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Geography Key Terms
Europe and Russia Key Terms
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Land hemisphere | The half of the globe containing the greatest amount of land surface, centered on Western Europe. |
City-state | An independent political entity consisting of a single city with (and sometimes without) an immediate hinterland. |
Local functional Specialization | A hallmark of Europe's economic geography that later spread to many other other parts of the world, whereby particular people in particular places concentrate on the production of particular goods and services. |
Industrial Revolution | The term applied to the social and economic changes in agriculture, commerce, and especially manufacturing and urbanization that resulted from technological innovations and greater specialization in late-eighteenth-century Europe. |
Complementarity | Exists when two regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products, can specifically satisfy each other's demands. |
Transferability | The capacity to move a good from one place to another at a bearable cost; the ease with which a commodity may be transported. |
Centrifugal forces | A term employed to designate forces that tend to divide a country--such as internal religious, linguistic, ethnic, or ideological differences. |
Centripetal forces | Forces that unite and bind a country together--such as strong national culture, shared ideological objectives, and a common faith. |
Supranationalism | A venture involving three or more states--political, economic, and/or cultural cooperation to promote shared objectives. |
Four Motors of Europe | Rhone-Alpes (France), Baden-Wurttemberg (Germany), Catalonia (Spain), and Lombardy (Italy). Each is a high-technology-driven region marked by exceptional industrial vitality and economic success not only within Europe but on the global scene as well. |
Devolution (include example) | The process whereby regions within a state demand and gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the central government. Ex: UK |
Microstate (examples) | A sovereign state that contains a miniscule land area and population. They do have the attributes of "complete" states, but are on the map as tiny yet independent entities nonetheless. Ex: Monaco |
Site and situation | Site: the internal locational attributes of an urban center, including its local spatial organization and physical setting. |
Conurbation (include example) | General term used to identify a large multimetropolitan complex formed by the coalescence of two or more major urban areas. Ex: The Rhine-Ruhr |
Shatterbelt (where in Europe) | Region caught between stronger, colliding, external cultural-political forces, under persistent stress, and often fragmented by aggressive rivals. Eastern Europe us a classic example. Ex: Yugoslavia |
Entrepot (example in this realm)/Break of Bulk (function) | Entrepot: A place, usually a port city, where goods are imported, stored, and transshipped; a break-of-bulk point Break of Bulk: A location along a transport route where goods must be transferred from one carrier to another. |
Exclave (with an example) | A bounded (non-island) piece of territory that is part of a particular state but lies separated from it by the territory of another state. |
Continentality | The variation of the continental effect on air temperatures in the interior portions of the world's landmasses. The greater the distance from the moderating influence of an ocean, the greater the extreme in summer and winter temperatures. |
Forward capital (example) | Capital city positioned in actually or potentially contested territory, usually near an international border; it confirms the state's determination to maintain its presence in the area of contention. Ex: Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia. |
Command economy | The tightly controlled economic system of the former Soviet Union, whereby central planners in Moscow assigned the production of particular goods to particular places, often guided more by socialist ideology than the principles of economic geography. |
Satellite state | The countries of eastern Europe under Soviet hegemony between 1945 and 1989. This tier of countries--the "satellites" captured in Moscow's "orbit" following World War II--was bordered on the west by the Iron Curtain and on the east by the USSR. |
Distance decay | The various degenerative effects of distance on human spatial structures and interactions. |
Unitary state | A nation-state that has a centralized government and administration that exercise power equally over all parts of the state. |
Federal system | Federation: A country adhering to a political framework wherein a central government represents the various subnational entities within a nation-state where they have common interests--defense, foreign affairs, and the like--yet allow these various... |
Double complementarity | Double Complementarity: When two areas each require the other's products. Complementarity: exists when two regions, through an exchange of raw materials and/or finished products, can specifically satisfy each other's demands. |