The Land and Its Water
Mountains, plateaus and plains
Tell a mountain, a plateau and a plain apart by the shape and height of the land, and say why people live and farm where they do.
Stand anywhere and look around and the land is doing something: rising, falling, or lying flat. The shapes it makes are called landforms, and three of them cover most of the land on the earth — mountains, plateaus and plains. Which one you are standing on decides a great deal: what can be grown, where a road can go, how cold the nights are, and how many people live nearby.
The three great landforms
A mountain rises much higher than the land around it, with steep sides and a narrow top called a peak. A plateau is raised land with a flat top and steep sides — table land. A plain is a wide stretch of flat, low, level land. Lowest to highest, that is plain, then plateau, then mountain.
The air gets colder the higher you go, so the highest peaks keep their snow even while the country below them is warm. Mountains are steep, cold and hard to farm, and few people live high up — but a great deal comes down from them. Rain and melting snow gather there and run downhill, which is why so many rivers begin in mountains. Mountains standing in a line together are called a range, and the low land lying between two of them is a valley. A hill is the same idea as a mountain but gentler: lower, rounder and far easier to climb.
A plateau is a step up from the land around it, and its edge is where things happen: a river running off the flat top drops over that steep edge as a waterfall. Plateaus are often made of old, hard rock, and much of the world's mineral wealth is dug out of them. Plains are the opposite kind of place — deep soil, level ground, easy to plow and easy to build on — which is why most of the world's farms, roads and cities are on them, and why most people live there.
Worked example
Someone describes a place to you: 'The top is flat enough to walk across for hours, but getting up here meant a steep climb from the fields below, and there is a waterfall where the stream goes over the edge.' What kind of land are they standing on?
Take the flat top first. That rules out a mountain, whose top is a narrow peak.
Working through the shapes one at a time is more reliable than guessing from the whole description at once.
Try it together
A traveler crosses a country from one side to the other, and writes down what the land does.
Answer each step with the name of one landform.
1.'For two days I walked on flat, low, level ground with fields on both sides.' What kind of land was that?
Have a go
Have a go on your own. A line of mountains standing side by side in a row is called a ______.
Ready to practice?
Eight questions on what you have just read. Nothing is timed, and you can play as many times as you like.