homework essay

I need an explanation for this Social Science question to help me study.

1. Why do Southwest Asia and North Africa form a useful world region? What are some of the problems associated with defining the region?

2. Describe the climatic changes you might experience as you traveled from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the highlands of Yemen. What are some of the key climatic variables that explain these variations?

3. Discuss five important human modifications of the Southwest and North African environment, and assess whether these changes have benefitted the region.

4. Discuss how pastoral nomadism, oasis agriculture, and dryland wheat farming represent distinctive adaptations to the regional environments of Southwest Asia and North Africa. How do these rural lifeways create distinctive patterns of settlement?

5. Compare the modern maps of religion and language for the region, and identify three major examples where Islam dominates non-Arabic-speaking areas. Explain why that is the case.

6. Describe the role played by the French and British in shaping the modern political map of Southwest Asia and North Africa. Provide specific examples of their lasting legacy.

7. Define Islamic fundamentalism and Islamism. Outline three regional examples where Islamic fundamentalism or Islamism redefined the domestic geopolitical setting since the late 1970s.

8. Explain how ethnic differences have shaped Iraq’s political conflicts in the past 50 years.

9. Describe the basic geography of oil reserves across the region, and compare the pattern with the geography of natural gas reserves.

10. What strategies for economic development have recently been employed by nations such as Turkey, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco? How successful have they been, and how do they relate to the theme of globalization?

word count: 650 words