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AP Human Geography
Vocabulary Review
| Vocabulary Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Acid Deposition | sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, emitted by burning fossil fuels, enter the atmosphere - where they combine with oxygen and water to form sulfuric acid and nitric acid - and return to the Earth's surface |
| Acid Precipitation | conversion of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides to acids that return to Earth as rain, snow, or fog |
| Active solar energy systems | solar energy system that collects energy through the use of mechanical devices like photovoltaic cells or flat-plate collectors |
| Agribusiness | commercial agriculture characterized by integration of different steps in the food-processing industry, usually through ownership by large corporations |
| Agricultural density | the ratio of the # of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture |
| Agricultural revolution | the time when human beings first domesticated plants and animals and no longer relied entirely on hunting and gathering |
| Agriculture | the deliberate effort to modify a portion of Earth's surfact through the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock for sustenance or economic gain |
| Air pollution | concentration of trace substances, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and solid particulates, at a greater level than occurs in average air |
| Animate power | power supplied by animals or people |
| Animism | belief that objects, such as plants and stones, or natural events, like thunderstorms and earthquakes, have a discrete spirit and conscious life |
| Annexation | legally adding land area to a city in the United States |
| Apartheid | laws (no longer in effect) in South Africa that physically separated different races into different geographic areas |
| Arithmetic density | the total number of people divided by the total land area |
| Autonomous religion | a religion that does not have a central authority but shares ideas and cooperates informally |
| Balance of Power | condition of roughly equal strength between opposting countries or alliances of countries |
| Balkanization | process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities |
| Balkanized | a small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states because it was inhabited by many ethnicities with complex, long-standing antagonisms toward each other |
| 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 |
| Basic industries | industries that sell their products or servies primarily to consumers outside the settlement |
| Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) | amount of oxygen required by aquatic bacteria to decompose a given load of organic waste; a measure of water pollution |
| Biodiversity | the # of species within a specific habitat |
| Biomass fuel | fuel that derives from plant material and animal waste |
| Blockbusting | a process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices because of fear that black families will soon move into the neighborhood |
| Boundary | invisible line that marks the extent of a state's territory |
| Brain drain | large-scale emigration by talented people |
| Branch (of a religion) | a large and fundamental division within a religion |
| Break-of-bulk point | a location where transfer is posible from one mode of transportation to another |
| Breeder reactor | a nuclear power plant that creates its own fuel from plutonium |
| British Received Pronunciation (BRP) | the dialect of English associated with upper-class Britons living in the London area and now considered standard in the United Kingdom |
| Bulk-gaining industry | an industry in which the final product weighs more or comprises a greater volume than the inputs |
| Bulk-reducing industry | an industry in which the final product weighs more or comprises a lower volume than the inputs |
| Business services | services that primarily meet the needs of other businesses |
| Cartography | the science of making maps |
| Caste | the class or distinct hereditary order into which a Hindu is assigned according to religious law |
| Census Tract | an area delineated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census for which statistics are published; in urbanized areas, census tracts correspond roughly to neighborhoods |
| Census | a complete enumeration of people |
| Central Business District (CBD) | the area of the city where retail and office activities are clustered |
| Central Place Theory | explains distribution of services, settlements serve as centers of market areas for services; larger settlements are fewer & farther apart than smaller settlements & provide services for a larger number of people who are willing to travel farther |
| Central Place | a market center for the exchange of services by people attracted from the surrounding area |
| Centripetal Force | an attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state |
| Cereal Grain | a grass yielding grain for food |
| Chaff | husks of grain separated from the seed by threshing |
| Chain Migration | migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously migrated there |
| Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) | a gas used as a solvent, a propellant in aerosols, a refrigerant, and in plastic foams and fire extinguishers |
| Circulation | short-term, repetitive, or cyclical movements that recur on a regular basis |
| City-state | a sovereign state comprising a city and its immediate hinterland |
| Clustered Rural Settlement | a rural settlement in which the houses and farm buildings of each family are situated close to each other and fields surround the settlement |
| Colonialism | attempt by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles in another territory |
| Colony | a territory that is legally tied to a sovereign state rather than completely independent |
| Combine | a machine that reaps, threshes, and cleans grain while moving over a field |
| Commercial Agriculture | agriculture undertaken primarily to generate products for sale off the farm |
| Compact State | a state in which the distance from the center to any boundary does not vary significantly |
| Concentration | the spread of something over a given area |
| Concentric Zone Model | a model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially aranged in a series of rings |
| Connections | relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space |
