Natural resources are materials and components that can be found within the environment.
Natural resources are materials and components that can be found within the environment. Every man–made product is composed of natural resources.
A natural resource may exist as a separate entity such as fresh water, and air, as well as a living organism such as a fish, or it may exist in an alternate form which must be processed to obtain the resource such as metal ores, oil, and most forms of energy. Everything which surrounds us is collectively termed as the environment. Environment constitutes life support system for us, since it is from the environment that we get food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe and all other requirements of our day–to–day life.
Depending upon their abundance, natural resources are of two main types, inexhaustible and exhaustible.
Inexhaustible natural resources: They are natural resources which occur in such abundance that they are not likely to get exhausted by continuous use, e.g., air, water, solar energy.
Exhaustible natural resources: They are natural resources which are in limited quantity. They are likely to get exhausted by continued indiscriminate human use. Examples include: coal, petroleum etc.