What Is Geography? Flashcards
Geography
The study of the distribution and interaction of physical and human features on earth; Greek word first used by the scholar Eratosthenes; geo=earth, graphy=to write
Two basic questions of geography
Where? Why there?
Divisions of geography
Physical and human
Physical geography
Rocks and minerals, landforms, soils, animals, plants, water, atmosphere, water bodies, environment, climate and weather
Human geography
Population, settlements, economic activities, transportation, recreational activities, religion, political systems, social traditions, human migration, and agricultural systems
Five themes of geography
Place, region, interaction, location, and movement
Place
Human features, physical features; characteristics that uniquely define a place and impart meaning to its inhabitants
Human-environmental interaction
People adapt to and change the environment; how the environment has determined how people live and how people have changed the environment
Location
Latitude and longitude, relative location
Movement
Movement of information, ideas, goods, and people; connects people and regions
Four ways to identify location
Place name (toponym), mathematical location (absolute location), site (absolute location), and situation (relative location)
Perception of place
Toponym, situation
Townships
Land ordinance of 1785
Types of movement
Cyclical and migratory
Region
The cultural landscape; regional studies approach; each region has its own distinctive landscape that results from unique social relationships and physical processes
Types of regions
Formal, functional, perceptual
Formal region
Everyone shares one or more distinctive characteristic
Functional region
Area organized around a focal point
Perceptual region
Exists as a part of cultural identity (the south)
Spatial association
Tries to explain why regions express distinctive features
Purpose of regions
Comparison
Cultural ecology
The study of human-environment relationships
Environmental determinism
How the environment causes social development
Possiblism
The physical environment may limit some human activities, but we can adapt
Four processes to understand the distribution of human activities
Climate, vegetation (biospheres=forests, grasslands, savannas, and deserts), soil (erosion, nutrients, soil depletion, etc), and landforms
Spatial distribution
The regular arrangement of a phenomenon across earth’s surface
Properties of spatial distribution
Density, concentration, and pattern
Density
The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area
Arithmetic density
Total number of people over total land area
Physiological density
Number of people per unit of arable land
Agricultural density
Number of farmers to the total amount of arable land
Concentration
The spread of something over a given study area;can either be clustered or dispersed; same land area, same number of objects
Pattern
The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area; usually a square or rectangle
Diffusion
Two types; relocation and expansion
Hearth
Where an innovation originates
Relocation diffusion
Spread through the physical movement of people
Expansion diffusion
The spread of a feature from one place to another in a snowballing process; hierarchal (spreads from a person of power), contagious (rapid, widespread), stimulus (spread of an underlying principle)
Distance decay
The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin
Spatial interaction
Movement of people, goods, and ideas within and among regions
Uneven development
The increasing gap in economic conditions between regions in the core and periphery that results from globalization of the economy
Core
USA, Europe, and Japan; wealthy, powerful, control media and finance, technologically advanced
Periphery
Less developed, poor, dependent on core countries for education, technology, media, and military equipment
Globalization
The increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world through common processes of economic, political and cultural change. Cultural, economic, and environmental effects of globalization are highly contested
Space
The physical gap between objects
Connections
Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space
Economic globalization
Goods and services; imports and exports as a portion of a nation’s income
Cultural globalization
Must have common form of communication; local vs. global culture
Maps
2d representations of the earth’s surface; most important geographic tool; used as reference tool or communications tool; they have authors, biases, and they can lie
Grid system
Includes poles, latitude, and longitude
Latitude
Parallels; angular distance north or south from equator; measured from 0 degrees to 90 degrees; each degree is 111km (69mi)
Longitude
Meridians; east to west; time depends on it; each time zone is 15 degrees longitude
Equator
0 degrees latitude
Prime meridian
0 degrees longitude; runs through Greenwich, England
International dateline
180 degrees longitude; 24 hours forward going west, back going east
Transferring a globe onto a flat surface always…
Causes distortions
Properties of distortion
Area (larger or smaller), shape (longer or more squat), distance (increased or decreased), and direction (changed)
Conic map
Projected as a cone; shows shape accurately, but distorts places far east or west
Cylindrical
Projected as a cylinder; whole earth on one map
Mercator
Elongated poles and squat around equator
Goode’s interrupted
Cuts off some of the ocean; accurate land masses but incorrect distances
Robinson
Accurate size and shape but flat poles
Planar map
Azimuthal; show a flat surface; shows the shortest distance between two places; distance is accurate but size and shape are distorted
Scale
Ratio between something on a map to something on earth
Ways to represent scale
Verbally, graphically, and/or as a fraction
The larger the scale…
The less detail there is
The smaller the scale…
The more detail there is
Topographic map
Surface area in high detail, physical and human features
Thematic maps
Point symbols (dot density, proportional circles), area symbols (different colors or patterns, cartograms), and line symbols (non-quantitive {roads}, quantitive {isolines}, and flow line maps)
Geotechnology
Remote sensing, GPS, and GIS
