Geography GPY351 of Africa Midterm exam study guide 1. One thing that is unique about Africa is its diversity of languages. Describe the patterns of languages spoken today and how they came to have the geographic distribution that they do today. Start with an overview of African languages and then spend the rest of your answer discussing the changing geography of African language. Please include a paragraph or two on the future of language diversity in Africa. It would be useful to use maps to showing the changes across the continent. The population of Africa is unevenly distributed across the continent. Discuss the geographic distribution of population across Africa and explain the cause(s) of the pattern. In the last part of your answer describe how and why the distribution and numbers of people in Africa has changed over the last several thousand years. What does the future hold for African population growth? Describe present African climates and environments and what causes them. How have African climates and environments changed since the Holocene. What changes can we expect with global climate change? Describe the geopolitical nature of the African pre-colonial state and discuss the challenges that European powers and, after independence, African governments faced in maintaining the sovereignty the across entire national space in Africa. Some have said that Africa is the "key" to understanding world plate tectonics. Others have commented on the uniqueness of African geology. Discuss the geology of Africa and how African evidence can be used to demonstrate the validity of continental drift and plate tectonics. Particular environments provide opportunities, constraints, and even challenges to people and their activities. The topic of this question is pastoralism. What is pastoralism? Where is it found in Africa? Explain the logic of pastoralism as a socioeconomic system existing in dryland environments. In other words, how does it work? List and discuss the major strategies that pastoralists use to minimize risk. Discuss three competing strategies that have been p...