Help
Options
Didn't know it?
click below
click below
Knew it?
click below
click below
Don't Know
Remaining cards (0)
Know
retry
shuffle
restart
0:00
Embed Code - If you would like this activity on your web page, copy the script below and paste it into your web page.
Normal Size Small Size show me how
Normal Size Small Size show me how
Units 1-7
AP Human AP Exam Vocab
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Human Geography | One of the two major divisions of geography; the spatial analysis of human population, its cultures, activities, and landscapes. |
| Globalization | The expansion of economic, political, and cultural processes to the point that they become global in scale and impact. |
| Physical Geography | One of the two major divisions of systematic geography; spatial analysis of the structure, processes, and location of the Earth's natural phenomena such as climate, soil, plants, animals, and topography. |
| Spatial Distribution | Physical location of geographic phenomena across space. |
| Pattern | The design of a spatial distribution. |
| Medical Geography | The study of health and disease within a geographic context and from a geographical perspective. |
| Pandemic | An outbreak of a disease that spreads worldwide. |
| Epidemic | Regional outbreak of a disease. |
| Spatial Perspective | Observing variations in geographic phenomena across space. |
| Location theory | A logical attempt to explain the locational pattern of an economic activity and the manner in which its producing areas are interrelated. |
| Sense of Place | State of mind derived through the infusion of a place with meaning and emotion by remembering important events that occurred in that place or by labeling a place with a certain character. |
| Perceptions of places | Belief or "understanding" about a place developed through books, movies, stories or pictures. |
| Movement | The mobility of people, goods and ideas across the surface of the planet. |
| Spatial Interaction | Movement between places. |
| Distances Accessibility | The degree of ease between the measured length between places. |
| Connectivity | The degree of direct linkage between one particular location and other locations in a transport network. |
| Landscape | The overall appearance of an area. |
| Sequent Occupance | The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, each contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape. |
| Cartography | The art and science of making maps, including data compilation, layout and design. |
| Reference Maps | Maps that show the absolute location of places and geographic features determined by a frame of reference, typically latitude and longitude. |
| Thematic Maps | Maps that tell stories, typically showing the degree of some attribute or the movement of a geographic phenomenon. |
| 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 and longitude. |
| Global Positioning System | Satellite |
| Geocaching | A hunt for a cache, the Global Positioning System coordinates which are placed on the Internet by other geocachers. |
| Relative Location | The regional position or situation of a place relative to the position of other places. |
| Mental Maps | Image or picture of the way space is organized as determined by an individual's perception, impression and knowledge of that space. |
| Activity Spaces | The space within which daily activity occurs. |
| Generalized map | Information on the map is not specific. |
| Remote Sensing | A method of collecting data or information through the use of instruments that are physically distant from the area or object of study. |
| Geographic Information Systems | A collection of computer hardware and software that permits spatial data to be collected, recorded, stored, retrieved, manipulated, analyzed and displayed to the user. |
| Rescale | Involvement of players at other scales to generate support for a position or an initiative. |
| Formal Region | A type of region marked by a certain degree of homogeneity in one or more phenomena. |
| Functional Region | A region defined by the particular set of activities or interactions that occur within it. |
| Perceptual Region | A region that only exists as a conceptualization or an idea and not as a physically demarcated entity. |
| Culture Complex | A related set of cultural traits. |
| Cultural Hearth | Heartland, source area, innovation center; place of origin of a major culture. |
| Culture Trait | A single element of normal practice in a culture. |
| Cultural Diffusion | The expansion and adoption of a cultural element, from its place of origin to a wider area. |
| Independent Invention | The term for the trait with many cultural hearths that developed independent of each other. |
| 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. |
| Cultural Barrier | Prevailing cultural attitude rendering certain innovations, ideas or practices unacceptable or unadoptable in that particular culture. |
| Expansion Diffusion | The spread of an innovation or an idea through a population in an area in such a way that the number of those influenced grows continuously larger, resulting in an expanding area of dissemination. |
| Contagious Diffusion | The distance-controlled speading of an idea, innovation, or some other item through a local population by contact from person to person |
| Hierarchical Diffusion | A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. |
| 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. |
| Relocation diffusion | Sequential diffusion process in which the items being diffused are transmitted by their carrier agents as they evacuate the old areas and relocate to the new ones. |
| Environmental determinism | The view that the natural environment has a controlling influence over various aspects of human life, including cultural development. |
| Isotherms | Line on a map connecting points of equal temperature values. |
| Possibilism | Geographic viewpoint that holds that human decision making is the crucial factor in cultural development. |
| Cultural Ecology | The multiple interaction and relationships between a culture and the natural environment |
| Political Ecology | An approach to studying nature |
| Sunni | Largest branch of Islam, believe in the effectiveness of family and community in the solution of life's problems. |
| Shiites/Shia | A division of Islam, represent the Persian variation, believe in the infallibility and divine right to authority of the Imams, descendants of Ali. |
| Taoism | Founded by Lao-Tsu that focuses on the proper form of political rule and on the oneness of humanity and nature. |
| Theocracy | A state whose government is under the control of a ruler who is deemed to be divinely guided, or of a group of religious leaders |
| Universalizing | A belief system that espouses the idea that there is one true religion that is universal in scope. |
| Zoroastrianism | The religion states that active participation in life through good thoughts, good words and good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay. |
| Religious architectural styles | These are the styles of architecture created by the religions. |
| Religious Culture Hearth | This is where most religions are born. This is important to Human Geography because where religions are created, civilizations are too. |
| Religious Conflict | This is the conflict between religions. This affects Human Geograohy because there has been a lot of bloodshed over this. |
