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AP Human Geography - Comprehensive Notes

Geography – Nature & Perspectives

Sequent Occupance: The concept that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape. It highlights the interaction between humans and their environment.

Cultural Landscape: The modification of a natural landscape by a cultural group, reflecting human interaction with nature.

Arithmetic Density: The total number of people divided by the total land area. This is a basic measure of population density:

Total Population

Total Land Area

Total Land Area

Total Population

​

\frac{\text{Total Population}}{\text{Total Land Area}}.

Physiological Density: The number of people per unit of area of arable land. This indicates the pressure on agricultural land:

Total Population

Arable Land Area

Arable Land Area

Total Population

​

\frac{\text{Total Population}}{\text{Arable Land Area}}.

Hearth: The region of origin of innovative ideas. It is related to the concept of diffusion, where ideas spread from one area to another.

Diffusion: The process by which a feature or trend spreads from one place to another over time.

Relocation Diffusion: The spread of an idea through the physical movement of people from one place to another (e.g., spread of AIDS from New York, California, and Florida).

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 (e.g., hip-hop/rap music).

Contagious Diffusion: The rapid, widespread diffusion of a characteristic throughout the population (e.g., ideas placed on the internet).

Stimulus Diffusion: The spread of an underlying principle, even though a characteristic itself apparently fails to diffuse (e.g., PC & Apple competition).

Absolute Distance: Exact measurement of the physical space between two places.

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 arguing that physical environment caused human activities. It posited that human geographers could find general laws 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 (e.g., "My house is west of 394").

Site: The physical character of a place, including what is found at the location and why it is significant.

Situation: The location of a place relative to other places.

Space, Scale, and Regions

Space-Time Compression: The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place due to improved communications and transportation.

Friction of Distance: The concept that distance requires effort, money, and energy to overcome, leading to more spatial interactions over shorter distances.

Distance Decay: The diminishing importance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin. Interaction decreases as distance increases, although electronic devices can mitigate this effect.

Networks: Defined by Manuel Castells as a set of interconnected nodes without a center.

Connectivity: The relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space, facilitated by various means.

Accessibility: The degree of ease with which it is possible to reach certain locations from other locations, varying from place to place.

Space: The physical gap or interval between two objects.

Spatial Distribution: Physical location of geographic phenomena across space.

Size: Estimation or determination of extent.

Scale: Representation of a real-world phenomenon at a certain level of reduction or generalization. In cartography, it is the ratio of map distance to ground distance.

Formal Region: Also known as a uniform or homogenous region, it is an area within which everyone shares in common one or more distinctive characteristics. The shared feature could be a cultural value or an environmental climate.

Functional Region: Also known as a nodal region, it is an area organized around a node or focal point. The characteristic chosen diminishes in importance outward and is tied to the central point by transportation, communication, or economic systems.

Vernacular Region: Also known as a perceptual region, it is a place that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity, emerging from people's informal sense of place, often identified using a mental map.

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

Natural Landscape: (xxx)

Pattern: A common property of distribution representing the geometric arrangement of objects in space, which can be geometric or irregular.

Place Name: Often referred to as a place's toponym, which is the name given to a place on Earth.

Population – Migration & Dispersion

Age Distribution: Represented by a population pyramid, showing the number of males and females in a population in five-year age groups. It indicates important characteristics of a country, such as a high guest worker population, the impact of war, or deadly diseases.

Carry Capacity: The population level that can be supported, given the available resources like food, habitat, and water.

Cohort: Population of various age categories in age-sex population pyramids, indicating a country's stage in the demographic transition model.

Demographic Equation: The formula that calculates population change, found by subtracting deaths from births and adding or subtracting net migration:

Population Change

=

(

Births