Chapter 1: Basic Concepts (Part 1) Flashcards
Agricultural density
The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture.
Arithmetic density
The total number of people divided by the total land area.
Base line
An east-west line designated under the Land Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the United States.
Cartography
The science of making maps
Concentration
The spread of something over a given area
Concentric zone model
A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially arranged in a series of rings.
Connections
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
Geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships.
Cultural landscape
Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.
Culture
The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people’s distinct tradition.
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.
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 the 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 a snowballing process.
Formal region
An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics
Functional (or nodal) region
An area organized around a node or focal point.
GIS
A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data.
Globalization
Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope
Global Positioning System (GPS)
A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers.
Greenwich Mean Time
The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0° longitude
Hearth
The region from which innovative ideas originate.
Hierarchical religion
A religion in which a central authority exercises a high degree of control
International Date Line
An arc that for the most part follows 180° longitude, although it deviates in several places to avoid dividing land areas. When you cross the International Date Line heading east (toward America), the clock moves back 24 hours, or one entire day. When you go west (toward Asia), the calendar moves ahead one day.
Land Ordinance of 1785
A law that divided much of the United States into a system of townships to facilitate the sale of land to settlers.
Latitude
The numbering system used to indicate the location of parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance north and south of the equator (0°).
Location
The position of anything on Earth’s surface.
Longitude
The numbering system used to indicate the location of meridians drawn on a globe and measuring distance east and west of the prime meridian (0°).