| Religious toponym | This refers to the origin and meaning of the names of religions. This is important to Human Geography because many names mean significant things including beliefs of cultures. |
| Sacred Space | Place or space that people infuse with religious meaning |
| Secularism | The idea that ethical and moral standards should be formulated and adhered to for life on Earth, not to accommodate the prescriptions of a deity and promises of a comfortable afterlife. |
| Shamanism | Community faith in traditional societies in which people follow a religious leader, teacher, healer and visionary. |
| Sharia Law | The system of Islamic law, sometimes called Qu'ranic Law |
| Shintoism | Located in Japan, focuses particularly on nature and ancestor worship |
| Hinduism | One of the oldest religions in the modern world, dating back over 4,000 years and does not have a founder, theology or agreement of its origin. |
| Interfaith Boundaries | Boundaries within a single major faith. |
| Islam | The youngest of the major world religions based on the teachings of Muhammad who received the truth directly from Allah written then in the Koran |
| Janism | Religion and philosophy orginating in ancient India that stresses spiritual independence and equality throughout all life |
| Judaism | A monotheistic, ethnic religion first developed among the Hebrew people, its determining conditions include descent from Israel, the Torah and tradition |
| Landscapes of the Dead | Religious burial areas |
| Monotheism | Belief in one god |
| Polytheism | Belief in more then one god |
| Mormonism | A term used to describe religious, ideological and cultural aspects of the various denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement |
| Hajj | A muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (Makkah), usually around Ramadan |
| Proselytic religion | A religion that actively seeks converts and has the goal of converting all humankind |
| reincarnation | After this life you will come back in another life either as a plant, animal or a human life |
| religion | A system of beliefs and practices that attempts to order life in terms of culturally perceived ultimate priorities |
| trade language | A language used by speakers of a different native language for communication in commercial trade |
| animism | A belief that natural objects may be the abode of dead people, spirits or gods who occasionally give the objects the appearance of life |
| Buddhism | A universalizing religion based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, that suffering is inherent in all life but can be relieved by mental and moral self-purification |
| Religious Extremism | Fundamentalism carried to the point of violence. |
| Christianity | A monotheistic, universalizing religion based on the teachings of Jesus and the Bible as sacred scripture. |
| Confucianism | A Chinese value system and ethnic religion emphasizing ethics, social morality, tradition and ancestor worship. |
| Ethnic religion | A religion identified with a particular ethnic group and largely exclusive to it. Such a religion does not seek converts. |
| Exclave | A portion of a state that is separated from the main territory and surrounded by another country |
| Enclave | A small bit of foreign territory lying within a state but not under its jurisdiction. |
| Fundamentalism | A movement to return to the founding principles of a religion, which can include literal interpretation of sacred texts, or the attempt to follow the ways of a religious founder as closely as possible |
| Geomancy | The Chinese art and science of placement and orientation of tombs, swellings, buildings and cities. Structures and objects are positioned in a effort to channel flows of sheng-chi in favorable ways. |
| Creole | Language derived from a pidgin language that has acquired a fuller vocabulary and become the native language of it speakers |
| Dialect | A distinctive local or regional variant of a language that remains mutually intelligible to speakers of other dialects of that language, subtype of a language |
| Isogloss | the border of usage of an individual word or pronunciation |
| Language | A mutually agreed on system of symbolic communication that has a spoken and usually a written expression |
| Language Family | A group of related languages derived from common ancestor |
| Language Group | A group of languages related by descent from a common ancestor |
| Lingua Franca | An existing, well established language of communication and commerce used widely where it is not a mother tongue |
| Linguistic diversity | 5,000 to 10,000 living languages depending generally on the precision of ones definition of language |
| Monolingual | A society's or country's use of only one language of communication for all purposes |
| Multilingual | The common use of two or more languages in a society or country |
| Official Language | A governmentally designated language of instruction of government, of the courts and other official public or private communication |
| pidgin | An auxiliary language derived, with reduced vocabulary and simplified structure from other languages |
| Toponymy | The place names of a region or especially the study of place names |
| Backward reconstruction | Tracking shifting consonants and cognates back in an effort to reconstruct elements of a prior common language. |
| Doubling Time | The time required for a population to double in size. |
| Gendered Space | In terms of place, whether the place is designed for or claimed by men or women. |
| Infant Mortality Rate | A figured that describes the number of babies that die within the first year of their lives in a given population. |
| Newborn Mortality Rate | The number of infants who die within the first month of life per 1,000 births. |
| Child Mortality Rate | A figure that describes the number of children that die between the first and fifth years of their lives in a given population. |
| Arithmetic Population Density | The population of a country or region expressed as an average per unit. |
| Physiologic Population Density | The number of people per unit area of arable land. |
| Population Density | A measurement of the number of people per given unit of land. |
| Population Distributions | Description of locations on the Earth's surface where populations live. |
| Population Explosion | The rapid growth of the world's human population during the past century, attended by ever-shorter doubling times and accelerating rates of increase. |
| Natural Increase | Population growth measured as the excess of live births over deaths. |
| Stationary Population Level(zero population growth) | The level at which a national population ceases to grow. |
| Chain Migration | Pattern of migration that develops when migrants move along and through kinship links. |
| Cyclic Movement | Movement that has a closed route and is repeated annually or seasonally. |
| Distance Decay | The effects of distance on interaction, generally the greater the distance the less interaction. |
| Forced Migration | Human migration flows in which the movers have no choice but to relocate. |
| Internal Migration | Human movement within a nation-state. |
| Intervening Opportunity | The presence of a nearer opportunity that greatly diminishes the attractiveness of sites farther away. |
| Migratory Movement | A change in residence intended to be permanent |
| Periodic Movement | Temporary, recurrent relocation. |
| Push Factor | Negative conditions and perceptions that induce people to leave their abode and migrate to a new locale. |
