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AP Human Geography
Chapter 1 Study Guide
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Absolute Location | The position or place of a certain item on the surface of the Earth as expressed in degrees, minutes, and seconds of latitude, 0° to 90° north or south of the equator, and longitude, 0° to 180° east or west of the Prime Meridian. |
Accessibility | The degree of ease with which it is possible to reach a certain location from other locations. Accessibility varies from place to place and can be measured. |
Cartography | The art and science of making maps, including data compilation, layout, and design. Also concerned with the interpretation of mapped patterns. |
Connectivity | The degree of direct linkage between one particular location and other locations in a transport network. |
Contagious Diffusion | The distance-controlled spreading of an idea, innovation, or some other item through a local population by contact from person to person—analogous to the communication of a contagious illness. |
Culture | The sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society. This is anthropologist Ralph Linton’s definition; hundreds of others exist. |
Cultural Ecology | The multiple interactions and relationships between a culture and the natural environment. |
Cultural Hearth | Heartland, source area, innovation center; place of origin of a major culture. |
Time Distance-Decay | The declining degree of acceptance of an idea or innovation with increasing time and distance from its point of origin or source. |
Distribution | To promote, sell, and ship or deliver (an item or line of merchandise) to individual customers, especially in a specified region or area. To disperse through a space or over an area; spread; scatter. |
Environmental Determinism (Environmentalism) | The view that the natural environment has a controlling influence over various aspects of human life, including cultural development. Also referred to as environmentalism. |
Expansion Diffusion | Expansion diffusion is idea or innovation spreads outward from the hearth. |
Formal Region | A formal region has a shared trait, it can be a shared cultural trait or a physical trait. In a formal cultural region, people share one or more cultural traits. |
Functional Region | A functional region is defined by a particular set of activities or interactions. Places that are part of the same functional region interact to create connections. Functional regions have a shared political, social, or economic purpose. |
GIS (Geographic Information System) | A collection of computer hardware and software that permits spatial data to be collected, recorded, stored, retrieved, manipulated, analyzed, and displayed to the user. |
Globalization | The expansion of economic, political, and cultural processes to the point that they become global in scale and impact. The processes of globalization transcend state boundaries and have outcomes that vary across places and scales. |
GPS (Global Positioning System) | A global system of U.S. navigational satellites developed to provide precise positional and velocity data and global time synchronization for air, sea, and land travel. |
Hierarchical Diffusion | A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. An urban hierarchy is usually involved, encouraging the leap-frogging of innovations over wide areas. |
Landscape | The overall appearance of an area. Most landscapes are comprised of a combination of natural and human-induced influences. |
Latitude | An imaginary line running parallel to the equator that is used to measure distance in degrees north or south from the equator. |
Longitude | An imaginary line circling the Earth and running through the poles. Used to determine the location of things by measurement of the angular distance, in degrees east or west, from the Prime Meridian. |
Mercator Projection | Mercator’s Projection greatly exaggerates the size and shape of higher-latitude landmasses, but direction is true everywhere on this map. |
Perceptual Region | A region that only exists as a conceptualization or an idea and not as a physically demarcated entity. For example, in the United States, “the South” and “the Mid-Atlantic region” are perceptual regions. |
Possibilism | Geographic viewpoint,a response to environmental determinism,that holds that human decision making, not the environment, is the crucial factor in cultural development. |
Prime Meridian | An imaginary north-south line of longitude on the Earth grid, passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in London, defined as having a longitude of 0°. |
Projection | The Robinson projection substantially reduces the exaggerated size of polar landmasses because the lines of longitude curve toward each other in the polar regions. The Robinson projection has a better approximates shape than the Mercator projection. |
Relative Location | Relative location is the location of something in comparison to the location of something else. For example, if I said, "My house is near the school," that's a relative location. |
Relocation Diffusion | Relocation diffusion is the spread of an idea through physical 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. |
Robinson Projection | The Robinson projection is a map projection of a world map which shows the entire world at once. It was specifically created in an attempt to find a good compromise to the problem of readily showing the whole globe as a flat image. |
Scale | Representation of a real-world phenomenon at a certain level of reduction or generalization. In cartography, the ratio of map distance to ground distance; indicated on a map as a bar graph, representative fraction, and/or verbal statement. |
Site | The internal physical attributes of a place, including its absolute location, its spatial character and physical setting. |
Situation | The external locational attributes of a place; its relative location or regional position with reference to other nonlocal places. |
Spatial Perspective | Way of identifying, explaining, and predicting the human and physical patterns in space and the interconnectedness of various spaces. |
Stimulus Diffusion | A form of diffusion in which a cultural adaptation is created as a result of the introduction of a cultural trait from another place. |
Geography | Geography is concerned with the analysis of the physical and human characteristics of the Earth’s surface from a spatial perspective. “Why are things located where they are?” are central questions that geographical scholarship seeks to answer. |
Human Geogrpahy | One of the two major divisions of geography; the spatial analysis of human population, its cultures, activities, and landscapes. |