KS3 Geography › Global inequalities and development
KS3 Geography › Global inequalities and development
These are the points the worksheet questions are built around.
Industry is any economic activity that creates jobs and generates income, and almost every product goes through a chain of four main types before it reaches you: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary.
Primary industry extracts raw materials directly from the Earth or sea — farming, fishing, forestry, and mining. It's the foundation everything else depends on: wheat for cereal, fish from the sea, metal ore from a mine, all start here. Primary industry has become far more mechanised over time, but it now employs far fewer people in developed countries — only around 1-2% of the UK workforce today, compared with about a third of workers in 1800 and most people in the centuries before that.
Secondary industry takes those raw materials and turns them into manufactured products — cotton becoming cloth, iron ore becoming steel and car parts, trees becoming paper or furniture. Germany is a major hub for car manufacturing, China for electronics, and the north-west of England historically had a thriving textile industry. Primary and secondary industries used to sit close together to minimise transport costs, but modern transport now allows global supply chains — Airbus wings, for example, are made in the UK and parts of the tail in Spain, before final assembly in France or Germany. In the UK, many manufacturing jobs disappeared in the late 20th century, a process called de-industrialisation, where a country shifts away from manufacturing.
Tertiary industry provides services rather than physical products — shops, restaurants, hospitals, schools, transport, banking, and more. As countries develop and become wealthier, demand for these services grows, which is why over 75% of UK workers are now employed in tertiary and quaternary industries combined.
Quaternary industry is the newest and most knowledge-based sector, covering information technology, research and development, consultancy, and computing. It supports and improves the other sectors — from software that helps manufacturers track inventory to medical research and GPS technology. This sector grew rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, driven by the digital revolution, and tends to cluster in cities with highly educated workers, universities, and strong infrastructure, such as Silicon Valley, London, Bangalore, and Tokyo.
The Clark Fisher Model explains how countries' employment patterns shift through three phases over time. In the pre-industrial phase (before the late 1700s), most people worked in primary industries, farming the land. In the industrial phase (late 1700s to the 1970s), secondary industry exploded as factories were built and cities like Manchester and Birmingham grew rapidly, while primary industry declined. In the post-industrial phase (from about the 1980s), manufacturing declines further as companies move factories to countries with cheaper labour, and tertiary and quaternary industries become dominant instead. Today in the UK, only 1-2% work in primary industries, around 20% in secondary, and roughly 78-79% in tertiary and quaternary combined — almost the reverse of 200 years ago. Different countries sit at different stages simultaneously: the UK and USA are post-industrial, China and India are largely industrial, and some African countries remain largely pre-industrial.
Industry creates impacts across several areas. Economically, offshoring — moving manufacturing to lower-cost countries to increase profits — creates jobs abroad while destroying jobs at home; a company might pay £15 an hour in the UK but only £2 an hour elsewhere. Socially, this caused real hardship, such as when UK coal mines closed in the 1980s, leaving mining communities facing unemployment and poverty, while for newly emerging economies like Nigeria, industrial growth can fund schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. Environmentally, industry can be heavily polluting — leather manufacturing has polluted the River Ganges in India, and textile factories in Bangladesh release chemicals into waterways — which has driven growing interest in a Green Industrial Revolution, including the UK's 2020 ten-point plan for green jobs and a zero-carbon economy. Politically, low-income countries often export raw materials while richer countries manufacture and sell the finished goods — Ivory Coast and Ghana export raw cocoa beans while Europe makes and sells the chocolate — reinforcing global inequality, since manufactured goods are generally worth more than raw materials.
In short: the four types of industry — primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary — form a chain from raw materials to finished products and services. Countries move through pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial phases over time, and this industrial change carries real economic, social, environmental, and political consequences, both good and bad, for the countries and communities involved.
These are the words that appear as key term cards in the video — worth knowing cold before the test.
Short clips from this lesson. Good for a quick refresh before a test.
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The 3 questions from the video, one at a time. See if you caught them.
1. A software developer creating apps for smartphones works in which industry?
Why: A software developer works with knowledge and ICT (information and communication technology), which makes it a quaternary industry.
2. Hundreds of years ago, most UK workers were farmers. What percentage of UK workers are farmers TODAY?
Why: Machines now do most of the farm work, and more people work in other industries. So only about 1 to 2% of UK workers are farmers today.
3. Your smartphone went through ALL 4 types of industry before reaching your pocket. Which industry came FIRST in your phone's journey?
Why: Primary industry takes raw materials from the ground, so mining for the metals comes first. Then factories make the phone, shops sell it and app stores provide the apps.
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Students watch the video and do the quiz. They get a result card to paste back to you, showing their first try and best score.
This lesson's quiz questions on one sheet, with the answer key on page 2.
The quiz in big text for your classroom screen, one question at a time. Or build a 5-question Do Now starter from lessons your class has already done.
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