geography exam 1 study guide

Define geography

Study of the spaces and places people create on the ground and in their mind and the way in which people use and shape their environments

Key questions in geography

Why and how do things come together in certain places to produce particular outcomes?

Why are certain things found in some places and not others?

How do characteristics of particular places shape what happens?

Geography three subdisciplines

Human, physical, techniques

What does human geography study?

Social phenomena

What does physical geography study?

Natural phenomena

What does geography techniques study?

Develop and use geographic information tools

What is spatial perspective?

Understanding change across space

Define place

Space but with meaning

The uniqueness of a location

Key characteristics of places

reflect difference/inequality

influence opportunities and constraints

are controlled

What does it mean to say places are produced lived and contested

They are created experienced and disagreed over

Space

Basic building block of geography

Traditionally thought of as a container where things occur

Has boundaries or measurable characteristics

Three types of space

Absolute relative cognitive

Absolute space

Physical extent of an area

Can be measured and bounded

Provides a standard framework for mapping and location features

Absolute space example

Latitude and longitude

UGA campus

Cognitive space

Emotion meaning or idea ideas about a space

How individuals and groups perceive and interpret space based on experiences, knowledge and backgrounds

Subjective

Cognitive space example

How students feel about UGA’s campus?

Meaning attached to UGA

Relative space

Relationships and interactions between different areas

Spatial patterns, interactions, and comparisons

Relative space example

Air transportation networks

Spread of cultural practices

Relationship between UGA’s campus and Athens

Why is the concept of place important/examples of why it matters

Structures the daily routines of economic and social life

Provide provides opportunities and constraints for long-term social well-being

Provide provides an arena for protesting, social norms, or political power

Provides settings for socialization and connection

Sense of place

Infuse, meaning and emotion into place by remembering important events or labeling a place with certain characteristics

Scale - map

Distance on map compared to distance on earth

Scale – spatial extent

Individual, family, neighborhood, city, state, watershed, region, world

Impacts how we interpret patterns and understand human and physical phenomenon

How is the question who emits the most greenhouse gases affected by the scale in which you ask it?

It changes dramatically based on if you ask locally nationally, regionally or globally

Offshoring

Moving entire company operations, like manufacturing plans, and assembly lines to another country

Why was geography important to Dr. Snow and the 1854 cholera outbreak?

It allowed him to see the spatial pattern of the outbreak

How is place making a social and political process?

Places are shaped by the people cultures, government and institutions that decide how spaces are used and represented

Cognitive Maps

Mental representation of spaces and places

General stages through which we make cognitive maps

Information – environmental messages, and senses

Perception – brain and personality

Cognition – culture

Recall – transformed cognitive image

How do cognitive maps reflect social differences in the Los Angeles example?

Residents of different communities remembered different landmarks

Formal region

Has a shared cultural or physical trait

Functional region

Shares a common purpose – economic political, social

Typically have nodes or places that function as central connecting points

Perceptual region

Intellectual constructs based on accumulated knowledge of people, places and things

Helps us understand the nature and distribution of phenomena

Demography

The study of population trends

Relies on statistics

Dependent on scale

Population

Total number of individuals in a specific area, species or group

US census

Questionnaire Conducted every 10 years

Goal is to count every person in the country

Collects information on race/ethnicity age sex and homeownership status

Fertility/mortality

Life/death

Migration

Purposeful movement of people from home to a new location with intent to stay

What is current world population?

Over 8 billion

Why is demography important?

Answers how populations are changing where they are changing and why they are changing

What types of information do demographers collect and analyze?

Size

Composition/race, ethnicity and age

Changes through fertility, mortality, and migration

Example reasons why you would conduct a demographic analysis

Insights into societal trends

Resource allocation

Policy making

Forecast population changes and impact on healthcare, education, and economics

Population density

Number of people per unit area of land

Also known as arithmetic population density

Assumes equal distribution of people across land

Must consider scale

Population distribution

Description of the spatial distribution of people

Where do large numbers of people live closely together – clustering

Where do few people live – dispersed

Population density does not consider places where

People don’t live

Parts of Alaska, sparseness of Western US, deserts

Population distribution physical factors

Climate landforms altitude soils

Population distribution human factors

Economics politics history

population composition

Structure of a population in terms of age sex race/ethnicity

Includes other properties such as marital status and education

Why does the US conduct a census?

To determine number of seats, each state has in the US House of Representatives

Create voting district boundaries

Determines how federal funding is allocated

What information is collected on the US census?

Race/ethnicity age sex homeownership status

How and why the categories for race have changed on the census over the years

Americans are increasingly multiracial

Who is overcount on the census?

Non-Hispanic white individuals

Who is undercounted on the census?

