Mandrake 10 auto partitions
 

Probably a stupid question, but why is Mandrake partitioning the drive the way it does? On an 80 Gb drive I have a 5 Gb root, a 500 Mb swap, and the rest is /home.
I realize this is a very basic question but what is the purpose of creating several partitions?
On the same general note I've read alot saying that the swap partition is superfluous considering how much RAM most people have. True? Not true? Any advice on partitioning for linux pretty much.