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.
