Unit I. Geography: Its Nature and Perspectives

Basic Vocabulary and Concepts

• Sequential imprints of occupants, whose impacts are layered on top of one another

• Ex. Zanzibar was occupied by Arabs then Germans

• Sequent Occupance

• Visible imprint of human activity on the landscape; associated with Carl Sauer

• Glacier National Park’s parking lot and melting glaciers

• Cultural Landscape

• Total population relative to land size

• US 3,717,425 square miles/population 302 million = 81 per square mile

• Arithmetic Density

• Number of people per unit of agriculturally productive land

• Egypt – population density 203; physiological density 6,776

• Physiological Density

• The area where an idea or cultural trait originates

• Islam from the Arabian Peninsula

• Hearth

• Movement of individuals who have adopted the idea or innovation and carry it to a new locale and disseminate it

• Ex. Diffusion of Christianity with European settlers who came to America.

• Innovation develops in a hearth and remains strong there while spreading outward

• Islam from Arabian Peninsula to Egypt and North Africa, Southwest Asia and West Africa

• Expansion Diffusion

• A pattern in which the main channel of diffusion is some segment of those who are susceptible to what is being used.

• Crocs were designed for boating but become popular with the wider public

• Hierarchical diffusion

• A form of expansion diffusion in which nearly all adjacent individuals and places are affected

• Spread of soccer westward from NY, CT, PA and NJ and eastward from CA.

• Contagious diffusion

• A specific trait is rejected but the underlying idea is adopted

• Siberians domesticated reindeer only after exposure to domesticated cattle

• Stimulus diffusion

• Spatial separation using miles, feet, etc

• Orlando is 235 miles from Miami

• Absolute Distance

• Transforms distance into something more meaningful.

• The mall is 30 minutes away

• Relative Distance

Total Travel Estimate:   28 minutes   /   15.53 miles  

• Amount of spread of a phenomenon over an area.

• Ex. A city would have a lot of people living in the suburbs

• Dispersed pattern

• Distribution that is closely spaced

• Entire population lives in central city

• Clustered/agglomerated pattern

• Uses cardinal points

• North, South, East, West

• Absolute direction

• Culturally based and locationally variable

• Out west, up North

Relative Direction

• Arrangement of something across earth’s surface

• Density, dispersion, pattern

• View that the physical environment controls human action

• Areas with mild climate are densely settled

• People not environments are the dynamic forces of cultural development

• Cities in Siberia reflect Russian development programs.

• Possibilism

• Organized set of computer hardware to capture, store, update, manipulate and display data

• Explain how housing developments impact wetlands

• GIS

• 21 satellites orbit the earth and broadcast time and location

• Used in cars for navigation

• GPS

• Opportunities for contact from a given point in relation to other locations

• A day care center the opens after parents leave lacks this

• accessibility

• Identification of place by some precise and accepted system of coordinates

• US Township and Range System

• Absolute location

• Expresses spatial interconnections and interdependence and may carry social and economic implications

• New York City is connected to the continental interior through the Hudson-Mohawk lowland corridor.

• Relative location

• Refers to physical and cultural characteristics and attibutes of a place

• San Francisco was on a shallow cove on the eastern shore of a peninsula

• site

• An expression of relative location with particular reference to items of significance to the place in question

• Chicago is located at the deepest penetration of the Great Lakes system into the interior of the US

• Situation

• Reference to the size of the unit studied

• Global climate regimes in the world agricultural patterns as compared to crop patterns in US counties

• Scale

• Geographic arrangement of objects in space

• Land Ordinance of 1785 created a checkerboard.

• pattern

• Distribution of towns along railroad or houses on a street

• Linear pattern

• Reflect feelings and images rather than objective data

• Dixie

• Perceptual(vernacular) regions

• Items concentrated around a single node

• The central city with its nearby suburbs

• Centralized pattern

• An unstructured irregular distribution

• Random pattern

• Physical characteristics such as climate and soil, the presence or absence of water supplies and mineral resources, terrain features

• Typhoons in central China

• Natural landscape

• The method chosen to represent the earth’s curved surface as a flat map

• Peter’s projection

• projection

• 90 degrees North• North Pole• 90 degrees South• South Pole• 0 degrees latitude• Equator• 0 degrees longitude• Prime Meridian• 180 degrees longitude• International Date Line

• A general term applied to a map of any scale that presents a specific spatial distribution or a single category of data

• The world location of producing oil fields

• Thematic map

• Features lines that connect points registering equal values of the item mapped

• Weather map connecting points recording the same temperature at the same moment of time or the average temperature during the day

• Isoline map

• Presents average value of data studied per preexisting areal units. Each unit area on the map is then shaded or colored to suggest the magnitude of the event or item found within its borders

• Population densities by individual townships in the US

• Choropleth map

• Records the actual number or occurrences of the mapped item per established unit area or location

• The actual count of each states colleges and universities shown on an outline map of the US

• Statistical map

• Uses statistical maps to transform territorial space so that the largest areal unit in the map is the one showing the greatest statistical value

• A cartogram in which each state is sized according to its number of residents

• cartogram

• Each dot represents one occurrence of the phenomenon being mapped

• Incidence of disease

• Dot map

• The collection of information about the Earth’s surface by means of aerial photography or satellite imagery designed to record data on visible, infrared, and microwave sensor systems

• Agricultural productivity can be monitored by remotely sensed images of crops

• Remote sensing

• The deterrent or inhibiting effect of distance on human activity; a reflection of the time and cost of overcoming distance

• There is a big deterrent effect in having to travel 2 kilometers rather than 1 to get to a grocery store

• Friction of distance

• The rate at which a particular activity or phenomenon diminishes with increasing distance

• The effects of distance on people’s willingness to travel for free medical care

• Distance decay

• The rate at which places move closer together in travel or communication time or costs

• Overland travel between New York and Boston has been reduced

• from 3.5 days in 1800

• to 5 hours in 2000.

• Time space compression

• A set of interconnected nodes without a center

• Financial, transportation communication

• networks

• Maps in our minds of places we have been and places we have heard of

• Even if you have never been to the Great Plains of the US you have come across the region in books frequently enough to envision the States of the

region.

• Mental maps

• The world is divided into 24 standard time zones, each of which represents 15 degrees of longitude

• Greenwich Mean Time is the time near the prime meridian.

• Time zones

• Result of drawing the Earth on a flat piece of paper

• On an equal area projection the shape of the landmasses toward the North and South poles are more

distorted

• distortion