Black individuals, Hispanic, Native Americans

Hard to count population

Locate, contact, persuade, interview

Hard to count populations – locate

Homes not listed on census bureaus list of addresses

People who wanted to remain hidden

Hard to count population populations – contact

Highly mobile

Unhoused populations

Gated communities

Heart count populations – persuade

Suspicious of government

Low levels of civic engagement

Hard to count population – interview

Language barriers

Low literacy

Health issues

Technology barriers

What is the American community survey and why is it conducted?

More timely data was needed

Used to estimate the characteristics of the broader US – includes more questions than the census

Where do you find census data?

US census bureau

Vital records

Birth death marriage

Crude birth rate

Number of live births per year per thousand people

Crude death rate

Number of deaths per year per thousand people

Natural increase

Crude birth rate is greater than crude death rate

Total fertility rate

Average number of children born to those who can bear children that are within childbearing age – 15 to 49

Where is total fertility rate higher and blower

Higher in Africa and lower and more developed countries

Why is it important to be careful about saying there are too many people and what did Malthus say about this?

Population problems are more complicated than simply the number of people

He argued population grows faster than the resources needed to sustain them

Infant mortality rate, and where is it higher and lower

Probability of child, dying before reaching the age of one

High in Africa, Mississippi, and Arizona

Low in developed countries

Child, mortality rate

Probability of child, dying before reaching the age of five

Life expectancy

Average number of years a person is expected to live

Japan has the highest

Demographic transition model

There are trends we have seen in population growth overtime

Stage one of demographic transition model

Low growth

High birth rates, high death rate rates

Demographic transition model stage two

High growth

High birth rate rates, rapidly declining, death rate rates

Came after improve improvements in sanitation food, healthcare and agriculture during industrial revolution

Demographic transition model stage three

Moderate growth

Rapidly, declining birth rates, declining death rates

Low natural increase rate

Came with new opportunities for women, lower infant/child mortality rates

Demographic transition model stage four

Low growth

Low birth rates, low death rate rates

Came with increased access to contraceptives

Demographic transition model stage five

Negative growth

Some demographers predict that the world will reach zero population growth within 50 years

Would result in a stationary population level

Mobility

The ability to move from one place to another

Migration – international

Across countries

India to South America and Africa

Migration – internal

Within the same country

The great migration of African-Americans from the south to the north east and California

Migration – voluntary

Temporary labor, migration, economic strategy

Guest workers, migrant or seasonal farm workers

Migration – amenity

Move for cultural, environmental or social benefits

Remote, tech worker, retirees, moving for a school district

Migration – forces

Violence war corruption, famine, environmental disaster

Can be internal or international

Enslaved Africans to South America

Relocation diffusion

Spread of an idea or innovation from its hearth by the act of people moving and taking the idea or innovation with them

Immigration

Moving to a particular place

Emigration

Moving from a particular place

Net migration

Difference between immigration and emigration

The three major migration waves in the US

Mexican migration to Southwest US

The great migration of African-Americans moving from south to north and west

South was origin for great migration

Pull factors

Things that attract you to a place

Jobs, environmental amenities, politics, culture, affordability, family

Push factors

Events or conditions that encourage an individual to move away from a location

Current living conditions,War, Religious or political persecution, extreme economic distress, environmental conditions

Internally displaced person

People who must leave their homes, but remain in their own countries

Refugee

Migrants, fleeing political persecution, and violence in their home country

Globalization

The increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world through common processes of economic, environmental, political, and cultural change

Hearth areas

Geographic settings where new practices have developed in from which they have spread

Colonialism

Establishment and maintenance of political and legal domination by a state over a separate society

Settler colonialism

Settlers move to and stay in a colony

Neo colonialism

Economic and political strategies by which powerful states in court economies, indirectly maintain or extend their influence over other areas and people

Developed versus developing

Higher income and infrastructure versus lower income, less infrastructure

How does a morning cup of coffee reflect an interconnected but differentiated world

Your coffee connects multiple countries and economies showing how the world is interconnected. All the different roles and benefits of the people involved show that the world is different.

Hearth areas locations around 9000 to 7000 BC

Middle East – fertile Crescent, Tigris and Euphrates river

South Asia – Ganges and Indus river

China – yellow river

Mesoamerica – Mexico and Andes

Heart areas, social effects

Population – higher density, rise and permanent settlements, better food security

Specialization – more non-agricultural activities, art, weapons, religion, education

Social organization – new social systems for Organization, rights to land and resources, organizing patterns of land use

Economies – increased connections between communities, larger distances, specialization in particular product products

Heart areas key features

Nomadic Hunter gathering to settled agriculture

Reciprocal society – make and share things among a group

Transition was enabled by several technology, such as slash and burn agriculture, domestication of animals, like sheep and cattle, advances in food storage and cooking

involve more complicated system of social organization – specialization