| Pull Factor | Positive conditions and perceptions that effectively attract people to new locales from other areas. |
| Refugees | People who have fled their country because of political persecution and seek asylum in another country. |
| Step Migration | Migration to a distant destination that occurs in stages. |
| Transhumance | A seasonal periodic movement of person and their livestock between highland and lowland pastures. |
| Voluntary Migration | People relocate in response to perceived opportunity, not forced. |
| Dependency Ratio | The number of people under the age of 15 and over the age of 64 compared to the number of people active in the labor force. |
| Ecumene | The portion of Earth's surface occupied by permanent human settlement. |
| Overpopulation | The number of people in an area exceeds the capacity of the environment to support life at a decent standard of living. |
| Population Pyramid | A bar graph representing the distribution of population by age and sex. |
| Sex Ratio | The number of males per 100 females in the population. |
| Repatriation | A refugee or group of refugees returning to their home country, usually with the assistance of government or nongovernmental organization. |
| Interregional Migration | Permanent movement from one region of a country to another. |
| Cohorts | All individuals in a certain age range. |
| Demographic Momentum | Continued population growth long after replacement-level fertility rates have been reached. |
| Age Distribution | Percentage of the total population or the population of each sex at each age level. |
| Carrying Capacity | The idea that any given environment can only support a finite population. |
| Demographic Regions | Regions where demographics take place. |
| Demographics | Characteristics of a human population. |
| Disease Diffusion | Occurs when a disease is transmitted to a new location. |
| Maladaptation | Trait that is more harmful than helpful. |
| Natality | Ratio of live births in an area to the population of that area. |
| Standard of Living | Level of material comfort as measured by the goods, service and luxuries available. |
| Sustainability | Capable of being continued to an individual, group or nation. |
| Underpopulation | When the population is not sufficient to make full use of all the resources available and so the standard of living are not as high as they could be. |
| Intercontinental migration | Permanent movement from one continent to another. |
| Asylum | Shelter and protection in one state for refugees from another state. |
| Place Utility | The desirability and usefulness of a place to the individual or to a group. |
| Space Time Prism | Set of all points that can be reached by an individual. |
| Transmigration | Mass resettlement of people within a country to alleviate overcrowding or localized overpopulation. |
| Selective Immigration | Process to control immigrants in which individuals with certain backgrounds are barred from immigrating. |
| Reverse Remittance | Remittances from foreign lands to the U.S. The struggling migrant asking back home for money. |
| Human Trafficking | A form of forced migration in which organized criminal elements move people illegally from one place to another. |
| Deportation | The act of a government sending a migrant out of its country and back to the migrant’s home country. |
| Immigration Wave | Phenomenon whereby different patterns of chain migration build upon one another to create a swell in migration from one origin to the same destination. |
| Russification | The Soviet policy to promote the diffusion of Russian culture throughout the republics of the former Soviet Union. |
| acculturation | adoptation of cultural traits by one group under the influence of another |
| assimilation | when a new group adapts to their surroundings |
| cultural ecology | the study of the interactions between societies and the natural environments they occupy |
| cultural landscape | the visible imprint human activity and culture on the landscape |
| culture realm | a collective of cultural regions sharing related culture systems |
| culture | a society's collective beliefs, symbols, values, forms of behavior and social organizations, together with its tools, structures and artifacts created according to the group's condition of life |
| cultural region | a region defined by similar cultural traits and cultural landscape |
| expansion diffusion | the spread of an innovation or an idea through a population in an area in such a way that the number of those influenced grows continuously larger, resulting in an expanding area of dissemination |
| relocation diffusion | sequential diffusion process in which the items being diffused are transmitted by their carrier agents as they evacuate the old areas and relocate to new ones |
| innovation adoption | introduction of new ideas, practices, objects usually an alteration of custom or culture within a social group |
| maladaptive diffusion | diffusion of a process with negative side effects or what works well in one region may not in another |
| sequent occupance | cultural succenssion and its lasting imprint |
| adaptive strategies | The unique way in which each culture uses its particular physical environment; those aspects of culture that serves to provide the necessities of life, food, clothing, shelter and defense |
| built environment | the part of the physical landscape that represents material culture |
| folk culture | the body of institutions, customs, dress, artifacts, collective wisdoms and traditions of a homogeneous, isolated, largely self-sufficient and relatively static social group |
| folklore | oral traditions of a folk culture, including tales, fables, legends, customary observations and moral teachings |
| material culture | the tangible, physical items produced and used by members of a specific culture group and reflective of their traditions, lifestyles and technologies |
| nonmaterial culture | oral traditions, songs and stories of a culture group along with its beliefs and customary behaviors |
| popular culture | the constantly changing mix of material and nonmaterial elements available through mass production and the mass media to an urbanized heterogeneous, nontraditional society |
| traditional architecture | Indicates originality within a culture or long-term part of an indigenous society |
| enfranchisement | the franchise is the civil right to vote or the exercise of that right |
| gender gap | unbalanced sex ratio or economic gap between the sexes |
| infanticide | the practice of intentionally killing an infant |
| maternal mortality rate | the number of women in child birth that die each year |
| ethnic cleansing | the systematic killing or extermination of an entire people or nation |
| barrio | spanish word for neighborhood |
| ethnic neighborhood | area, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture in which a local culture can practice its customs |
| ethnicity | affiliation or identity within a group of people bound by common ancestry and culture |
| race | a categorization of humans based on skin color and other physical characteristics |
| ghetto | a section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal or economic pressure |
| multiculturalism | the cultural diversity of communities within a given society and the policies that promote this diversity. |
| ethnic group | a group of people who share a common ancestry and cultural tradition, often living as a minority group in a larger society |
