Describe the characteristics and impacts of shifting cultivation and rainforest clearing based on the provided diagram, including risks and recovery.

Here are the answers to your questions based on the diagram:

Q.1. Is shifting cultivation an intensive or extensive agricultural practice?
Shifting cultivation is an extensive agricultural practice.

Q.2. Explain your reason to question 1.
It is extensive because it requires a large amount of land to produce relatively low yields, as plots are cleared, cultivated for a few years, and then abandoned to allow the soil to recover, necessitating the clearing of new plots.

Q.3. After a plot has been cleared, which (Middle right Picture) which two natural risk is the cleared area exposed to?

i) Soil erosion

ii) Leaching of nutrients

Q.4. Rainforests are cleared for various economic activities. Name one commercial practice found in PNG.
Logging (or Palm oil plantations)

Q.5. 'Shifting cultivation' can also be known as
Slash-and-burn agriculture (or Swidden agriculture)

Q.6. Explain why rainforest do not recover?
Rainforests often do not fully recover to their original state because repeated clearing and cultivation lead to soil degradation and nutrient depletion (leaching), which prevents the complex, diverse original vegetation from re-establishing. The diagram notes that "secondary vegetation does not always grow in the same way as the original rainforest."