Some merit scholarships also consider financial need, but rewarding talent is the primary objective. In most cases the scholarship sponsor has a set of criteria they use to select the winners from among the qualified applicants. Sponsors can have a variety of goals in offering a scholarship.
A batholith (from Greek bathos, depth + lithos, rock) is a large emplacement of igneous intrusive (also called plutonic) rock that forms from cooled magma deep in the Earth's crust. batholith is an exposed area of (mostly) continuous plutonic rock that covers an area larger than 100 square kilometers (40 square miles). Areas smaller than 100 square kilometers are called stocks.
One such batholith is the Sierra Nevada Batholith, which is a continuous granitic formation that makes up much of the Sierra Nevada in California. An even larger batholith, the Coast Plutonic Complex is found predominantly in the Coast Mountains of western Canada, and extends for 1,800 kilometers and reaches into southeastern Alaska.