| ethnic homeland | a sizable area inhabited by an ethnic minority that exhibits a strong sense of attachment to the region and often exercises some measure of political and social control over it |
| cultural core periphery pattern | based on the notion that as one culture expands in prosperity, it must engulf regions nearby to ensure on going cultural success |
| ethnocentrism | Belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group |
| segregation | a segregating or being segregated; specif., the policy or practice of compelling racial groups to live apart from each other, go to separate schools, use separate social facilities, etc. |
| social distance | This social distance is also known as body space and comfort zone and ... The social distances here are approximate, of course and will vary with people. |
| plural society | a society combining ethnic contrasts: the economic interdependence of those groups, and the ecological specialization |
| ethnic shatterbelt | a politically unstable region where differing cultural elements come into contact and conflict. |
| cultural adaptation | the evolutionary process by which an individual modifies his personal habits and customs to fit in to a particular culture. |
| longevity | Longevity Gap is the difference of average expected life spans between different groups of people, or nations or races, e.g longevity Gap between Men and Women of a particular type of people etc. |
| cultural identity | the identity of a group or culture or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. ... |
| ethnic conflict | An ethnic conflict or ethnic war is a war between ethnic groups often as a result of ethnic nationalism |
| ethnic enclave | neighborhood, district, or suburb which retains some cultural distinction from a larger, surrounding area. |
| residential segregation | The degree to which two or more groups live separately from one another, in different parts of the urban environment |
| Annexation | The legal incorporation of some territory into another geo-political entity (either adjacent or non-contiguous). |
| Antarctica | Area governed by a system known as the Antarctic Treaty System which is administered through annual meetings |
| Apartheid | Laws (no longer in effect) in South Africa that physically separated different races into different geographic areas |
| Balkanization | A small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states because it is inhabited by many ethnicities with complex, long-standing antagonisms toward each other |
| Border landscape | The complex representation of the environment around state boundaries |
| Border disputes | When two or more states disagree about the demarcation of a political boundary |
| Boundary origin | also known as Genetic Political Boundaries because it has to do with the evolution of boundaries |
| Buffer state | An independent but small and weak country that is lying between two powerful countries |
| Capital | Associated with its government, it physically encompasses the offices and meeting places of the seat of government and fixed by law |
| Centrifugal | Forces that tend to divide a country-such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic or ideological differences |
| Centripetal | Forces that tend to unify a country-such as widespread commitment to a national culture, shared ideological objectives and a common faith |
| City-State | A sovereign state comprising a city and its immediate hinterland |
| Colonialism | An attempt by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political economic and cultural principles in another territory |
| Confederation | A uniting or being united in a league or alliance |
| Core-Periphery | Spatial structure of an economic system in which underdeveloped or declining peripheral areas are defined with respect to their dependence on a dominating developed core region. |
| Decolonization | The action of changing from colonial to independent status. |
| Deterritorialization | Movement of economic, social and cultural processes out of the hands of states. |
| Devolution | The transfer of certain powers from the state central government to separate political subdivisions within the state's territory |
| Domino Theory | The political theory that if one nation comes under communist control then neighboring nations will also come under communist control. |
| Exclusive Economic Zone | As established in the United Nations Convention on the law of the Sea, a zone of exploration extending 200 nautical miles seaward from a coastal state that has exclusive mineral and fishing rights over it |
| Electoral regions | The different voting districts that make up local, state and national regions |
| Enclave | A small bit of foreign territory within a state but not under its jurisdiction |
| Exclave | A portion of a state that is separated from the main territory and surrounded by another country |
| Federal | A political territorial system where in a central government represents the various entities within a nation-state where they have common interests; defense, foreign affairs, and yet allows these various entities to retain their own identities and laws |
| Forward Capital | Is the area of a country, province, region or state regarded as enjoying primary status, although there are exceptions |
| Frontier | A zone separating two states in which neither state exercises political control |
| Geometric boundaries | Political boundary defined and delimited as a straight line or an arc. |
| Geopolitics | The influence of the habitat on political entities |
| Gerrymander | The drawing of electoral district boundaries in an awkward pattern to enhance the voting impact of one constituency at the expense of another |
| Global Commons | Is that which no one person or state may own or control and which is central to life |
| Heartland | The interior of a sizable landmass, removed from maritime connections in particular the interior of the Eurasian continent |
| International Organization | An international alliance involving many different countries |
| Iron Curtain | Ideological and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of WWII in 1945 until the end of the Cold War |
| Irredentism | The policy of a state wishing to incorporate within its territory inhabited by people who have ethnic or linguistic links with the country but lies within a neighboring state |
| Landlocked | A state that does not have a direct outlet to the sea |
| Law of the Sea | Agreement signed by 158 nations that has standardized the territorial limits for most countries at 12 nautical miles |
| Manifest Destiny | Was the 19th century American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean |
| Median-line Principle | An approach to dividing and creating boundaries at the midpoint between two places |
| Microstate/Ministate | A state that encompasses a very small land area |
| Nation | A culturally distinctive group of people occupying a specific territory and bound together by a sense of unity arising from shared ethnicity, belief and customs |
| National iconography | Branch of knowledge dealing with representations of people or objects in art and design, hence the symbolism in a design |
| Nation-state | Member of the modern state system possessing formal sovereignty and with people possessing bonds of shared cultural attributes |
| Physical-political boundaries | Political boundary defined and delimited by a prominent physical feature in the natural landscape. |
| Reapportionment | Process by which representative districts are switched according to population shifts, so that each district encompasses approximately the same number of people |