| Conservation | the sustainable use and management of a natural resourse, through consuming at a less rapid rate than it can be replaced |
| Consumer Services | businesses that provide services primarily to indivvidual consumers, including retail services and personal services |
| Contagious Diffusion | the rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population |
| Cosmogony | a set of religious beliefs concerning the origin of the universe |
| Cottage Industry | manufacturing based in homes rather than in a factory, commonly found before the Industrial Revolution |
| Council of Government | a cooperative agency consisting of representatives of local governments in a metropolitan area in the United States |
| Counterurbanization | net migration from urban to rural areas in more developed countries |
| Creole (Creolized Language) | a language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language wiht the indigenous language of the people being dominated |
| Crop Rotation | the practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year, to avoid exhausting the soil |
| Crop | grain or fruit gathered from a field as a harvest during a particular season |
| Crude Birth Rate (CBR) | the total number of live births in a year for every 1,000 people alive in the society |
| Crude Death Rate (CDR) | the total number of deaths in a year for every 1,000 people alive in the society |
| Cultural Ecology | geographic approach that emphsizes human-environment relationships |
| Cultural Landscape | fashioning of a natural landsccape by a cultural group |
| Culture | the body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people's distinct tradition |
| Custom | the frequent repetition of an act, to the exxtent that it becomes characteristic of the group of people performing it |
| Demographic Transition | process of change in a society's population from a condition of high CBRs & CDRs to a condiiton of low CBRs & CDRs & higher total population |
| Demography | the scientific study of population characteristics |
| Denomination | a division of a branch that unites a number of local congregations in a single legal and administrative body |
| Density | the frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area |
| Density Gradient | the change in density in an urban area from the center to the periphery |
| Dependency Ratio | the # of people under the age of 15 and over the age of 64, compared to the # of people active in the labor force |
| Desertification | degradation of land, especially in semiarid areas, primarily because of human actions like excessive crop planting, animal grazing, and tree cutting |
| Development | a process of improvement in the material conditions of people through diffusion of knowledge and technology |
| Dialect | a regional variety of a language distinguished by vocaulary, spelling, and pronunciation |
| Diffusion | the process of spread of a feature or trend from one place ot another over time |
| Diocese | the basic unit of geographic organization in the Roman Catholic Church |
| Dispersed Rural Settlement | a rural settlement pattern characterized by isolated farms rather than clustered villages |
| Distance Decay | the diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon wiht increasing distance from its origin |
| Distribution | the arrangement of something across Earth's surface |
| Double Cropping | harvesting twice a year from the same field |
| Doubling Time | the number of years needed to double a population, assuming a constant rate of natural increase |
| Ebonics | dialect spoken by some African-Americans |
| Economic Base | a community's collection of basic industries |
| Ecumene | the portion of Earth's surface occupied by permanent human settlement |
| Edge City | a large node of office and retail activities on the edge of an urban area |
| Elongated State | a state with a long, narrow shape |
| Emigration | migration from a location |
| Enclosure Movement | the process of consolidating small landholdings into a smaller number of larger farms in England during the eighteenth century |
| Environmental Determinism | a 19th & early 20th century approach to the study of geography that 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 |
| Epidemiological Transition | distinctive causes of death in each stage of the demographic transition |
| Ethnic Cleansing | process in which more powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically homogenous region |
| Ethnic Religion | a religion with a relatively concentrated spatial distribution whose principles are likely to be based on the physical characteristics of the particular location in which its adherents are concentrated |
| Ethnicity | identity with a group of people that share distinct physical and mental traits as a product of common heredity and cultural traditions |
| Expansion Diffusion | the spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in a snowballing process |
| Extinct language | a language that was once used by people in daily activities but is no longer used |
| Federal state | an internal organization of a state that allocates most powers to units of local government |
| Ferrous | metals, including iron ore, that are utilized in the production of iron and steel |
| Filtering | a process of change in the use of a house, from single-family owner occupancy to abandonment |
| Fission | the splitting of an atomic nucleus to release energy |
| Floodplain | the area subject to flooding during a given number of years according to historical trend |
| Folk culture | culture traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups |
| Forced migration | permanent movement compelled usually by cultural factors |
| Fordist migration | form of mass production in which each worker is assigned one specific task to perform repeatedly |
| Formal region | an area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics |
| Fossil fuel | energy sourced formed from the residue of plants and animals buried millions of years ago |
| Fragmented state | a state that includes several discontinuous pieces of territory |
| Franglais | a term used by the French for English words that have entered the French language |
| Frontier | a zone separating two states in which neither state exercises political control |
| Functional region | an area organized around a node or focal point |
| Fundamentalism | literal interpretation and strict adherence to basic principles of a religion |
| Fusion | creation of energy by joinng the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms to form helium |
Created by:
SophomoreStud08