Unit 2
Question 1- Death Valley is the coldest, very moist place in the United States. True or False
Answer-False
FeedBack-Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in the United States. The valley is a long, narrow basin
282 feet (86 m) below sea level, yet is walled by high, steep mountain ranges.
Question 2- Which three ways is heat moved around?
A-radiation, motivation, convection
B-conduction, convection, carbonation
C- radiation, conduction, and convection.
D- radiation, conduction, alteration
Answer-C
Feedback-Vibrating atoms give off electromagnetic radiation. Conduction is a rapidly vibrating that sits
next to a slowly vibrating atom, collisions between the two will tend to slow down the fast one and
speed up the slow one. Convection is the third option for moving heat. Take something hot, and move it
from here to there.
Question 3-Earthquakesoccur where rocks are moving past other rocks.
Answer-True
Feedback-Rocks on each side of the fault are forced to move, but rocks at the fault are locked together.
Because rocks are locked together they bend storing energy like a coiled spring. Rocks suddenly let go
springing back, causes an earthquake.
Question 4- Seismographs is a measure of how much the ground shakes during a quake.
Answer-False
Feedback-Richter scale. Developed a logarithmic scale—a magnitude 2 quake shakes the ground 10
times more than does a magnitude 1 quake, and a magnitude 3 quake shakes the ground 10 times more
than does a magnitude 2 or 100 times more than does a magnitude 1.
Question 5- What is the easiest way to predict earthquakes?
A- Call up a meteorologist because they went to school for many years and know what they are
talking about.
B- Count the cracks in the ground, measure the distance between the two cracks closest to the
middle, and divide these numbers. This will predict the time fram for an earthquake.
C- Identify places where earthquakes are most likely to occur.
D- Research will lead you in the right direction.
Feedback-This can be done from historic records, and from prehistoric geologic evidence.
Unit 3
Question 1 - Crater Lake, at 1932 feet (about 600 m) deep, is the deepest and probably the cleanest
lake in the United States.
Answer- True
Feedback-Crater Lake sits in a great volcanic crater or caldera, 5 miles (8 km) across, formed when
Mt. Mazama experienced a cataclysmic eruption about 6600 years ago. That massive eruption laid
down ash that is 200-300 feet thick (almost 100 m) on the flanks of the volcano; the ash forms a
recognizable layer hundreds of miles away in Yellowstone, and has been identified in Greenland ice
cores.
Question 2 - What is the sea floor made of?
A- Basalt
B- Sediment rocks and crystals
C-Sand dunes
E- Sodium
Answer-A
Feedback-Sea floor is made at the spreading ridges. It is hot and low-density initially, but cools and
contracts as it gets older and loses heat to the colder ocean water.
Question 3- Plate boundaries include spreading ridges where the plates move apart and subduction
zones where the plates come together and one side sinks under the other.
Answer-True
Feedback – Learned about this happening back in Death Valley and the mid-ocean ridges
Question 4 -What is true about Tsunamis?
A- They are destructive but only occur at night when the temperature drops.
B- They are created by sea creatures when they become angry and want to destroy the world.
C- A large undersea eruption may move a lot of water. When a tsunami nears a shore, the water
“piles up” into a short, steep wave that may be 100 feet high.
D- A large above sea eruption may move a lot of water. When a tsunami nears a shore, the water
“goes back and forth”, steep waves can go as high as 500 feet.
Answer C
Feedback-The largest eruption of historical times, that of Krakatau in Indonesia in 1883, killed
thousands of people on neighboring islands in this way.
Question 5-Volcanoes occur where melted rock rises to the Earth’s surface.
Answer True
Feedback-Almost all volcanoes are associated with one of three settings—pull-apart margins
(spreading ridges), push-together subduction zones, and hot spots. We’ve already met the
volcanoes at spreading ridges, where low-silica basalt is erupted, and those producing highersilica andesite at subduction zones.
Unit 4Question 1- Thrust faults often show evidence of sliding—scratches and polish indicating motion
in one direction, crushing or breaking of rocks, etc.
Answer True
Feedback- In some cases elsewhere in the world where deformation is still active, thrust faulting
has been observed during earthquakes. In the Smokies, the older rocks have been shoved as
much as 70 miles (110 km) to reach their present position on top of the younger rocks.
Question 2- The key to most of this is that you can’t sink old, cold sea floor, but you can sink a
continent
Answer- False
Feedback- You can sink old, cold sea floor, but you can’t sink a continent. Island arcs and
continents float on the mantle too well. So rather than going down the subduction zone with
the oceanic lithosphere, the island arc or continent rides across the subduction zone for a major
collision.
Question 3- A tsunami wave is long and low in deep water, but “friction” with the ocean bed as
the wave enters shallower water slows the front of the wave down while the back catches up,
causing the wave to become high and short.
Answer-True
Feedback- In the deep ocean, the “bump” of water that is the wave of a big tsunami may be only
a very few feet high, but may extend well over 100 miles in the direction it is moving. Waves
slow down as they enter shallower water, and the leading edge of a wave hits shallow water
before the trailing edge. So, the leading edge slows as it nears the coast, the trailing edge
catches up, and the wave goes from being long and low to being squashed and high.
