AP Human Geography Notes

Absolute location:

The precise location of something usually expressed in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates or a specific street address



Relative location (situation): 

The location of something else in relation to something else

  • Situation is a useful way to indicate location

    • Finding an unfamiliar place: comparing a known location to an unfamiliar one

    • Understanding the importance of a place: many, location are important because they are accessible 



Place: a specific point on Earth, distinguished by a unique characteristic

  • Built environment: 

    • human-made surroundings including buildings, roadways, infrastructure, and public spaces

  • Cultural landscape: 

    • visible importance of human activity, reflecting religion, values, clothing, food, and traditions

  • Natural environment: 

    • physical and biological features such as weather patterns, climate, and topography



Toponym: the name given to a place on Earth

  • A toponym provides cultural evidence about the people who named the place



  • Toponyms reveal linguistic & religious origins, like Spanish saints’ names across the American Southwest or French names along the Mississippi



  • Layered toponyms from different cultural groups in one area are evidence of sequent occupancy, a characteristic of cultural landscapes



  • Renaming places, like Bombay becoming Mumbai, shows a shift in cultural or political power and connects to how identity shapes space



  • Informal toponyms like “the Bible Belt” define perceptual/vernacular regions, whose boundaries can be contested and/or overlapping



Types of Map Projection: 

Station 1: Mercator

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Developed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, this projection was designed specifically for marine navigation. Its primary advantage was the preservation of consistent direction.

On a Mercator map, a straight line drawn between two points represents a constant compass bearing (a rhumb line). This allowed sailors to plot a course across vast oceans with high precision. Additionally, the shapes of landmasses are distorted very little locally, making coastlines recognizable for explorers.



While the Mercator map is excellent for direction, its relative size is grossly distorted toward the poles. As you move away from the Equator, the map scale increases. This creates a visual bias where high-latitude places look significantly larger than they actually are in reality.

The Mercator Projection



Station 2: Gall-Peters 

Unlike the Mercator projection, the Gall-Peters is an equal-area projection. This means that if one landmass is twice as large as another in reality, it will appear twice as large on the map.​

The Equal-Area Solution

In 1973, Arno Peters introduced this projection to the public, claiming it was a more 'fair' representation of the world than the standard Mercator. Because the Gall-Peters projection does not distort relative size, it accurately depicts the massive scale of the Global South—specifically Africa, South America, and South Asia.

However, this accuracy in area comes at a significant cost: shape distortion. To maintain the correct size of landmasses on a rectangular grid, the map must stretch the continents vertically near the equator and squash them horizontally near the poles. This results in a 'stretched' or 'melting' appearance that many find visually jarring.

The Gall-Peters Projection






Station 3: Winkel Tripel​



In map-making, a compromise projection is one that does not perfectly preserve any single metric (like area or direction). Instead, it intentionally accepts small amounts of distortion in all areas to create a map that 'looks' more like a globe than a specialized projection does.



The Winkel Tripel projection was designed by Oswald Winkel in 1921. The name 'Tripel' (German for triple) refers to Winkel's goal of minimizing three types of distortion: area, direction, and distance.

Unlike the Mercator, which prioritizes direction, or the Gall-Peters, which prioritizes area, the Winkel Tripel is a mathematical middle ground. It uses curved lines for both latitude and longitude to mimic the spherical nature of the Earth. While it does not eliminate distortion—distortion still increases toward the poles—it manages to keep landmasses like Greenland and Australia closer to their true relative sizes than many other world maps.

The Winkel Tripel Projection




Station 4: Goode Homolosine 

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Interruption: Think of the Earth's surface like the skin of an orange. To lay it flat on a table, you must make cuts (interruptions) in the peel. The Goode Homolosine projection chooses to make these cuts through the oceans to keep the continents intact and accurately sized.



The Logic of the "Broken" Map

Developed in 1923 by J. Paul Goode, this projection is an equal-area map, meaning the sizes of landmasses are represented accurately relative to one another. Unlike the Mercator, Greenland and Africa appear in their true proportions.

Characteristics of the Goode Homolosine:

  • Interruption

  • Land Prominence

  • Meridian Distortion: On a globe, meridians (vertical lines) always form right angles with parallels. In this projection, that relationship is lost, causing the grid to look curved or broken.





