Text for written translation. Despite large expanses of mountainous, Arctic and desert wastelands, more than 15 percent of Asia’s land area is arable

Despite large expanses of mountainous, Arctic and desert wastelands, more than 15 percent of Asia’s land area is arable. At least three fourths of this is developed to basic cereal and tuber crops (rise, wheat). About 1 percent of the continent is pasture of rangeland, supporting nearly a third of the world’s cattle. Asia is well endowed with nearly every mineral resources required by modern industrial society: antimony, magnesium, tin, iron, bismuth, titanium, manganese, nickel, two third of the global reserves of both petroleum and natural gas.

Asia is marked by great disparities in wealth between different countries and within those countries. A few parts of the continent, notably Japan, Singapore, and the oil-rich nations of Arabia, have achieved very high standards of living, and such East Asian countries as South Korea and Taiwan are industrializing rapidly. Other parts of Asia, however, such as Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma) have very low standards of living. Between these two extremes lie Russia and some of the Central Asian nations that once formed part of the USSR. The economies of most Asian countries are not fully industrialized. The economies of most Southwest Asia countries are based largely on traditional agriculture and the production and export of petroleum; the manufacturing sector is limited in large part to traditional artisanship and petrochemical industries. Southwest Asia exports rice and cash crops such as rubber, copra, and kapok; most manufacturing industries centre on processing domestic raw materials and assembling consumer goods.