Economic activity and global trade
Geography · Key Stage 3 · The School
Four kinds of work
PRIMARY takes it out of the ground or the sea: farming, fishing, mining, forestry. SECONDARY makes something from it: factories, building, refining. TERTIARY provides a service: teaching, nursing, shops, transport. QUATERNARY works with knowledge: research, software, design. Every job belongs to one, and a country can be described by the proportions.
The mix shifts as a country develops
A largely agricultural economy has most people in primary work. Industrialisation moves them into secondary. As wages and services grow, tertiary and quaternary dominate — the United Kingdom now has around four in five jobs in services and roughly one in a hundred in agriculture. That is not a judgement about which work matters; it is a description of where people are employed.
One product, many countries
A cotton shirt might be grown in India, spun in Bangladesh, dyed in China, designed in Italy and sold in Britain — five countries in one garment. That chain exists because each step is cheapest somewhere different, and it explains why a shortage or a closed port on the far side of the world empties a shelf here.
Who gains, and what it costs
Trade lowers prices and creates work, and the gains are unevenly shared: the grower usually earns least and the brand most. Long chains also carry a carbon cost in shipping, and a fragility — the same route that makes a shirt cheap makes it unavailable when the route breaks. A geographer describes both sides rather than settling whether trade is good.