Chapter 2

Question 1

Capitalism

Answer 1

A form of economic and social organization characterized by the profit motive and the control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods by private ownership.

Question 2

Climate change

Answer 2

Defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “a change in the state of the climate that can be identified,
like with using statistical tests, by changes in the mean and/or variability of its properties, and persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.

Question 3

Colonization

Answer 3

The physical settlement in a new territory of people from a colonizing state.

Question 4

Colonialism

Answer 4

The establishment and maintenance of political and legal domination by a state over a separate society.

Question 6

Commodity chains

Answer 6

Networks of labour and production processes beginning with the extraction or production of raw materials and ending with the delivery of a finished commodity.

Question 7

Digital divide

Answer 7

Inequality of access to telecommunications and information technology, particularly the internet.

Question 8

Comparative advantage

Answer 8

The specialization of a country in an economic activity that does not duplicate or compete with the domestic suppliers within core countries.

Question 9

Core regions

Answer 9

Regions that dominate trade, control the most advanced technologies, and have high levels of productivity within diversified economies.

Question 10

Fast world

Answer 10

People, places, and regions directly involved, as producers and consumers, in transnational industry, modern telecommunications, materialistic consumption, and international news and entertainment.

Question 11

Division of labour

Answer 11

The specialization of different people, regions, or countries in particular kinds of economic activities.

Question 12

Environmental determinism

Answer 12

A doctrine holding that human activities are shaped and constructed by the environment.

Question 13

Hearth areas

Answer 13

Geographic settings where new practices have developed and from which they have spread.

Question 14

Ethnocentrism

Answer 14

The attitude that a person’s own race and culture are superior to those of others.

Question 15

External areas

Answer 15

Regions of the world not yet absorbed into the modern world-system.

Question 16

Globalization

Answer 16

The increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world through common processes of economic, environmental, political, and cultural change.

Question 18

Hinterland

Answer 18

The sphere of economic influence of a town or city.

Question 19

Hydraulic empire

Answer 19

A state in which despotic rulers organized labour intensive irrigation and drainage schemes that allowed for significant increases in agricultural productivity.

Question 20

Hegemony

Answer 20

Domination over the world economy exercised by one national state in a particular historical epoch though a combination of economic, military, financial, and cultural means.

Question 22

Law of diminishing returns

Answer 22

The tendency for productivity to decline with the continued application of capital and/or labour to a given resource base.

Question 22

Imperialism

Answer 22

The deliberate exercise of military power and economic influence by powerful states in order to advance and secure their national interests.

Question 23

Minisystem

Answer 23

A society with a single cultural base and a reciprocal social economy.

Question 23

Import substitution

Answer 23

Copying and making goods preciously available only by trading.

Question 25

Leadership cycles

Answer 25

Periods of international power established by individual states through economic, political, and military competition.

Question 25

Pandemic

Answer 25

An epidemic that spreads rapidly around the world with high rates of illness and death.

Question 26

Neo-colonialism

Answer 26

Economic and political strategies by which powerful states in core economies indirectly maintain or extend their influence over other areas or people.

Question 27

Plantations

Answer 27

Large landholdings that usually specialize in the production of one particular crop for market.

Question 27

Peripheral regions

Answer 27

Regions with dependent and disadvantageous trading relationships, obsolete technologies, and undeveloped or narrowly specialized economies with low levels of productivity.

Question 28

Risk society

Answer 28

Notion of a society in which the significance of wealth distribution is being eclipsed by the distribution of risk and in which politics-both domestic and international-is increasingly about avoiding hazards.

Question 29

Semiperipheral regions

Answer 29

Regions that are able to exploit peripheral regions but are themselves exploited and dominated by core regions.

Question 29

Slow world

Answer 29

People, places, and regions whose participation in transnational industry, modern telecommunications, materialistic consumption, and international news and entertainment is limited.

Question 30

Spatial justice

Answer 30

The fairness of the distribution of society’s burdens and benefits, taking into account spatial variations in people’s needs and in their contributions to the production of wealth and social well-being.

Question 31

Staples thesis

Answer 31

A proposition arguing that the export of Canada’s natural resources, or staples, locked this country into dependency as a resource hinterland for more advanced economies and so delayed the maturing of its own economy.

Question 32

Staples trap

Answer 32

An over-reliance on the export of staples, which makes an economy (national or regional) vulnerable to fluctuations in world prices and without alternatives when resource depletion occurs.

Question 33

Technology systems

Answer 33

Clusters of interrelated energy, transportation, and production technologies that dominate economic activity for several decades at a time.

Question 36

Transnational corporations

Answer 36

Companies with investments and activities that span international boundaries and with subsidiary companies, factories, offices, or facilities in several countries.

Question 37

World-empire

Answer 37

Minisystems that have been absorbed into a common political system while retaining their fundamental cultural differences.

Question 38

World-system

Answer 38

An interdependent system of countries linked by economic and political competition.

Question 41

Sustainability

Answer 41

The interdependence of the economy, the environment, and social well-being.