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Unit 1
Nature and Perspectives
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Changing attributes of place | It refers to the way of change a landscape appears by modernization or migration into uninhabited space. |
Cultural attributes | cultural landscape |
Density | The amount of people per land. |
Diffusion | The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time. |
Direction | Information contained in the relative position of one point with respect to another point without the distance information. |
Dispersion/concentration | The spread of something over a given area. |
Distance | Absolute: Exact measurement of the physical space between two places. Relative: Approximate measurement of the physical space between two places. |
Distribution | The arrangement of something across Earth’s surface. |
Environmental determinism | A 19th- and 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 o f how the physical environment caused human activ |
Relative Location | Position on Earth’s surface relative to other features. (Ex: My house is west of 394). |
Pattern | A common property of distribution, which is the geometric arrangement of objects in space. Some features are organized in a geometric pattern, whereas others are distributed irregularly. Geographers observe that many objects form a linear distribution, |
Physical attributes | natural landscape |
Possibilism | The physical environment may limit some human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to their environment. |
Region | An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features. |
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. |
Size | Is the estimation or determination of extent. |
Spatial | of or pertaining to space on or near Earth’s surface. Often a synonym for geographical and used as an adjective to describe specific geographic concepts or processes. |
Spatial interaction | Physical location of geographic phenomena across SPACE |
Distortion | area, distance, direction, shape |
Geographic Information System (GIS) | a computer hardware and software system that handles geographically referenced data; it uses and produces maps and has the ability to perform many types of spatial analysis. |
Global Positioning System (GPS) | A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations and recievers. |
Grid | The Military Grid Reference System (MGRS)is the geocoordinate standard used by NATO militaries for locating points on the earth. The MGRS is based on the Universal Polar Stereographic system, and uses co-ordinates of longitude and latitude to represent a |
Map | a two-dimensional, or flat, representation of Earth’s surface or a portion of it. |
Map scale | distance on a map relative to the distance on Earth. |
Map types | there are many different types if map. For example: political, physical/elevation, spatial etc. See the handouts for detail! |
Mental map | (cognitive map) the map like image of the world, country, region, city, or neighborhood a person carries in mind. |
Model | a simplified abstraction of reality, structured to clarify causal relationships: e.g., Demographic Transition, Gravity Model, etc. |
Projection | the system used to transfer locations from Earth’s surface to a flat map. |
Remote sensing | the acquisition of data about Earth's surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or other long-distance methods. |
Time zones | a geographic region within which the same standard time is used. |
Relocation diffusion | The spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another. Ex: spread of AIDS from New York, California, & Florida. |
Expansion diffusion | The spread of a feature from one place to another in a snowballing process. This can happen in 3 ways |
Hierarchical diffusion | The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places (Ex: hip-hop/rap music) |
Contagious diffusion | The rapid, widespread diffusion of a characteristic throughout the population. (Ex: ideas placed on the internet) |
Stimulus diffusion | the spread of an underlying principle, even though a characteristic itself apparently fails to diffuse. (Ex: PC & Apple competition, p40) |
absolute location | Position on Earth’s surface using the coordinate system of longitude (that runs from North to South Pole) and latitude (that runs parallel to the equator). |