QUESTION
a) Explain the concept of rank size role as used in Geography.
b) To what extent are villages forms and patterns and adaptation to their local physical environment.
Answer
a) Rank size role simply refers to the statistical relationship between the population sizes and the population ranks of the country's cities.
In other terms, it is the raking or arrangement of cities according to their population sizes
PX=P1/X where X means the rank of the city's population
P1=Population size of the largest city and PX=Population size of the concern city.
The rank size role shows that there is an inverse relationship between the rank of a city and a population that is cities with lower ranks have the largest population and vice versal
b) The forms refers to the shape of morphology of a village settlement. The main form of rural settlement includes; Loose knit, Linear, nucleated, open space, circular, planned rural settlement, double village, cruisiform.
In high land regions, settlement usually have loose knit form. This is because their steep slopes do not favor the building of roads, rail ways. Low land regions such as plains associated withy nucleated forms. This is because they have fertile soils which attacks many people for agriculture and levelness facilitate the building of roads, railways and dwells.
Double villages develop around ridges villages also adapt to drainage systems. Navigable rivers are associated with linear settlement because of their rule in settlement. Water bodies that are associated with floods and disease vector like the black fly. Then large water bodies are associated with double villages.
Pattern refers to the degree of closeness of building in a settlement to each other. There are 2 main types of settlement pattern namely nucleated and dispersed settlement.
In areas of water scarcity such as the hot desert near Oasis. While dispersed pattern develop on other areas with infertile soil and water shortages
In areas with infertile soils dispersed settlement pattern turns to develop due to the practice of extensive commercial agriculture while in areas with infertile soils nucleated pattern turn to develop in few spot that contains fertile soils.
In high land regions, dispersed pattern usually emerge due to difficulties in communication. The few lowlands in this highlands usually contain nucleated settlement but in lowland region, nucleated pattern usually emerge due to the presence of fertile soils which ease communication and the ease of the building of roads, railways and bridges.
Water courses are associated with nucleated settlement because of its importance in fishing, transport, domestic uses and agriculture except water bodies that are associated with floods and diseases vectors