EOC review

Agricultural Density

The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture.

Arithmetic Density

The total number of people divided by the total land area.

Base Line

An east-west line designated under the Land Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the U.S.

Cartography

The science of making maps.

Concentration

The spread of something over a given area.

Connections

Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space.

Contagious Diffusion

The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population.

Cultural Ecology

A geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships.

Cultural Landscape

Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.

Culture

The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group's distinct tradition.

Density

The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area.

Diffusion

The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time.

Distance Decay

The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin.

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 physical environment causes human activities.

Expansion Diffusion

The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in a snowballing process.

Formal Region (Uniform Region)

An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics.

Functional Region (Nodal Region)

An area organized around a node or focal point.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through satellites, tracking stations, and receivers.

Globalization

Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope.

Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

The time in the zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0 degrees longitude.

Hearth

The region from which innovative ideas originate.

Hierarchical Diffusion

The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places.

International Date Line

An arc that for the most part follows 180 degrees longitude, deviating in several places to avoid dividing land areas.

Land Ordinance of 1785

A law that divided much of the United States into townships to facilitate the sale of land to settlers.

Latitude

The numbering system used to indicate the location of parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance north and south of the equator.

Location

The position of anything on Earth's surface.

Longitude

The numbering system used to indicate the location of meridians drawn on a globe and measuring distance east and west of the prime meridian.

Map

A two-dimensional or flat representation of Earth's surface or a portion of it.

Mental Map

A representation of a portion of Earth's surface based on what an individual knows about a place.

Meridian

An arc drawn on a map between the North and South poles.

Parallel

A circle drawn around the globe parallel to the equator and at right angles to the meridians.

Pattern

The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area.

Physiological Density

The number of people per unit area of arable land.

Place

A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular characteristic.

Polder

Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area.

Possibilism

The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions, but people have the ability to adjust and choose a course of action from many alternatives.

Prime Meridian

The meridian, designated as 0 degrees longitude, that passes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England.

Principal Meridian

A north-south line designated in the Land Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the U.S.

Projection

The system used to transfer locations from Earth's surface to a flat map.

Region

An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features.

Relocation Diffusion

The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another.

Remote Sensing

The acquisition of data about Earth's surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or from other long-distance methods.

Resource

A substance in the environment that is useful to people, economically and technologically feasible to access, and socially acceptable to use.

Scale

Generally, the relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole.

Site

The physical character of a place.

Situation

The location of a place relative to other places.

Space

The physical gap or interval between two objects.

Space-Time Compression

The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place as a result of improved communications and transportation systems.

Stimulus Diffusion

The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected.

Sustainability

The use of Earth's renewable and nonrenewable natural resources in ways that do not constrain resource use in the future.

Toponym

The name given to a place on Earth.

Transnational Corporation

A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters are located.

Vernacular Region (Perceptual Region)

An area that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity.

Urbanization

The increase in the percentage of people who live in cities.

Push Factor

A factor that induces people to leave old residences.

Pull Factor

A factor that induces people to move to a new location.

Refugee

A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.

Brain Drain

Large-scale emigration by talented people.

Chain Migration

Migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously migrated there.

Guest Worker

A worker who migrates to developed countries in search of higher-paying jobs.

Internally Displaced Person (IDP)

A person who has been forced to migrate for similar political reasons as a refugee but has not migrated across an international border.

Migration Transition

A change in the migration pattern in a society that results from social and economic changes that also produce the demographic transition.

Circular Migration

The temporary movement of a migrant worker between home and host countries to seek employment.

Ethnic Enclave

A place with a high concentration of an ethnic group distinct from those in the surrounding area.

Acculturation

The process of changes in culture that result from the meeting of two groups, each of which retains distinct cultural features.

Assimilation

The process by which a group's cultural features are altered to resemble those of another more dominant group.

Syncretism

The blending of traits from two different cultures to form a new trait.

Multiculturalism

The coexistence of several cultures in one society, with the ideal of all cultures being valued and accepted.

Lingua Franca

A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages.

Creole Language

A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated.

Dialect

A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.

Isogloss

A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate.

Language Family

A collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history.

Language Branch

A collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago.

Language Group

A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary.

Universalizing Religion

A religion that attempts to appeal to all people, not just those living in a particular location.

Ethnic Religion

A religion that is identified with a particular ethnic group and that does not seek new converts.

Secularism

A doctrine that rejects religion and religious considerations.

Monotheism

The doctrine or belief in the existence of only one god.

Polytheism

The belief in or worship of more than one god.

Nation-State

A state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity that has been transformed into a nationality.

Balkanization

The process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities.

Colonialism

The effort by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles in another territory.

Imperialism

A policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force.

Devolution

The transfer of power from a central government to regional governments.

Gerrymandering

The process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the party in power.

Territoriality

The defense of a bounded physical space against encroachment by other individuals.

Sovereignty

The ability of a state to govern its territory free from control of its internal affairs by other states.

State

An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government with control over its internal and foreign affairs.

Nation

A group of people with a common cultural heritage and a sense of unity.

Multinational State

A state that contains two or more ethnic groups with traditions of self-determination.

Stateless Nation

An ethnic group or nation that does not possess its own state and is not the majority population in any nation-state.

Centripetal Force

An attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state.

Centrifugal Force

An attitude that tends to divide people and decrease support for a state.

Shatterbelt

A region caught between stronger colliding external cultural-political forces, under persistent stress, and often fragmented.

Demarcation

The physical marking of a boundary on the landscape.

Redistricting

The redrawing of electoral district boundaries after census changes.

Agribusiness

Commercial agriculture characterized by the integration of different steps in the food-processing industry.