Chapter 1 Ap Human Geography Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms from Chapter 1 of AP Human Geography, focusing on geographical concepts, maps, and cultural processes.

Absolute Location

Description of the position of a place in a way that never changes such as geographical coordinates.

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 group.

Cartogram

A map in which the size of an area is proportional to the value of the variable.

Choropleth Map

A map in which areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the variable.

Climate

The long-term average weather condition at a particular location.

Concentration

The extent of a feature's spread over a given area

Connection

Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space.

Conservation

The sustainable management of a natural resources to meet human needs.

Contagious Diffusion

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

Cultural Landscape

The combination of cultural features such as religion, economics, agriculture, industry features and physical features such as climate and vegetation.

Culture

The body of material possessions, customary beliefs, and social-norms that together constitutes the distinct tradition of a group of people.

Density

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

Diffusion

The process by which a feature spreads from one place to another over time.

Distance Decay

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

Distribution

The arrangement of something across Earth's surface.

Dot Distribution

Depicts data as points and shows how those points are clustered together or spread out over an area.

Ecosystem

A group of living organisms and the abiotic spheres with which they interact.

Environmental Determinism

A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography that argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences. Geography was therefore the study of how the physical environment was caused by human activities.

Expansion Diffusion

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

Formal (uniform) Region

A region where everyone shares a characteristic.

Functional (nodal) Region

Starts at one point and spreads out and diminishes out.

Global information system (GIS)

Captures, Stores, queries, and displays the geographic data.

Global position system (GPS)

System that determines the precise position of something on Earth.

Globalization

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

Graduated Symbol Map

displays a graphic, such as a circle, multiple times that changes in size according to the value of the data.

Hearth

A place from which an innovation originates.

Hierarchical Diffusion

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

Isoline Map

Connects with lines all the places that have particular values.

Map Scale

The level of detail on a map.

Mashup

A map that overlays data from one source on top of a map provided by a mapping service.

Mental Map

A representation of a portion of Earth's surface based on what an individual knows about a place that contains personal impressions of what is in the place and where the place is located.

Pattern

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

Place

A specific point on Earth, distinguished by a particular characteristic.

Possibilism

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

Projection

The way a map gets projected onto a two-dimensional plane.

Region

An area of Earth defined by one or more distinctive characteristics.

Relocate Diffusion

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

Remote Sensing

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

Resource

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

Scale

The relationship between the proportion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole.

Site

Physical Character of a place: climate, weather, topography, soil, vegetation, latitude, longitude, elevation etc.

Situation

The relative location of a place 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.

Spatial Association

The relationship between the distribution of one feature and the distribution of another feature.

Stimulus Diffusion

The spread of an underlying principle.

Sustainability

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

Syncretism

The combining of elements of two groups into a new cultural feature.

Transnational Corporation

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

Uneven Development

The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of the economy.

Vernacular Region

A region that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity

Clustering

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Dispersal

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Qualitative Data

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Quantitative Data

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Time-Space Continuum

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Scale of Analysis

the level at which geographers examine spatial data (global, regional, national, or local), and changing the scale changes the patterns you see and the conclusions you can draw from the same data.