| Regionalism | Political geographical group, frequently an ethnic group identification with a particular region of a state rather than with the state as a whole |
| Reunification | The act of coming together again |
| Satellite State | A small weak country dominated by one powerful neighbor to the extent that some or much of its independence is lost |
| State | A centralized authority that enforces a single political, economical and legal system within its territorial boundaries |
| Stateless ethnic groups | Ethnic groups that share certain cultural, political and/or historic qualities, such as religion, location or art, but do not share enough qualities to be recognized as a nationality or nation |
| Stateless nation | A group that does not have a state. |
| Suffrage | The civil right to vote |
| Supranationalism | A method of decision-making in multi-national political communities, wherein power is transferred or delegated to an authority by governments of member states |
| Territorial Disputes | A disagreement over the possession or control of land between two or more states |
| Territorial Morphology | An impact on the ability of ruling governments to impose law and policy on state territory |
| Territoriality | A behavior pattern in animals consisting of the occupation and defense of a territory |
| Theocracy | A form of government in which a god or deity is recognized as the state's supreme civil ruler |
| Treaty Ports | Name given to the port cities that were opened to foreign trade by the Unequal Treaties. |
| Unitary | A sovereign state governed as one single unit in which the central government is supreme and any administrative divisions exercise only powers that the central government chooses to delegate |
| Rimland | The maritime fringe of a country or continent in particular the western, southern and eastern edges of the Eurasian continents |
| Agrarian | A person who advocates the political interests of working farmers; of or relating to, the ownership, tenure and cultivation of land |
| Agribusiness | A generic term for the various businesses involved in food production, including farming and contract farming, seed supply, agrichemicals, farm machinery, wholesale and distribution, processing, marketing and retail sales |
| Agricultural location model | An attempt to explain the pattern of agricultural land use in terms of accessibility, costs, distance and prices |
| Agriculture | The science and practice of farming including the cultivation of the soil and the rearing of livestock |
| Animal domestication | The process whereby a population of animals, through a process of selection, becomes accustomed to human provision and control |
| Aquaculture | Involves cultivation freshwater and saltwater populations |
| Biorevolution | Decoding of entire genomes or genetic codes for species, which allows biologists studying organisms as different as a bacterium and a human being, a common language in which to communicate |
| Biotechnology | A field of applied biology that involves the use of living organisms and bioprocesses in engineering, technology, medicine and other fields |
| Collective Farm | Communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise |
| Commercial agriculture | Agriculture undertaken primarily to generate products for sale off the farm |
| Crop rotation | The practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year to avoid exhausting the soil |
| Cultivation Regions | An area suited by climate and soil conditions to the growing of a certain type of crop or plant group |
| Dairying | Branch of agriculture that encompasses the breeding, raising and utilization of primary cows for the production of milk |
| Debt-for-nature swap | Financial transactions in which a portion of a developing nation's foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for local investment in conservation measures |
| Double cropping | The practice of consecutively producing two crops of wither like or unlike commodities on the same land within the same year |
| Organic Agriculture | Approach to farming and ranching that avoids the use of herbicides, pesticides, growth hormones and other similar synthetic inputs. |
| Environmental Modification | The deliberate manipulation of natural processes |
| Subsistence agriculture | Self-sufficiency farming that is small scale and low technology and emphasizes food production for local consumption, not for trade. |
| Extractive industry | Industry that involves mining, such as to obtain copper or other valuable minerals found in the earth |
| Farm crisis | Term describing times of agricultural recession, low crop prices and low farm incomes that can lead to farm bankruptcy |
| Feedlot | Type of animal feeding operation which is used in factory farming for finishing livestock, notably beef cattle |
| First agricultural revolution | The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement |
| Food chain | Representations of the predator-prey relationships between species within an ecosystem or habitat |
| Forestry | The art and science of managing forests, tree plantations and related natural resources |
| Globalized agriculture | Small farms will be replaced by large farms, which in turn will be controlled by giant multinational corporations |
| Green Revolution | Great increase in production of good grains that resulted in large part from the introduction into developing countries of new, high-yielding varieties, beginning in the mid-20th century |
| Growing season | The period of each year when native plants and ornamental plants grow |
| Hunting and gathering | The subsistence method based on edible plants and animals from the wild |
| Shifting Cultivation(Slash and Burn) | Cultivation of crops in tropical forest clearings in which the forest vegetation has been removed by cutting and burning. These clearings are usually abandoned after a few years in favor of newly cleared forestland. |
| Intertillage | Turning up land between rows of crop plants |
| Livestock ranching | An area of landscape, including various structures, given primarily to the practice of raising and grazing livestock |
| Market gardening | The growing of vegetables or flowers for market |
| Mediterranean agriculture | Farming system found in countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea |
| Mineral Fuels | A carbonaceous fuel mined or stripped from the earth, such as petroleum, coal, peat and shale oil |
| Mining | The extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, usually from an ore body |
| Cash Crops | A crop for direct sale in a market, as distinguished from a crop for use as livestock feed or for other purposes. |
| Plant domestication | Genetic modification of a plant such that its reproductive success depends on human intervention |
| Plantation agriculture | A commercial tropical agriculture system which is essentially export-oriented |
| Renewable | Resources that can regenerate as they are exploited |
| Nonrenewable | Resources that cannot be regenerated |
| Second agricultural revolution | Took place which increased efficiency of production as well as distribution which allowed more people to move to the cities as the industrial revolution go under way |
| Specialization | The separation of tasks within a system |
| Staple grains | A type of edible grain, usually wheat or corn, on which a group of people are dependent |
| Suitcase farm | Commercial grain agriculture, a farm on which no one lives, planting and harvesting is done by hired migratory crews |
