Rubenstein-Chapter 1: Basic Concepts 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.
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 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’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 which 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 (or uniform or homogeneous region)
An area in which everyone shares one or more distinctive characteristics.
Functional Region (or nodal region)
An area organized around a node or focal point.
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 zone encompassing the prime meridian, or zero degrees longitude.
Hearth
The region from which innovative ideas originate.