptologist,
Farmer,
Golf Course Designer,
Hotel Manager,
Injuries Claim Lawyer,
Jury Member,
Karate Instructor,
Lima Llama rearer,
Mother,
Nuclear Power Station button pusher,
Oscar-winning film director,
Petrol head,
The Queen,
Romulian Cos Player,
Scientist,
Transport Hub coordinator for a logistics firm,
Uniform designer,
Venusian atmosphere data analyst,
A weary World Wide Web developer,
A Xylophonist who tours England and Wales in a transit van until he reaches the big time and not forgetting...
The Zoo keeper who specialises in ant colonies.
I have only scratched the surface. Others I may have missed include Viking navigator, Urban planner of future mega cities, Chinese cartographer, measurer of Martian mountain heights, artist who makes a map of said xylophonists journey around British Isles, Coastal walk guide writer. Kids get forced down the science route for job prospects, at the expense of 'softer' subjects. Showing kids what they could end up doing as Geographers is important, in addition to all the transferable skills, and 'soft' skills which are coming back into fashion.
14) Who put the Ram in the Ramalamadingdong?
It was the same guy who put the Bop in the Bop-shu-wop-du-wop.
Well a relatively answer that also reflects the geography of music. George Jones Jr. wrote the song and thus "put the ram in Ramalamadingdong", he wrote it for the group The Edsels in which he also performed. The song was recorded in 1957 and he sadly passed away on the 27th of September 2008. the song is written in the Doo Whop style that was created and adopted by the African-American communities in the major USA cities. So it could be stated that this style of music and more or less the origin of music came from the African continent. The question also gives me the excuse to the play The Muppets version.
15) Cleavage. Come on. Have you thought this through?
Yes, like most subjects or television programmes (need I mention the Pottery Throw Down or the Great British Bake Off) they are full of double entredres. I presume you are asking about the cleavage that is linked to geomorphology and petrology.
It helps to describe a rock feature that is the result of deformation from heat, pressure and sometimes metamorphism. Cleavage helps to describe the planar features (ie the plane surfaces) in the many layers of the rock (foliation). This foliation is divided into two types, primary being found in igneous and sedimentary rocks and features whereas secondary is found in metamorphic rocks and features. And cleavage is the secondary foliation is found in fine-grained metamorphic rocks. Whereas the coarser grained rock foliation is known as schistosity (which also sounds a bit rude - can you imagine Finbarr or Roger Melly being a Geography teacher).
Of course, there are various forms of cleavage (stop it at the back, please) which are continuous, slaty, spaced, crenulation, disjunctive and transposition. Slate, the metamorphic material found on the roof, is characterised by fine foliation along which it breaks to cause a smooth surface - the slaty cleavage - all the better for the rain to sluice off.
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