Question | Answer |
Land form | a natural land shape or feature |
Mountain | land with steep sides that rises sharply (2,000 feet or more) from surrounding land; generally larger and more rugged than a hill |
Plateau | an area of high, flat land |
Plate | a piece of the Earth's crust that is believed to drift slowly |
Erosion | the process of moving sediment from one place to another |
Weathering | the process that crumbles, cracks, and breaks down rocks (slow change by wind and water) |
Physical Map | A map that shows mountains, hills, plains, rivers, lakes, oceans, etc. |
Political Map | A map that shows all the boundaries of nations and other political units, usually uses color |
Pangaea | The supercontinent formed near the end of the Paleozoic era when plate movements brought all the landmasses of Earth together. |
Atmosphere | a mixture of gases that surrounds a planet or moon |
Weather | the day to day conditions in the atmosphere: temperature and wind and clouds and precipitation |
Climate | the weather in some location averaged over some long period of time |
Precipitation | the falling to earth of any form of water (rain or snow or hail or sleet or mist) |
Plate Tectonics | the theory that pieces of Earth's crust are in constant motion, driven by convection currents in the mantle |
Mercator Projection | these maps show true direction and land shapes fairly accurately, but not size or distance. Areas that are located far from the Equator are quite distorted on this type of map. Alaska, for example, appears much larger on this type of map than it does on a |
Robinson Projection | Projection that attempts to balance several possible projection errors. It does not maintain completely accurate area, shape, distance, or direction, but it minimizes errors in each. |
Latitude | distance north or south of the Equator, measured in degrees |
Longitude | distance east or west on the earth's surface, measured in degrees from a certain meridian (line from the North to the South Pole). |
Key | shows what the symbols stand for on a map |
Location | tells where something is; absolute and relative |
Place | tells what a place is like and what you would see; physical and manmade characteristics |
HEI | how people Modify, adapt and depend on the environment |
Movement | how people, goods, and ideas move |
Region | areas with one or more common characteristics, "mini-worlds" |
Distortion | a change in the shape, size, or position of a place when it is shown on a map |