Human Geo Chapter 12 Vocab

Question 1

Service

Answer 1

Any activity that fulfills a human want or need and returns money to those who provide it.

Question 2

Consumer Services

Answer 2

A business that provides services primarily to individual consumers, including retail services and education, health, and leisure activities. 1/2 of all US jobs are in consumer services. 4 main types of consumer services are retail, education, health, and leisure.

Question 3

Business Services

Answer 3

A service that primarily meets the needs of other businesses, including professional financial, and transportation services. 1/4 of all US jobs are in business services, and the main types are financial, professional, information, and transportation services.

Question 4

Public Services

Answer 4

A service offered by the government to provide security and protection for citizens and businesses. 8% of all US jobs are in the public sector, and 1/6 of them work for the federal government (excluding educators), 1/4 for state governments, and 3/5 for local governments.

Question 5

Settlement

Answer 5

A permanent collection of buildings and inhabitants. They occupy only 1% of Earth’s surface, but are home to nearly all humans. Only 1 location factor is critical for a service: proximity to market, so they locate in a settelemt, or where customers are clustered. Providing services is a principal reason that settlements exist.

Question 6

Central Place Theory

Answer 6

A theory that explains the distribution for services based on the fact that settlements serve as centers of market areas for services; larger settlements are fewer and farther apart than smaller ones and provide services for a larger number of people who are willing to travel farther. It was proposed in the 1930s by Walter Christaller (geographer), and others in the US further developed it in the 1950s.

Question 7

Central Place

Answer 7

A market center for the exchange of services by people attracted from the surrounding area. It maximizes accessibility (central), and businesses there compete against each other to serve as markets for goods/services for the surrounding region. This competition creates a regular pattern of settlements.

Question 8

Market Area (or Hinterland)

Answer 8

The area surrounding a central place from which people are attracted to use the place’s goods and services. It is a nodal region (core characteristic). To establish the market area, a circle is drawn around the node of a service on a map. The US is divided into market areas based on the hinterlands surrounding the largest urban settlements.

Question 9

Range

Answer 9

The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service. The range is the radius of the circle/hexagon. People are only willing to go a short distance for everyday consumer services (groceries/pharmacies), but they will travel further for other services (concert/ball game), so a stadium has a large range. In a large urban settlement, fast-food franchises have smaller ranges than casual dining chains.

Question 10

Threshold

Answer 10

The minimum number of people needed to support a service. Every enterprise has a minimum # of customers required to generate enough sales to make a profit, so once the range has been determined, a service provider must see if a location is suitable by counting potential customers (with Census data helps).

Question 11

Rank-size Rule

Answer 11

A pattern of settlements in a country such that the nth largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement. The second-largest city is 1/2 the size of the largest. When plotted on a graph, the rank-size distribution forms a straight line (at least for the US).

Question 12

Primate City Rule

Answer 12

A pattern of settlements in a country such that the largest settlement has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement. An example is Mexico, whose largest settlement (Mexico City) is 10 times larger than its 5th largest settlement, Toluca.

Question 13

Primate City

Answer 13

The largest settlement in a country, if it has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement (ex. Mexico City).

Question 14

Gravity Model

Answer 14

A model saying that the potential use of a service at a particular location is directly related to the number of people in a location & inversely related to the distance people must travel to reach the service. According to the model, consumer behavior reflects two patterns:
1. The more people living in a place, the greater the potential customers.
2. The farther people are from a service, the less likely it is that they’ll use it.

Question 15

Food Desert

Answer 15

An area that has a substantial amount of low-income residents and has poor access to a grocery store. This is an example of interaction between a person and a service not occurring due to distance. The USDA mapped the distribution of food deserts using low-income residences and needing to travel more than 1 mile to get to a grocery store (in urban areas), and found that 23.5% of Americans live in a food desert.

Question 16

Periodic Market

Answer 16

A collection of individual vendors who come together to offer goods and services in a location on specified days. Ex: Farmers Market. Services at the lower end of the central place hierarchy may be provided here. It is typically set up in a street/public space for a day and set up elsewhere the next day. It provides goods to residents of developing countries where sparse populations and low incomes produce purchasing power too low to support full-time retailing.

Question 17

Global City

Answer 17

A major center for the provision of services in the global economy. They can be subdivided according to a number of criteria. They’re most closely integrated into the global economic system because they’re at the center of the flow of information and capital. Global cities may be centers of national or international political power (containing homes for the head of state, foreign embassies, and offices for the gov’t agencies). Offices for groups having business with the gov’t are also clustered in global cities.

Question 18

Basic Business

Answer 18

A business that sells its products or services primarily to consumers outside the settlement.

Question 19

Nonbasic Business

Answer 19

A business that sells its products primarily to consumers in the community.

Question 20

Economic Base

Answer 20

A community’s collection of basic businesses. It is important in a settlement because exporting by the basic business brings more money into the local economy (stimulating the provision of nonbasic services into that settlement).

Question 21

Clustered Rural Settlement

Answer 21

A rural settlement in which the houses and farm buildings of each family are situated close to each other, with fields surrounding the settlement. Typically includes homes, barns, tool sheds, and consumer services (like churches, schools, and shops), with a few business or public services. Everyone in a clustered rural settlement is allocated strips of land in the surrounding fields, and homes/buildings are arranged according to local cultural and physical characteristics (either circular or linear patterns).

Question 22

Dispersed Rural Settlement

Answer 22

A rural settlement pattern characterized by isolated farms rather than clustered villages. Isolated farms are common in rural US, & a dispersed pattern developed from the initial settlement of the Middle Atlantic because most immigrants to these colonies arrived individually, and land was plentiful/cheap as they moved westward, so they bought as much as they could manage.

Question 23

Enclosure Movement

Answer 23

In Europe, some clustered settlements turned to dispersed ones to make agriculture more efficient (with a growing population). Farms operated more efficiently at a larger scale when machinery was introduced. The Enclosure Movement was the process of consolidating small landholdings into a smaller number of larger farms in England during the 18th century. The gov’t forced people to give up their holdings when necessary, and as displaced farmers moved to urban areas & worked in factories (Industrial Revolution happened at the same time as this), rural clusters declined.

Question 24

Urbanization

Answer 24

An increase in the % of the number of people living in urban settlements. It’s both the % of people in urban areas, and the NUMBER of people in urban areas, and that difference is important because they occur for different reasons and have different global distribution.

Question 25

Megacity

Answer 25

An urban settlement with a total population in excess of 10 million people. There are 37 of these in the world.

Question 26

Metacity

Answer 26

An urban settlement with a total population in excess of 20 million people. 11 of the 37 megacities are metacities.