Geography of World Trade
Why world trade flows the way it does: environments and resources decide where things can be grown, mined or made; location, transport routes and chokepoints shape the spatial pattern of imports and exports
What a learner can do afterwards
- Explain why a product is made or grown where it is (e.g., coffee near the equator, microchips in a few specialised regions)
- Trace a supply chain across a map (e.g., cotton grown, spun, sewn and sold on different continents)
- Identify a major trade route or chokepoint and why it matters (e.g., the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca)
1 · Read
Look at the labels in a store: shoes from Vietnam, coffee from Colombia, a phone assembled in China. None of that is an accident. Two things decide where a product is made: what the land and climate can produce, and how easily the finished goods can travel to buyers.
Coffee only grows well in a narrow band near the equator, warm all year with steady rain, so coffee sold in London or Toronto usually comes from there. Microchips work differently. Making them needs a huge, ultra-clean factory and highly specialized workers, so almost all the world's chips come from just a few places, mainly Taiwan and South Korea.
When a chokepoint like the Suez Canal or the Strait of Malacca gets blocked, goods pile up and prices can jump around the world. That is why a traffic jam in one narrow strip of water becomes global news.
Environment and resources decide what gets made where; routes and chokepoints decide how it reaches you.
2 · Watch
Take it off screen
Where it sits
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
8 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.