EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 107 of 120

Correct — C, (c) Both 1 and 2. Both statements reproduce the standard textbook account of truck farming, and the second one is where the term gets its name. Statement 1 is correct. Truck farming is the specialised growing of vegetables for sale in nearby urban markets. It is a branch of market gardening and horticulture, the commercial farming type in which high-value crops such as vegetables, fruits and flowers are raised solely for the urban market. Farms are small, intensively worked, and heavy on both labour and capital, using irrigation, high-yielding seeds, fertilisers, insecticides and, in colder regions, greenhouses and artificial heating. Where a farmer specialises in vegetables alone rather than in the wider basket of fruits and flowers, the activity is called truck farming. The daily perishability of the produce is what forces the farms close to the city. Statement 2 is correct, and it is the reason for the name. The standard school text puts it directly: the distance of truck farms from the market is governed by the distance a truck can cover overnight. Vegetables picked in the evening must reach the wholesale market before it opens in the morning, so the practical limit on how far a truck farm can be from the city is one night's road haul. That single constraint explains the geography of the activity, which is a ring of intensive vegetable holdings around every large urban centre, and it is why improvements in roads and refrigerated transport push the ring outward. Since both statements are correct, the code option is (c). Notice how the two statements are built to work together rather than to contradict each other: the first defines the activity by what it produces and for whom, and the second explains what fixes its location. A candidate who has read the market-gardening section of the standard human geography text will recognise both sentences almost verbatim, which is the level of familiarity this kind of item rewards.

• (a)1 only — Choosing this means accepting the definition in statement 1 while rejecting the overnight-haul explanation in statement 2. But statement 2 is not an embellishment; it is the sentence that gives truck farming its name and its characteristic location. The activity exists as a distinct category precisely because vegetables are perishable and must be delivered daily, and the radius within which that is possible is one night's drive. A candidate lands here by treating the second statement as a colourful detail that might have been invented, when in fact it is the part of the definition that a textbook states explicitly.
• (b)2 only — This rejects statement 1, which is the plain definition of the term. Truck farming is the growing of vegetables for nearby urban markets, and the reference to meeting the daily demand of people is exactly right, since daily delivery of perishable produce is the whole basis of the activity. The only way to argue against statement 1 is to insist that market gardening and truck farming are entirely different things, when the second is in fact the vegetable-only branch of the first. If anything, statement 1 is the safer of the two, and rejecting it while keeping statement 2 leaves the term with an explanation but no definition.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — This rejects both, and neither can be rejected. Statement 1 is the definition of the term as standard human geography texts give it, and statement 2 is the explanation of its name that the same texts give in the very next sentence. The option would be attractive only to a candidate who has confused truck farming with something else, most often with factory farming, which is the intensive rearing of livestock in stalls, or with contract farming, which is an arrangement between a producer and a buyer and says nothing about distance. Neither of those has anything to do with vegetables grown within a night's haul of a city.

Standard human geography classifies agriculture first by whether the produce is consumed by the grower or sold. Subsistence agriculture divides into primitive subsistence, which is shifting cultivation, and intensive subsistence, the densely populated wet-paddy and non-paddy farming of monsoon Asia. Commercial agriculture divides into commercial grain farming, commercial livestock ranching, mixed farming, dairy farming, plantation agriculture, Mediterranean agriculture, and market gardening and horticulture. Market gardening and horticulture is the type that specialises in high-value crops, meaning vegetables, fruits and flowers, grown solely for urban markets. Its farms are small and located where transport links to the city are good and where high-income consumers are concentrated; it is both labour intensive and capital intensive, relying on irrigation, high-yielding seeds, fertilisers, insecticides, greenhouses and artificial heating in colder regions. It is well developed in the densely populated industrial districts of north-west Europe, the north-eastern United States and the Mediterranean regions, and the Netherlands is the classic example, specialising in flowers and horticultural crops. Truck farming is the branch of it in which the farmer grows vegetables only, and it is named for the distance a truck can travel in a night between the farm and the market. Factory farming, a term often confused with it, belongs to the dairy and livestock side and refers to rearing animals in stalls on bought-in feed.

Human geography sits inside the polity, economy and environment block of the EO/AO General Ability Test, and the agriculture classification is one of the few topics in it with a single settled source, which is why examiners can set it as a two-statement code item and expect an unambiguous answer. Questions in this family reward a candidate who has read the classification once carefully rather than one who has collected definitions from several places, because it is the textbook's own phrasing that gets reproduced in the statements. The habit rewarded is to learn each farming type by three attributes: what it grows, who it sells to, and what fixes its location.

• Truck farming is the specialised commercial growing of vegetables for nearby urban markets.
• It is the vegetable-only branch of market gardening and horticulture.
• It is named for the distance a truck can cover overnight between the farm and the market, which is what fixes how far the farms can be from the city.
• Market gardening and horticulture grows high-value vegetables, fruits and flowers solely for urban markets, on small, labour-intensive and capital-intensive farms.
• It is well developed in north-west Europe, the north-eastern United States and the Mediterranean region; the Netherlands specialises in flowers.
• Factory farming is a different thing: rearing livestock in stalls on bought-in feed, part of the dairy and livestock side.
• Commercial agriculture also includes commercial grain farming, livestock ranching, mixed farming, dairy farming, plantation agriculture and Mediterranean agriculture.

• Confusing truck farming with factory farming, which concerns livestock kept in stalls.
• Treating truck farming as identical to market gardening; it is the branch restricted to vegetables.
• Assuming the name comes from the vehicle used to plough or to carry inputs rather than from the overnight haul to market.
• Reading 'daily demand' in statement 1 as an exaggeration; daily delivery of perishables is the defining feature.
• Assuming that any statement offering a colourful explanation of a name must be the invented one in the pair.

Agricultural classification appears in EO/AO papers as a two-statement code item like this one, as a direct definition question asking what a named farming type is, or as a matching item pairing four farming types with four descriptions or four regions. Because the classification comes from one standard source, the safest preparation is to read that source's own sentences rather than a summary, and to hold each type against the three questions of what it grows, whom it sells to, and what determines where it is carried on.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Market gardening and horticulture is best described as :

  • (a)The rearing of livestock in stalls on purchased feed for urban milk markets
  • (b)The cultivation of high-value vegetables, fruits and flowers solely for urban markets
  • (c)Shifting cultivation practised on cleared forest patches for a few seasons
  • (d)Extensive grain farming on large mechanised holdings in temperate grasslands

  Answer(b) The cultivation of high-value vegetables, fruits and flowers solely for urban markets

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs is correctly matched ?

  • (a)Factory farming : growing of vegetables within a night's haul of a city
  • (b)Truck farming : rearing of cattle in stalls on bought-in feed
  • (c)Plantation agriculture : single-crop cultivation of a commercial crop on a large estate
  • (d)Shifting cultivation : commercial grain farming on mechanised holdings

  Answer(c) Plantation agriculture : single-crop cultivation of a commercial crop on a large estate