| Survey patterns | Survey of major patterns of physical features, culture and human-land relations |
| Sustainable yield | Natural capital is the ecological yield that can be extracted without reducing the base of capital itself |
| Third Agricultural Revolution | For the first time farmers using substantial inputs purchased off their farms, in the form of fertilizers for their land and artificial feedstuffs for their animals |
| Tragedy of the commons | A dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's interest for this to happen |
| Truck Farm | Commercial gardening and fruit farming so named for bartering or the exchange of commodities |
| Monoculture | Dependence on a single agricultural commodity |
| Pastoralism | An agricultural activity that involves the raising of livestock. |
| Genetically Modified Organisms | Crops that carry new traits that have been inserted through advanced genetic engineering methods |
| Deforestation | The clearing and destruction of forests to clear land for agricultural uses |
| Desertification | The encroachment of desert conditions on arable land |
| Luxury Crops | Non-subsistence crops such as tobacco, tea, cacao, and coffee. |
| Food Desert | An area characterized by a lack of affordable, fresh and nutritious food. |
| Agglomeration | A process involving the clustering or concentrating of people or activities. The term often refers to manufacturing plants and businesses that benefit from close proximity because they share skilled labor pools and technological and financial amenities |
| Blockbusting | Rapid change in the racial composition of residential blocks in American cities that occurs when real estate agents and others stir up fears of neighborhood decline after encouraging people of color to move to previously white neighborhoods. In the result |
| Central Business District (CBD) | The downtown heart of a central city that is marked by high land values, a concentration of business and commerce, and the clustering of the tallest buildings |
| Centrality | The strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities: a city's "reach" into the surrounding regions |
| Central-Place Theory | Explains how and where central places in the urban hierarchy should be functionally and spatially distributed with respect to one another |
| City | Conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a center of politics, culture and economics |
| Commercialization | The transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity |
| Concentric Zone Mode | A structural model of the American central city that suggests the existence of five concentric land-use rings arranged around a common center |
| Deindustrialization | Process by which companies move industrial jobs to other regions with cheaper labor, leaving the region to switch to a service economy and work through a period of high unemployment |
| Edge Cities | A term used to describe the shifting focus of urbanization in the United States away from the central business district toward new loci of economic activity at the urban fringe. These areas are characterized by extensive amounts of office and retail spac |
| Ethnic neighborhood | neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs |
| Gentrification | The rehabilitation of deteriorated, often abandoned, housing of low-income inner-city residents |
| Disamenity Sector | The very poorest parts of cities that in extreme cases are not even connected to regular city services and are controlled by drug lords or gangs. |
| Hinterland | Literally "country behind" a term that applies to a surrounding area served by an urban center |
| Megalopolis | Term used to designate large coalescing supercities that are forming in diverse parts of the world |
| Primate City | A country's largest city-ranking atop the urban hierarchy-most expressive of the national culture and usually the capital city as well |
| Rank-size rule | In a model urban hierarchy, the idea that the population of a city or town will be inversely proportional to its rank in the hierarchy |
| Redlining | A discriminatory real estate's practice in North America in which members of minority groups are prevented from obtaining money to purchase homes or property in predominantly white neighborhoods. Today it is officially illegal. |
| Site | The internal physical attributes of a place, including its absolute location, its spatial character and physical setting |
| Situation | The external location attributes of a place, its relative location or regional position with reference to other nonlocal places |
| Suburb | A subsidiary urban area surrounding and connected to the central city. Many are exclusively residential; others have their own commercial centers or shopping malls |
| Suburbanization | Movement of upper and middle class people from urban core areas to the surrounding outskirts to escape pollution as well as deteriorating social conditions. |
| Urban Hierarchy | A ranking of settlements according to their size and economic functions |
| Urban Morphology | The study of the physical form and structure of urban places |
| Level of Urbanization | The proportion of a country's population living in urban places. |
| Process of Urbanization | The movement of people to and the clustering of people in, towns and cities- a major force in every geographic realm today |
| Urbanization | When a expanding city absorbs the rural countryside and transforms it into suburbs. |
| World City | Dominant city in terms of its role in the global political economy. |
| Zone | Area of a city with a relatively uniform land use. |
| Zoning Laws | Legal restrictions on land use that determine what types of building and economic activities are allowed to take place in certain areas. |
| Economic Base | A community's collection of basic industries |
| Ghetto | A section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal or economic pressure |
| Multiple nuclei model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a collection of nodes of activities |
| Sector Model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a series of sectors, or wedges, radiating out from the central business district. |
| Squatter Settlement | An area within a city in a less developed country in which people illegally establish residences on land they do not own or rent and erect homemade structures |
| Threshold | The minimum number of people needed to support the service |
| Range | The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service |
| Underclass | A group in society prevented from participating in the material benefits of a more developed society because of a variety of social and economical factors |
| Barriadas | Illegal housing settlements, usually made up of temporary shelters, that surround large cities, also known as squatter settlements |
| Cityscapes | An urban landscape |
| Decentralization | The tendency of people or businesses and industry to locate outside the central city |
| Hydraulic civilization | A civilization based on large-scale irrigation |
| In-filling | New building on empty parcels of land within a checkerboard pattern of development |
| Megacities | A term that refers to a particularly large urban center |
| Neighborhood | A small social area within a city where residents share values and concerns and interact with one another on a daily basis |
| Office Park | A cluster of office buildings, usually located along an interstate, often forming the nucleus of an edge city |