The 'Interrupted' Goode Homolosine Projection





Relative Location (Situation):

The location of something in relation to something else

  • Situation is a useful way to indicate location

    • Finding an unfamiliar place: comparing a known location to an unfamiliar one

    • Understanding the importance of a place: many locations are important because they are accessible



Site: physical character of a place

  • Site characteristics: climate, water sources, topography soil, vegetation, latitude, and elevation

Situation: The relative location of a placed based on its external connections and surroundings

  • Situation characteristics: Relative location, etc.



Space: the physical gap or interval between two places

Space-Time Compression: the reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distance place as a result of improved communications and transportation systems

  • Is the world shrinking? NO! Relative distance “shrink” and we make places far away seem closer

  • Example:

    • 1817: freight shipment from Cincinnati to New York City took 52 days

    • 1850: canals and railroads cut that time in half

    • 1852: took 7 days

    • Today: by airplane (a few hours) and digital information (seconds or less)



Distance-Decay: the diminished importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin

  • The fraction of distance: when things are farther apart, they tend to be less well connected

  • Example: 

    • The weakening of a radio signal as it travels across space away from a radio tower - friction of distance causes the decay, or weakening, of the signal

  • Advances in transportation, communication, infrastructure have reduced the friction



Pattern:

  • It’s how things (cities, roads, etc.) are placed on Earth

  • Most states outside of the original 13 states have countries arranged in a grid pattern

  • Patterns make things and places easier to find

  • Pattern can be arranged in line or clustered patterns



Sustainability

Natural Resources

Land Use

Actions that provide immediate benefits while also preserving resources for future use



Example: 

  • Manufacturing biomass energy such as ethanol made from corn or sugar to power automobiles


Items produced in nature that can be used by humans



Natural resources can be renewable or non-renewable

  • Renewable resources include food crops and trees which can be replanted after harvesting

  • Non renewable resources include burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas which are finite in quantity and are known to have environmental consequences

Changing the Earth’s surface for a specific purpose:

  • Agricultural

  • Industrial/Commercial

  • Residential

  • Transportational

  • Recreational





Environmental Determinism

Possibilism

  • Developed in the ancient world (especially Greek philosophers) and was used as the foundation for Eurocentric views of the world and its people during the Ages of Colonialism and Imperialism.



  • Natural factors alone determine the cultural attributes of human societies.



  • Think “5 Too’s”: human settlements are not often located in places too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry or too mountainous.



  • Overly simplistic and discounts the role of humans in creating their own way of life

  • Developed in the early 20th century as a rebuttal to the often criticized theory of environmental determinism.



  • The natural environment is still a factor shaping our way of life, however humans have choices and can harness technologies to overcome environmental limitations.



  • Generally more accepted; celebrates the human spirit in adapting to the physical environment, even in places that might fall into one of the “5 Too” categories.






Scales vs. Scales of Analysis



Scale: the relationship of the size of a map to the amount of area it represents on Earth



Scale of analysis: the level at which the data is displayed on a map (global, national, regional, and local)

  • National: shows data for one or more countries

  • Local: shows data at a subnational level

    • Ex: the states within the U.S.

  • Global:

  • Regional:

  • World as a whole → Global

  • Continents / regions → Regional

  • Countries → National

  • States/cities/subnational areas → Local





Types of Regions:

  • Formal regions: those that are designed by official boundaries like cities, states, countries, countries. Usually clearly indicated and public known

  • Functional regions: defined by their connections

  • Perceptual/Vernacular regions: perceived regions like “The South”, “The Midwest”, or the “Middle East"

    • They have no formal boundaries but are understood in our “mental maps” of the world



Types of Maps:

  • Isoline - connect with lines all the places that have a particular value

  • Dot distribution - depict data as points and shows how those point are clustered together/spread out over an area

    • Each dot represent a predetermined number of observations with could be one or many

  • Choropleth - where recognisable areas are shaded or patterned in proportion to the measurement of the variable

    • For example: areas with darker colors may represent the highest range of data

  • Graduated symbol - displays symbols that change in size according to the value of the variable

    • Higher value typically represented by larger symbol

  • Cartogram - in which the size of a country or U.S. state is proportional to the value of a particular variable like amount of pop., rather to actual land area