| Question |
Answer |
| 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 | The 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 a barrier of space |
| Contagious Diffusion | The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population |
| Culture | The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people performing the act |
| Cultural Ecology | Geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships |
| Cultural Landscape | Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group |
| Density | The frequently 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 that argued that geography was the study of how the physical environment causes human activities. |
| Expansion Diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend among people from one another in a snowballing process |
| Formal Region | An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics |
| Functional 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 postion 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 | The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0 longitude |
| Hearth | The region from which innovative ideas originate |
| Hierarchical Diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places |
| International Date Line | When time changes by going forward 24 hours at 180 longitude |
| 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. |
| Location | The position of anything on Earth's surface |
| Latitude | The angular distance north or south from the equator of a point on the earth's surface, measured on the meridian of the point |
| Longitude | Angular distance east or west on the earth's surface, measured by the angle contained between the meridian of a particular place and some prime meridian. |
| Map | A flat representation of Earth’s surface or a portion of it |
| Mental Map | An internal representation of a portion of Earth’s surfaces based on what an individual knows about a place, containing personal impressions of what is in a place and where places are located. |
| Meridian | An arc drawn on a map between the North and South poles also called a longitude. |
| Parallel | A circle drawn around the globe parallel to the equator and at right angles to the meridians. |
| Pattern | The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area. |
| Physiological Density | The number of people per unit of arable land. |
| Place | A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular character |
| Polder | Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area |
| Possibilism | The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives. |
| Prime Meridian | The meridian running through Greenwich, England, from which longitude east and west is reckoned. |
| Principal Meridian | A north-south line designated in the land ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the United States |
| Projection | The system used to transfer locations from Earth’s surface to a flat map. |
| Region | An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features |
| Relocation Diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend theough bodily movement of people from one place to another |
| Remote Sensing | The science of gathering data on an object or area from a considerable distance, as with radar or infrared photography, to observe the earth or a heavenly body. |
| Resource | A substance in the environment that is useful to people, is economically and technologically feasible to access, and socially acceptable to use. |
| Scale | The relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole |
| Section | A square normally 1 mile on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided townships in the US into 36 sections. |
| Site | The position or location of a town, building, as to its environment |
| Situation | Manner of being situated; location or position with reference to environment |
| Space | The physical gap or interval between two objects |
| Space-Time Compression | The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place, as a result of improved communications and transportation systems. |
| Stimulus Diffusion | The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected |
| Toponym | Place name |
| Township | A square normally 6 miles on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided much of the United States into a series of townships. |
| Transnational Corporation | A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters or shareholders are located. |
| Uneven development | The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of the economy. |
| Vernacular Region | Regions that have no boundaries that people make up informally |
