Relief features
Relief describes the shape and elevation of the land: highlands (plateaus, hills, mountains), lowlands (plains, valleys), and everything between. Relief strongly influences drainage, climate, vegetation, and where people settle and farm.
Drainage patterns
A river's drainage basin is all the land whose water eventually flows into that river system, bounded by a watershed (the high ground separating one drainage basin from a neighbouring one). Common drainage patterns include dendritic (branching like a tree, on uniform rock) and trellis (a rectangular, grid-like pattern, where alternating hard and soft rock bands control tributary direction).
Example 1: A river system's tributaries branch out irregularly in many directions, like the branches of a tree. Identify this drainage pattern and the rock condition that typically produces it.
This is a dendritic drainage pattern, typically found where the underlying rock has uniform resistance to erosion, letting tributaries develop in whatever direction the local slope naturally guides them, rather than being forced into a regular geometric pattern by bands of differing rock hardness.
Rock types
Igneous rocks form when molten magma or lava cools and solidifies (e.g. granite, forming slowly underground with large crystals; basalt, cooling quickly at the surface with small crystals). Sedimentary rocks form when layers of sediment (sand, mud, shell fragments) are compacted and cemented together over long periods (e.g. sandstone, limestone) -- often containing fossils. Metamorphic rocks form when existing rock is transformed by intense heat and/or pressure, without fully melting (e.g. marble from limestone, slate from mudstone).