| Gated Community | Restricted neighborhoods or subdivisions where entry is limited to residents and their guests. |
| Settlement forms | The spatial arrangement of buildings, roads, towns, and other features that people construct while inhabiting an area |
| Symbolic Landscape | Landscapes that express the values, beliefs and meanings of a particular culture |
| Urban Hearth Area | A region in which the world's first cities evolved |
| Urbanized Population | The proportion of a country's population living in cities |
| Informal sector | The part of a national economy that involves productive labor not subject to formal systems of control or payment |
| Infrastructure | The basic structure of services, installations, and facilities needed to support industrial, agricultural and other economic development |
| Metropolitan Area | In the United States, a large functionally integrated settlement area comprising of one or more whole county units and usually containing several urbanized areas |
| Peak Value Intersection | The most accessible and costly parcel of land in the central business district and therefore in the entire urbanized area |
| Town | A nucleated settlement that contains a central business district but that is small and less functionally complex than a city |
| Bid-rent Theory | Geographical economic theory that refers to how the price and demand for real estate changes as the distance from the Central Business District decreases |
| Centralization | The process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning decision-making, become concentrated within a particular location and/or group |
| Colonial city | Cities that arose in societies that fell under the domination of Europe and North America in the early expansion of the capitalist world system |
| Counterurbanization | Net migration from urban to rural areas in more developed countries |
| Employment structure | The percentage of people employed in each of the four major employment sectors |
| Favela | Term used for a shanty town in Brazil |
| Female Headed Household | Single mother with children |
| Gateway City | A settlement which acts as a link between two areas |
| Indigenous City | Originating in and naturally living, growing or occurring in a region or country |
| Inner City | The usually older, central part of a city, especially when characterized by crowded neighborhoods that tend to be low income and minority dominated |
| Lateral Commuting | Traveling from one suburb to another in going between home and work |
| Planned Communities | A residential district that is planned for a certain class of residents |
| Postmodern Urban Landscape | Attempts to reconnect people to place through its architecture, the preservation of historical buildings, the re-emergence of mixed land uses and connections among developments |
| Shopping Mall | A shopping center with stores and businesses facing a system of enclosed walkways |
| Slum | Heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor |
| Tenement | Rundown apartment house barely meeting minimal standards |
| Urban Growth Rate | The process by which there is an increase in proportion of a population living in places classified as urban |
| Urban Heat Island | Metropolitan area which there is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas |
| Forward Capital | A symbolic relocation of a capital city to a geographically or demographically peripheral location that may or may not be for either economic or strategic reasons |
| Urbicide | The deliberate killing of a city, as happens, for example, when cities are targeted for destruction during wars. |
| Synekism | The possibility of change that results from people living together in cities. |
| Galactic City | A complex urban area in which centrality of functions is no longer significant. Instead, the old downtown plays the role of a festival or recreational area. |
| Bid rent theory | Geographical economic theory that refers to how the price and demand for real estate changes as the distance from the Central Business District decreases |
| Acid Rain | Growing environmental peril that severely damages plant and animal life caused by oxides of sulfur and nitrogen that are released into the atmosphere |
| Agglomeration | a process involving the clustering or concentrating of people or activities |
| Agglomeration economies | savings which arise from the concentration of industries in urban areas and their location close to linked activities |
| Air Pollution | the introduction of chemicals, particulate matter, or biological materials that cause harm or discomfort to humans or other living organisms or damages the natural environment, into the atmosphere |
| Aluminum industry | Manufactures of aluminum considered as a group |
| Fordism | Social theories about production and related socioeconomic phenomena |
| Break of bulk point | a location along a transport route where goods must be transferred from one carrier to another |
| Rimland | concept by Spykman to describe the maritime fringe of a country or continent, in particular the densely populated western, southern and eastern edges of the Eurasian continent |
| Comparative advantage | the ability of a party to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party |
| Cumulative causation | a mechanism by which an output is enhanced |
| Deglomeration | the process of industrial deconcentration in response to technological advances and/or increasing costs due to congestion and competition |
| Deindustrialization | process by which companies move industrial jobs to other regions with cheaper labor, leaving the region to switch to a service economy and to work through a high period of high unemployment |
| Economic sectors | another term for industries |
| Economies of scale | characteristics of a production process in which an increase in the scale of the firm causes a decrease in the long run average cost of each unit |
| Ecotourism | tourism to exotic or threatened ecosystems to observe wildlife or to help preserve nature |
| Energy resources | discovered to be hydro, solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, coal, crude oil, natural gas, and ocean wave motion and are used to produce power |
| Entrepot | a commercial center, a place where merchandise is sent for additional procession and distribution |
| Export processing zone | zones established y many countries in the periphery and semi periphery where they offer favorable tax, regulatory and trade arrangements to attract foreign trade and investment |
| Fixed costs | business expenses that are not dependent on the activities of the business, they tend to be time-related, such as salaries or rents being paid per month |
| Footloose industry | an industry that can be placed and located at any location without effect from factors such as resources or transport |
| Four tigers | refers to the highly developed economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan |
| Greenhouse effect | the blanket like effect of the atmosphere in the heating of the Earth's surface; shortwave insolation passes through the "glass" of the atmospheric "greenhouse" heats the surface is converted to longwave radiation that traps heat which raises the earth's |
| Heartland | the central region of a country or continent, especially a region that is important to a country or to a culture |
| Industrial location theory | Theory attempting to explain why industries are found to have located in the places they are found |
