Chapter 1 Flashcards
Atmosphere
The thin layer of gases surrounding Earth.
Biosphere
All living organisms on earth.
Cartography
The science of making maps.
Concentration
The spread of something over a given area.
Connection
Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space.
Contagious diffusion
The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population.
Cultural ecology
The geographic study of human-environment relationships.
Cultural landscape
Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.
Density
The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area.
Diffusion
The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time.
Distance decay
The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin.
Distribution
The arrangement of something across earth’s surface.
Ecology
The scientific study of ecosystems.
Ecosystem
A group of living organisms and the abiotic spheres with which they interact.
Environmental determinism
A nineteenth-and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography that argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in physical sciences. Geography was therefore the study of how the physical environment caused human activities.
Expansion diffusion
The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in an additive process.
Formal region (or uniform or homogeneous region)
An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics.
Functional region (or nodal region)
An area organized around a node or focal point.
Geographic grid
A system of imaginary arcs drawn in a grid pattern on the earth’s surface.
Abiotic
A system composed of non living or inorganic matter.
Geographic information science (GIS)
The development and analysis of data about earth acquired through satellite and other electronic information technologies.
Geographic information system (GIS)
A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes and displays geographic data.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
A system that determines the precise position of something on earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers.
Globalization
Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope.
Greenwich mean time (GMT)
The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0 degrees.
Hearth
The region from which innovative ideas originate.
