FAO eLearning Academy - agricultural statistics courses

Global · Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN · professional · unverified source

90practice questions written to this syllabus
5subjects

Format

Free self-paced online courses with certificates.

Sections

Over the years

Built from Laisha's knowledge because the official page could not be opened or was not found during research (web search quota exhausted); confirm against the body's current notification before relying on it. Course titles under statistics were not re-read for this track; the Academy itself is verified in the Agribusiness track.

Official source: https://elearning.fao.org/

Subjects this exam draws on

Agriculture for Statisticians14 questionsAgricultural Statistics System, Census & Official Statistics21 questionsIndex Numbers, National Accounts & Agricultural Economic Statistics35 questionsStatistical Ecology, Environmental & Fisheries Statistics9 questionsDatabases, Big Data & Agricultural Information Systems11 questions

Five practice questions, worked

Original questions written to this exam's published syllabus and pattern. Not past papers.

1. Which statement about world aquatic animal production is consistent with FAO's fisheries reports?

  1. Aquaculture has grown fast and now supplies about half, while capture has been roughly flat
  2. Capture fisheries have roughly doubled since 2000, while aquaculture output has declined sharply
  3. Aquaculture supplies under 5% of aquatic animal food, almost all of it farmed in Europe
  4. Capture fisheries and aquaculture have both fallen steadily every year since about 1990
Answer and working

A. Aquaculture has grown fast and now supplies about half, while capture has been roughly flat

Capture production has been broadly stable for decades; aquaculture, mostly in Asia, has expanded rapidly and now provides about half of aquatic animal production.

Agriculture for Statisticians · Importance of agriculture, forestry, livestock and fisheries in national economies

2. In FAO land-use statistics, cropland consists of:

  1. Forest land plus permanent crops
  2. Arable land plus permanent crops
  3. Arable land plus permanent pastures
  4. Net sown area plus current fallows only
Answer and working

B. Arable land plus permanent crops

Agricultural land = cropland (arable + permanent crops) + permanent meadows and pastures.

Agricultural Statistics System, Census & Official Statistics · Land-use statistics and the nine-fold classification

3. Why does a Laspeyres consumer price index tend to overstate the change in the cost of living?

  1. It ignores substitution towards goods whose relative prices fall
  2. It weights prices by the current, not the base, basket of goods
  3. It uses the geometric rather than the arithmetic mean of relatives
  4. It excludes all goods whose prices fall during the period
Answer and working

A. It ignores substitution towards goods whose relative prices fall

A fixed base basket assumes buyers keep the same quantities; in reality they substitute towards relatively cheaper goods, so the fixed basket costs more than the cheapest basket giving the same utility (substitution bias). Using current quantities would be Paasche, which understates.

Index Numbers, National Accounts & Agricultural Economic Statistics · Index numbers: Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher and Marshall-Edgeworth

4. Why should transect lines not be placed along roads?

  1. Roads are unrepresentative
  2. Roads make detection impossible
  3. Roads are too long for analysis
  4. Distance cannot be measured near roads
Answer and working

A. Roads are unrepresentative

Lines must be placed by a random or systematic design independent of the objects.

Statistical Ecology, Environmental & Fisheries Statistics · Quadrat, line-transect and distance sampling

5. A cube with 10 years, 30 districts and 8 crops has how many cells?

  1. 48
  2. 240
  3. 300
  4. 2,400
Answer and working

D. 2,400

Cells = 10 × 30 × 8 = 2,400; 48 adds the sizes instead.

Databases, Big Data & Agricultural Information Systems · Data warehousing: star and snowflake schemas, OLAP

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