Natural Resources Flashcards
What is the difference between renewable and nonrenewable resources?
Nonrenewable energy resources, like coal, nuclear, oil, and natural gas, are available in limited supplies.
Renewable resources are resources that are constantly being replenished, such as solar energy, wind energy, hydropower, geothermal energy, and biomass energy.
What are the disadvantages of renewable resources?
Each type of technology used to harness the energy of renewable resources can have disadvantages due to the cost of the technology uses to turn the energy into a useful for, i.e. Solar energy technology is expensive and can only be used in limited areas where the sun is not blocked regularly. Wind farms are similarly expensive to build and do not generate energy unless the wind blows.
What are the factors that determine the supply and demand of a product?
The demand by buyers for the product or service and the supply that manufacturers are willing to produce at a given price.
How are resources distributed around the globe?
states, for instance, possess abundant mineral resources which are capable of commanding high prices on world markets, while others possess reserves of coal and iron capable of driving industrialization. Others possess meager levels of resources, however, and indeed have scarce and sometimes insecure access even to essentials of life such as clean water.
Where and why renewable resource plants are built where they are?
For the hydro, wind and solar technologies, climatic variations (rainfall, cloud cover, intense storms) affect the where a plant is placed. For biomass, transportation distances between the fuel source and the generating facility may significantly affect the electricity cost.
Vocab. What does renewable mean?
an energy resource that is readily available or that can be replaced in a relatively short time
Vocab: Non-renewable
Natural resources such as fossil
fuels that will eventually be used
up and can never be replaced.
Vocab: supply and demand:
The quantity of a commodity or service suppliers are willing to produce and the desire for buyers to purchase it.
vocab: cost and benefit ratio
A benefit-cost ratio (BCR) is an indicator used in cost-benefit analysis to show the relationship between the relative costs and benefits of a proposed project, expressed in monetary or qualitative terms.
vocab:Biomass
fuels derived from living thing; renewable resources.
vocab:Cost benefit ratio
an indicator used in cost/benefit analysis
