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Unit 8 Vocabulary
South Asia
Question | Answer |
---|---|
Himalaya Mountains | A mountian range in South Asia that includes Mount Everest, the world's tallest mountain peak. |
Subcontinent | A landmass that is like a continent, only smaller, such as South Asia, which is called the Indian subcontinent. |
Alluvial Plain | Land that is rich farmland, composed of clay, silt, salt, or gravel deposited by running water. |
Archipelago | A set of closely grouped islands. |
Atoll | A ringlike coral island or string of small islands surrounding a lagoon. |
Monsoon | A seasonal wind, especially in South Asia. |
Cyclone | A violent storm with fierce winds and heavy rain; the most extreme weather pattern in South Asia |
Hinduism | The dominant religion of India. |
Ganges River | River in South Asia; an important water resource flowing more than 1,500 miles from its source in a Himalayan glacier to the Bay of Bengal. |
Estuary | A broadened seaward end of a river, where the river's currents meet ocean's tides. |
Storm Surge | High water level brought by a cyclone that swamps low-lying areas. |
Mughal Empire | The Muslilm empire established by the early 1500s over much of India, which brought with its new customs that sometimes conflicted with those native Hindus. |
Raj | The period of British rule in India, which lasted for nesarly 200 years, from 1857 to 1947. |
Nonviolent Resistance | A movement that uses all means of protest except violence. |
Land Reform | The process of breaking up large landholdings to attain a more balanced land distribution among farmers. |
Green Revolution | An argiculutural prograam launched by scientists in the 1960s to develope higher-yeilding grain varities and improve food productoin by incoropating new farming techniques. |
Caste System | The Aryan system of social classes in India and one conerstone of Hinduism in which each person is born in a caste and can only move into a different caste through reincarnation. |
Indus Valley Civilization | The largest of the world's first cicilizations in which in what is now Pakiistan; this was highly developed urban civilizations, lasting from 2500 B.C. to about 1500 B.C. |
Partition | Seperation; Division into two or more territorial units having seperate political status. |
Kashmir | A region of northern India and Pakistan over which serval distructive wars have been fought. |
Microcredit | a small loan available to poor enterprenurs, to help small businesses grow and raise living standards. |
Entepreneur | A person who starts and builds a business. |
Ramadan | An Islamic practice of month-long fasting from sunup to sundown. |
Constitutional Monarchy | A government in which the ruler's powers are limited by a constitution and the laws of the nation. |
Sherpa | A person of Tibetan abcestry in Nepal, who serves as the traditional mountain guide of the Mount Everest region. |
Siddhartha Gautama | The founder of the buddhism and known as the Budda, born in southern Nepal in the Sicth Century B.C. |
Mandala | A state organized as a ring of power around a central court, which often changed in size over time, and which was used instead of borders in the Early Southeast Asia. |
Sinhalese | An Indo-Aryan people who crossed the strait seperating India and Sri Lake in the sixth century B.C. and who created an advanced cicilization there adopting Buddhism. |
Tamils | A Dravidian Hindu, who arrived in Sri Lake in the fourth century, setting in the north while the Sinhalese moved further south. |
Sultan | A ruler of a Muslim country. |
Basic Necessities | Food, clothing, and shelter. |
Illiteracy | The inability to read or write. |
Summer Monsoon | The season when winds blow from the southwest across the Indian Ocean towardSoouth Asia, from June through September, with winds stirring up powerful storms and causing serve flooding. |
Winter Monsoon | the season when dry winds blow from the northeast across the HImalaya Mountains toward the sea from October through February, sometimes causing drought. |