Glossary Social Sciences

GLOSSARY

·                 Economic activity: actions that involve the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services at all levels within a society.

·                 Economic agent: a person, company, or organization that has an influence on the economy by producing, buying, or selling.

·                 Goods: possessions and personal property

·                 Services: commodities, such as banking, that are mainly intangible and usually consumed concurrently with their production.

·                 Production: the creation or manufacture for sale of goods and services with exchange value.

·                 Distribution: a thing or portion distributed

·                 Marketing: the provision of goods or services to meet customer or consumer needs.

·                 Consumption: expenditure on goods and services for final personal use.

·                 Supply: to make available or provide.

·                 Demand: the amount of a commodity that consumers are willing and able to purchase at a specified price.

·                 Inflation: the rate of increase of prices.

·                 Profit: excess of revenues over outlays and expenses in a business enterprise over a given period of time, usually a year.

·                 Tax: a compulsory financial contribution imposed by a government to raise revenue, levied on the income or property of persons or organizations, on the production costs or sales prices of goods and services, etc.

·                 Raw material: material on which a particular manufacturing process is carried out.

·                 Telecommuting: the use of home computers, telephones, etc, to enable a person to work from home while maintaining contact with colleagues, customers, or a central office.

·                 Employer: a person, business, firm, etc, that employs workers.

·                 Employee: a person who is hired to work for another or for a business, firm, etc, in return for payment.

·                 Self-employed: earning one's living in one's own business or through freelance work, rather than as the employee of another.

·                 Active population: in a state of action; moving, working, or doing something.

·                 Inactive population: antonymous of active population. 

·                 Disabled: lacking one or more physical powers, such as the ability to walk or to coordinate one's movements, as from the effects of a disease or accident, or through mental impairment.

·                 Retired: to give up or to cause (a person) to give up his work, a post, etc, on reaching pensionable age.

·                 Full-time contracts: for the entire time appropriate to an activity: a full-time job, a full-time student.

·                 Part-time contracts: for less than the entire time appropriate to an activity: a part-time job, a part-time waitress.

·                 Plot: a secret plan to achieve some purpose, esp one that is illegal or underhand.

·                 Soil: the top layer of the land surface of the earth that is composed of disintegrated rock particles, humus, water, and air.

·                 Crop rotation: the practice of growing different crops in succession on the same land chiefly to preserve the productive capacity of the soil.

·                 Intensive agriculture: farming that uses a lot of machinery, labour, chemicals, etc. in order to grow as many crops or keep as many animals as possible on the amount of land available.

·                 Extensive agriculture: farming that uses traditional methods and uses less labour and investment than more modern methods in order to farm fairly large areas of land.

·                 Dryland farming: a system of growing crops in arid or semiarid regions without artificial irrigation, by reducing evaporation and by special methods of tillage.

·                 Irrigated farming: The artificial application of water to the soil to produce plant growth.

·                 Polyculture: the raising at the same time and place of more than one species of plant or animal.

·                 Monoculture: the continuous growing of one type of crop.

·                 Greenhouses: a building with transparent walls and roof, usually of glass, for the cultivation and exhibition of plants under controlled conditions.

·                 Subsistence agriculture: farming that provides for the farm family's needs with little surplus for marketing.

·                 Shifting cultivation: a form of agriculture, used especially in tropical Africa, in which an area of ground is cleared of vegetation and cultivated for a few years and then abandoned for a new area until its fertility has been naturally restored.

·                 Livestock farming: domestic animals, such as cattle or horses, rose for home use or for profit, especially on a farm.

·                 Cattle: any domesticated bovine mammals.

·                 Fodder: bulk feed for livestock, straw, etc

·                 Rear: the back or hind part

·                 Fishing grounds

·                 Aquaculture: the cultivation of freshwater and marine resources, both plant and animal, for human consumption or use.

·                 Overfishing: to fish (a body of water) to such a degree as to upset the ecological balance or cause depletion of living creatures.

·                 Fleets: a number of warships organized as a tactical unit.