I suspect the author in that sentence hesitated between often and most of the time: he wanted to indicate that it was helpful very, very often; but he didn't want to go so far as to say that it was helpful more than 50 % of the time, and so he chose a somewhat cowardly expression in between. I think he would have been better off choosing either often or most of the time, or perhaps very often, though I don't think the added intensity of very is really necessary.
Most of the time is an expression indicating that something happens more often than not, usually much more often.
Much of the time I would normally only use where you could not substitute often, a simpler word, which is the case especially when it is about a large chunk or chunks of a period, not merely a frequent number of times.
They arrived early at the aeroport. They had wanted to spend their final hours in romantic embrace, but they were busy looking for the right papers and documents much of the time.
This means that a large part of this time was spent looking for papers, but "large" could be anything from 1 % to 99 %; if I used most of the time, it would mean that more than half of the time was spent on it.
Match is "a formal contest in which two or more persons or teams compete".
Tournament consists of multiple matches between contestants and comes from "contest between groups of knights on horseback. Modern use, in ref. to games of skill, is recorded from 1761."
Competition does not have such a problem with its meaning of "a contest for something" which is from 1610s.
Differences and relationships:
So, match is a different animal (you can not call a match neither a tournament nor competition).
Every tournament is a competition, but not every competition is a tournament.
You can also look at related term: championship.
References are from etymonline entries for match, tournament and competition.
Best Answer
I disagree with @baquiano to some extent. For one thing, shipment can also refer to the goods themselves, as in
Such a shipment can be cargo when it is in transit. But it can still be a shipment even when it is no longer in transit.
So in that respect it differs from cargo. Once cargo is no longer in transit, it is no longer cargo.
Just for the record, my Webster's defines cargo as
and shipment as
Think of a shipment as something that is, was, or will be shipped. Think of cargo as something that is currently being shipped. And take shipped to mean "carried by some type of long-distance conveyance" (not limited to actual ships).