AP Human Geography Vocabulary

Flashcards for AP Human Geography review.

Sequent occupance

The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, each contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape.

Cultural landscape

Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.

Arithmetic density

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

Physiological density

The number of people per unit of area of arable land.

Hearth

The region from which innovative ideas originate.

Diffusion

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

Relocation diffusion

The spread of an idea through physical movement of people from one place to another.

Expansion diffusion

The spread of a feature from one place to another in a snowballing process.

Hierarchical diffusion

The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places.

Contagious diffusion

The rapid, widespread diffusion of a characteristic throughout the population.

Stimulus diffusion

The spread of an underlying principle, even though a characteristic itself apparently fails to diffuse.

Absolute distance

Exact measurement of the physical space between two places.

Friction of Distance

The idea that distance usually requires some amount of effort, money, and/or energy to overcome, leading to more interactions over shorter distances.

Distance Decay

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

Networks

A set of interconnected nodes without a center.

Connectivity

The relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space.

Accessibility

The degree of ease with which it is possible to reach certain locations from other locations.

Space

The physical gap or interval between two objects.

Spatial Distribution

Physical location of geographic phenomena across space.

Relative distance

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.

Absolute location

Position on Earth’s surface using the coordinate system of longitude and latitude.

Relative location

Position on Earth’s surface relative to other features.

Site

The physical character of a place; what is found at the location and why it is significant.

Situation

The location of a place relative to other places.

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.

Size

The estimation or determination of extent.

Scale

Representation of a real-world phenomenon at a certain level of reduction or generalization.

Formal Region

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

Functional Region

Area organized around a node or focal point.

Vernacular Region

A place that people believe exists as a part of their cultural identity.

Possibilism

The physical environment may limit some human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to their environment.

Pattern

A common property of distribution, which is the geometric arrangement of objects in space.

Place Name

The name given to a place on Earth.

Age Distribution

Two back-to-back bar graphs, one showing the number of males and one showing females in a particular population in five-year age groups.

Carry capacity

The population level that can be supported, given the quantity of food, habitat, water and other life infrastructure present.

Cohort

Population of various age categories in an age-sex population pyramids.

Demographic equation

The formula that calculates population change (births minus deaths plus/minus net migration).

Demographic momentum

The tendency for growing population to continue growing after a fertility decline because of their young age distribution.

Demographic Transition model

A model that has 5 steps. Stage 1 is low growth, Stage 2 is High Growth, Stage 3 is Moderate Growth, and Stage 4 is Low Growth and Stage 5 although not officially a stage is a possible stage that includes zero or negative population group.

Dependency ratio

The number of people who are too young or too old to work, compared to the number of people in their productive years.

Disease diffusion

There are two types, contagious and hierarchical. Hierarchical is along high density areas that spread from urban to rural areas. Contagious is spread through the density of people.

Doubling time

The number of years needed to double a population, assuming a constant rate of natural increase.

Ecumene

The proportion of earths surface occupied by permanent human settlement.

Epidemiological transition model

A distinctive cause of death in each stage of the demographic transition.

Infant mortality rate

The annual number of deaths of infants under one year of age, compared with total live births.

J-curve

When the projection population show exponential growth; sometimes shape as a j-curve.

Maladaption

This is an adaptation that has become less helpful than harmful.

Malthus, Thomas

Was one of the first to argue that the worlds rate of population increase was far outrunning the development of food population.

Mortality

The infant mortality rate and life expectancy.

Natality

This is the ratio of live births in an area to the population of that area; it is expressed as number of birth in year to every 1000 people alive in the society.

Neo-malthusian

theory that builds upon Malthus’ thoughts on overpopulation. Takes into count two factors that Malthus did not: population growth in LDC’s, and outstripping of resources other than food.

Overpopulation

relationship between the number of people on Earth, and the availability of resources.

Population densities

the frequency with which something occurs in space is density.

Population explosion

a sudden increase or burst in the population in either a certain geographical area or worldwide.

Population projection

predicts the future population of an area or the world.

Population pyramid

population displayed by age and gender on a bar graph.

Rate of natural increase

is the percentage by which a population grows in a year.

S-curve

traces the cyclical movement upwards and downwards in a graph.

Sex ratio

the number of males per hundred females in the population.

Standard of living

refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people and the way they are distributed within a population

it is the opposition to overpopulation and refers to a sharp drop or decrease in a region’s population.

Underpopulation

Zero population growth

when the crude birth rate equals the crude death rate and the natural increase rate approaches zero.

Activity space

space allotted for a certain industry or activity.

Chain migration

when one family member migrates to a new country and the rest of the family follows shortly after.

Distance Decay-

When contact between two groups diminishes because of the distance between them.

Forced Migration

People removed from there countries and forced to live in other countries because of war, natural disaster, and government.

Internal Migration

Permanent movement within a particular country.

Refugee

People forced to migrate from their home country and cannot return for fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in social group, or political opinion.

Acculturation

Process of adopting only certain customs that will be to their advantage

Assimilation

Process of less dominant cultures losing their culture to a more dominant culture

Cultural Ecology

The geographic study of human environmental relationships

Cultural Identity

Ones belief in belonging to a group or certain cultural aspect

Cultural Landscape

The visible imprint of human activity on the landscape

Culture

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

Expansion-Diffusion

The spread of one feature from one place to another in a snowballing process

Maladaptive diffusion

Diffusion of a process with negative side effects or What works well in one region may not in another

Sequence Occupancy

Refers to such cultural succession and its lasting imprint proposed by Derwent Whittlesey

Religion

the faithfulness to codified beliefs and rituals that generally involve a faith in a spiritual nature.

Animism

Belief that objects, such as plants and stones, or natural events, like thunderstorms and earthquakes, have a discrete spirit and life

Cargo Cult Pilgrimage

Cargo Cult’s believe western goods have been traded to them by ancestral spirits.

Jainism

religion and philosophy originating in ancient India.

Judaism

It is the religion of ancient Hebrews, said to be one of the first monotheistic faiths.

Landscapes of the dead

The certain areas where people have commonly been buried

Monotheism/polytheism

Monotheism this is the belief in one god and polytheism is the belief in many gods.

Muslim pilgrimage

If physically and financially able, a Muslim makes a pilgrimage to Makkah. (Mecca)

Proselytic Religion

Referred to as a Universalizing Religion, which is an attempt to be global, to appeal to all people, wherever they may live in the world, not just to those of one culture or location

Reincarnation

The idea of reincarnation is that after this life you will come back in another life either as a plant, animal, or a human life.

Religious toponym

This refers to the origin and meaning of the names of religions.

Sacred space

Sacred space is the place where religious figures and congregations meet to perform religious ceremonies.

Secularism

This is the belief that humans should be based on facts and not religious beliefs.

Shamanism

This is the range of traditional beliefs and practices that claim the ability to cure, heal, and cause pain to people.

Shintoism

said to be the way of god. It is the native religion of Japan and was once its state religion.

Annexation

Incorporation of a territory into another geo-political entity.

Apartheid

Afrikaans for apartness, it was the segregation of blacks in South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

Balkanization

The political term used when referring to the fragmentation or breakup of a region or country into smaller regions or countries.

Exclusionary border landscape

Meant to keep people out

Boundary disputes

The conflicts over the location, size, and extent of borders between nations.

Buffer state

A country lying between two more powerful countries that are hostile to each other