| Industrial Revolution | A period from the 18th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining and transport had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions starting in the United Kingdom, then subsequently spreading throughout Europe |
| Infrastructure | The basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function |
| International division of labor | economic specialization is the specialization of cooperative labor in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase the productivity of labor |
| Labor intensive | Requiring a great deal of work, especially physical and manual effort |
| Least-cost location | the location of manufacturing establishments is determined by the minimization to three critical expenses; labor, transportation and agglomeration |
| Manufacturing exports zones | feature of economic development in peripheral countries whereby the host country establishes areas with favorable tax, regulatory and trade arrangements in order to attract foreign manufacturing operations, goods destined for global market |
| Maquiladora | Zones in northern Mexico with factories supplying manufactured goods to the US market, low wage workers in the primarily foreign owned factories assemble imported components and/or raw materials and then export finished goods |
| Multiplier Effect | The idea that an initial amount of spending leads to increased consumption spending and so results in an increase in national income greater than the initial amount of spending |
| NAFTA | An agreement for free trade between US, Canada and Mexico |
| Outsourcing | The transfer of a business function to an external service provider |
| Offshoring | With reference to production, to outsource to a third party located outside the country. |
| Plant location | An inventory strategy that strives to improve a business's return on investment by reducing in-process inventory and associated carrying costs |
| Postindustrial | A society in which an economic transition has occurred from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy and a diffusion of national and global capital and mass privatization |
| Cottage industry | small home based business |
| Special Economic Zones | Geographical region that has economic laws that are more liberal than a country's typical economic laws |
| Substitution Principle | Focused on the substitution of a product, service or process to another that is more efficient or beneficial in some way while retaining the same functionality |
| Range | The maximum distance a customer is willing to travel |
| Threshold | The minimum market area size |
| Time-space compression | The social and psychological effects of living in a world in which time space convergence has rapidly reached a high level of intensity |
| Flexible Production | A system of industrial production characterized by a set of processes in which the components of goods are made in different places around the globe and then brought together as needed to meet consumer demand. |
| Friction of Distance | The increase in time and cost that usually comes with increasing distance |
| Transnational Corporation | A multinational corporation(MNC) also called multinational enterprise (MNE) is a corporation or an enterprise that manages production or delivers services in more than one country |
| Vertical Integration | Ownership by the same firm of number of companies that exist along a variety of points on a commodity chain. |
| Variable Costs | Costs that change directly with the amount of production |
| Adaptive strategies | Marketing plans, tactics, and methods that have been modified to fit in with the local settings in foreign markets |
| Post-Fordist Production | The adoption by companies of flexible work rules such as the allocation of workers to teams that perform a variety of tasks |
| Market orientation | When an industry is located near its customers due to high transportation costs of the final product. |
| Weight-losing | Relative loss in weight of production inputs during the production process |
| Weight-gaining | relative gain in weight of production inputs during the production process |
| Growth poles | Points of economic growth |
| Calorie consumption | Food energy is the amount of energy in food that is available through digestion |
| Core-periphery model | Higher wages and prices are found at the core while the lack of employment in the periphery keeps wages low there. The result may well be a balance of payments crisis at the periphery |
| Cultural convergence | Is the contact and interaction of one country to another |
| Dependency theory | A structuralism theory that offers a critique of the modernization model of development. political and economic relations between countries have controlled and limit the extent to which regions can develop |
| Foreign Direct Investment | investment of foreign assets into domestic structures, equipment, and organizations |
| Commodity Chain | Series of links connecting the many places of production and distribution and resulting in a commodity that is exchanged on the world market. |
| Gross Domestic Product | The total value of all goods and services produced within a country during a given year |
| Gross National Product | Total value of all goods and services produced by a country's economy in a given year. It includes all goods and services produced by corporations and individuals. |
| Human Development Index | an indicator of the level of development for each country, constructed by the UN combing income literacy education and life expectancy |
| Levels of Development | Per capita levels of income, the structure of the economy, and various social indicators are typically used as measures for determining whether countries are developing or developed. |
| Neocolonialism | A policy whereby a major power uses economic and political means to perpetuate or extend its influence over underdeveloped nations or areas |
| Purchasing Power Parity | how much money would be needed to purchase the same goods and services in two different countries, and uses that to calculate an implicit foreign exchange rate. |
| Technology gap | The presence in a country of a technology that other countries do not have, so that it can produce and export a good whose cost might otherwise be higher than abroad |
| Technology Transfer | The sharing of technological information through education and training; The use of a concept or product from one technology to solve a problem in an unrelated one |
| Third World | underdeveloped and developing countries of Asia and Africa and Latin America collectively |
| Newly Industrializing Countries | States that underwent industrialization after WWII and whose economies have grown at a rapid pace |
| Spatial Fix | The movement of production from one site to another based on the place-based cost advantages of the new site |
| Gross National Income | The monetary worth of what is produced within a country plus income received from investments outside the country minus income payments to other countries around the world |
| Dollarization | When a poorer country ties the value of its currency to that of a wealthier country, or when it abandons its currency and adopts the wealthier country's currency as its own. |
| High Tech Corridors | Areas along or near major transportation arteries that are devoted to the research, development and sale of high-technology products. These areas develop because of the networking and synergistic advantages of concentrating high-technology enterprises in |
Created by:
abean_bean
Popular AP Human Geography sets