First Vocab Test- AP Human Geography

Globalization

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

Spatial

Spatial Association

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

Place

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

Scale

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

Space

The physical gap or interval between two objects.

Connection

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

Landscape

Contagious Diffusion

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

Relocation Diffusion

The spread of a feature or trend through

Possibilism

Cultural Landscape

An approach to geography that emphasizes the relationship among social and physical phenomena in a particular study area.

Sequent Occupance

Formal Region

An area in which most people share in one or more distinctive characteristic.

Functional Region/Nodal Region

An area organized around a node or focal point.

Perceptual Region/Vernacular Region

Culture

The body of customary beliefs, material traits, and social forms that together constitutes the distinct tradition of a group of people.

Hearth

A place from which an innovation originates.

Site

The physical character of a place.

Hierarchical Diffusion

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

Sustainability

The use of earths renewable and non-renewable natural resources in ways that do not constrain resource use in the future.

Situation

The location of a place relative to another place.

Assimilation

The process by which a groups cultural features are altered to resemble those of another group.

Acculturation

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

Cultural Diffusion

Distance Decay

The diminished importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from it’s origin.

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.

Cultural Barrier

Expansion Diffusion

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

Stimulus Diffusion

The spread of an underlying principle.

Environmental Determinism

A nineteenth and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography which 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 caused human activities.