Utility in Class 8 (Geography / Social Science) means the usefulness of a thing — how much it can satisfy our wants or needs.

What is “utility” in Class 8?

In your Class 8 resources chapter, you usually learn that something becomes a resource only when it has utility.

So:

  • Utility = usability or usefulness of an object.
  • If an object has utility for us, we call it a resource.
  • If it has no utility (for us, at that time), we usually do not treat it as a resource.

Example:

  • A smartphone has utility because it helps you communicate, study, and entertain yourself, so it is a resource.
  • A stone lying on the road may have no utility for you right now, so you do not consider it a resource in your daily life.

Key points for exam answers

You can write:

  1. Utility is the usefulness or usability of an object.
  1. It is utility that makes any object a resource.
  1. The same object can have different utility for different people and at different times (for example, land in a city vs. land in a village).

A crisp 2–3 line answer:

Utility is the usefulness or usability of an object. It is this utility that makes any object a resource, because only useful things that satisfy human needs are called resources.

TL;DR:
Utility in Class 8 means how useful something is to us; that usefulness is what turns an ordinary object into a resource.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.