Question 4- Subduction zones occur where two large blocks of rock move past each other but
not toward or away from each other.
Answer- False
Feedback- It would be Slide-past boundaries. When stresses run parallel to each other.
Question 5-The inside of a mountain range is hotter, higher-pressure, and less affected by acidic
groundwaters than is the surface.
Answer- True
Feedback- Materials that are stable at the Earth’s surface (such as the clays in a piece of shale)
are not stable deep in a mountain range. The minerals change, grow, and produce new types
even without melting. This process is called metamorphism.
Unit 5-
Question 1 - The changes that occur at a place are called weathering. Moving the products of
weathering is called transport. Weathering and transport together make erosion.
Answer True
Feedback-Weathering in turn is divided into mechanical and chemical weathering. Mechanical
weathering is the making of little pieces from big pieces; chemical weathering is the making of
new types of materials that were not there previously.
Question 2-Cracks in rocks are caused or enlarged by processes including:
A- Mountain-building stresses, or earthquake-release stresses, breaking the rocks
B- Expansion and breakage of rock as the weight of overlying rock is removed during erosion of
that overlying rock
C- Expansion and contraction during heating and cooling
D- All of the above
Question 3-When granite interacts with carbonic acid aluminum (Al), potassium (K) rusts. It picks up
water and oxygen, and remains in the soil as little pieces of rust.
Answer- False
Feedback- Iron rusts and The aluminum (Al), potassium (K) and silica (SiO2) from the feldspars and from
the dark mineral rearrange into new minerals, called clays, that also include some water.
Question 4- Water is usually involved in mass movement, however, because most mass movements
occur when soil or rock is especially wet.
Answer-True
Feedback- This happens for four reasons: water makes the soil heavy; water lubricates motion of rocks
past each other; water partially floats rocks (a rock pushes down less in water than in air) so they are not
as tightly interlocked and can move more easily past each other, and saturation of a rock mass removes
the effect of water tension.
Question 5- What is the most important mass-movement type in terms of transferring material
downhill?
ABCD-
Mass-movement
Soil creep
Hill slope
Transformation downhill
Answer-B
Feedback-Soil creep is the slow, downslope motion of soil. The diagram shows one of the many
mechanisms that contribute to soil creep. When ice grows beneath a pebble on a winter night, the
pebble is pushed up and out, more-or-less perpendicular to the hill surface. When the ice melts, the
pebble drops straight down, to a point lower on the hillside than where the pebble started.
Unit 6Question 1- Why do rivers flow even when it isn't raining?
ABCD-
Because water is slowly draining through the ground from beneath hills to the rivers.
Because rivers are not overflowing from the rain
Because rivers fill up from the rain
Because when it isn’t raining the rivers are being occupied by humans and animals.
Answer-A
Feedback- The water table rises in elevation during wet times as the “sponge” of the Earth fills up with
rain, and the water table falls during dry times as the sponge drains to keep the streams flowing. And,
the water table is just below the surface in valleys, actually hits the surface at streams, but you must drill
deeper under ridges to penetrate the water table and complete a water well.
Question 2 - If a stream receives lots of sand and gravel or even bigger chunks, the large blocks will tend
to plug, or dam, a single, deep and narrow channel.
Answer- True
Feedback- When sand and gravel get really wet along a river bank, they cannot form steep slopes, as we
saw with the mass movements in the Tetons, and the collapse of any steep slopes that start to form
along a river bank contributes to having a wide, shallow stream. Within this broad stream bed, gravel
(or boulder) bars often form when floods are ending and losing their ability to roll lots of sediment; the
water then must flow around these bars. The splitting and rejoining of channels around bars, when
viewed from above, looks something like ropes of water that have been braided together, so these are
called braided rivers. They are common in upland regions, where steep mountain slopes shed landslides
of coarse rocks into the channels.
Question 3-The Mississippi Delta is a massive pile of mud and sand from the Rockies and Appalachians,
transported by the river and dumped into the Gulf of Mexico.
Answer-True
Feedback-The compaction that occurred during a year would leave a little space at the top, but the
springtime floods would bring new mud to fill the space.
Question 4- What is so important in making Mammoth Cave so big?
ABCD-
The cavemen built it that way.
The sandstone is a rather sturdy layer, and provides a “roof” that does not collapse easily.
The cave was dissolved in limestone.
The rocks that make up the cave give it a larger appearance.
Answer- B
Feedback- Deep beneath the rolling Kentucky hills lies Mammoth Cave. With about 390 miles (almost
630 km) of surveyed passageways, this is the longest known cave in the world, more than twice as long
as second-place Jewel Cave (which is in a national monument in South Dakota, and has just under 160
miles or 260 km of surveyed passageways).
Question 5- Rainfall supplies evapotranspiration back to the air, runoff along the surface, and
groundwater that flows through spaces in rocks to reach streams.
Answer-True
Feedback- Refer back to the Colorado Plateau.