AP Human Geography Unit 1-7 (Terms, Definitions, & Notes)

Anthropogenic

  • Caused or produced by humans.

Data

  • Qualitative: Informal or relative characteristics (culture, language, religion).
  • Quantitative: Numerical data (population, political, economic).

Diffusion

  • The process of spreading a feature or trend.
  • Expansion Diffusion:
    • Hierarchical: Spread from authority figures (hip-hop/rap music).
    • Contagious: Rapid, widespread diffusion (ideas on the internet).
    • Stimulus: Spread of an underlying principle (PC vs. Apple).
  • Relocation Diffusion: Spread through physical movement of people (spread of AIDS).
    • Migrant: Weakens at the source as it moves (Spanish Flu).

Distance

  • Absolute: Exact measurement of space.
  • Relative: Measurement of time and cost to travel.

Environmental Perception

  • A person’s idea or image of a place (mental map).

Five Themes of Geography (GENIP)

  • Location: Position of people and things.
  • Human/Environmental Interaction: Relationship between humans and the environment.
  • Region: Area with a degree of homogeneity.
  • Place: Uniqueness of a location.
  • Movement: Mobility of people, goods and ideas.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

  • Computer hardware and software for spatial data.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

  • Satellite-based system for absolute location.

Holocene Epoch

  • Current interglaciation period.

Human Adaptation

  • Environmental Determinism: Physical environment causes human activities.
  • Possibilism: People can adjust to their environment.
  • Cultural Ecology: Study of human-environmental relationships.

Location

  • Absolute: Position using longitude and latitude.
  • Relative: Position relative to other features.

Region

  • Formal: An area with shared characteristics (ex Tennessee).
  • Functional: Area organized around a node (ex: zone of a high school).
  • Perceptual: A place people believe exists (ex: Bible belt).

Maps

  • Projections: Distortion when projecting Earth onto a 2D map.
    • Azimuthal: Preserves directions from a central point.
    • Mercator: Straight meridians and parallels, distorted at poles.
    • Peters: Equal-area cylindrical.
    • Robinson: Balances distortion of shape, area, scale, and distance.
    • Goode’s Homolosine: Equal-area, "orange peel map".
  • Types:
    • Reference: Shows general spatial properties.
    • Thematic: Reflects a particular theme.
      • Cartogram: Area substituted by thematic variable (e.g., GDP).
      • Choropleth: Areas shaded by statistical variable (e.g., population density).
      • Dot: One dot represents a number of phenomena (e.g., population).
      • Proportional Symbol: Symbol size varies with attribute value (e.g., city population).
      • Preference: Map of progressively desirable options.
      • Topographical: Relief representation using contour lines.
  • Map Terms:
    • Parallel: Line of latitude (Equator, tropics, circles).
    • Meridian: Line of longitude (Prime Meridian, International Date Line).

Pattison’s Four Traditions

  • Earth-science: physical geography
  • Locational: spatial tradition
  • Man-land: human/environmental interaction
  • Area-studies: regional geography

Remote Sensing

  • Data collection via instruments distant from the study area.

Scale

  • Territorial extent; representation at a level of reduction.

Sequent Occupancy

  • Successive societies leave cultural imprints (ex Temple Mount in Jerusalem).

Site

  • Physical character of a place

Situation

  • Location relative to other places.

Carrying Capacity

  • Population level that can be supported.

Census Tract

  • Areal unit approximating a neighborhood

Cohort

  • Population age categories in a population pyramid.
    • Baby Boom: US births 1946-1964.
    • Baby Bust: US fertility rate drop 1960s-1970s.
    • Generation X: US births 1965-1980.
    • Generation Y (Millennials): US births 1980-1997.
    • Generation Z: US births 1997-2015.

Crude Birth Rate (CBR)

  • Live births per year per 1,000 people.

Crude Death Rate (CDR)

  • Deaths per year per 1,000 people.

Demography

  • Geographic study of population.
    • Overpopulation: Exceeds environmental capacity.
    • Underpopulation: Insufficient population to support the economy.
    • Stationary Population Level (SPL): CBR = CDR (zero population growth).

Demographic Equation

  • Births - Deaths + Net Migration.

Demographic Transition Model

  • Illustrates development stages of countries.
    • Stage 1: Low Growth (high birth and death rates).
    • Stage 2: High Growth (high birth, declining death rates).
    • Stage 3: Moderate Growth (declining birth, low death rates).
    • Stage 4: Low Growth (low birth and death rates).
    • Stage 5: Negative Growth (death rates exceed birth rates).

Demographic Momentum

  • Continued population growth after fertility decline.

Demographic Trap

  • Stuck in stage 2 with high birth rates.

Dependency Ratio

  • Too young or old to work vs. productive years.

Distribution

  • Arrangement across Earth’s surface.

Doubling Time

  • Years to double population (70 / RNI).

Ecumene

  • Proportion of earth occupied by humans.

Life Expectancy

  • Average years a person is expected to live.

Major Population Concentrations

  • East Asia: China, Japan, Koreas.
  • South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka.
  • Europe: Britain to Russia.
  • North America: East-central US and SE Canada.

Mortality

*Infant Mortality Rate (IMR):

  • Reflects a country's health care system & economic devlopment. IMR=\frac{deaths}{live births}*1000
    *Child Mortality Rate (CMR):
  • Expressed as the annual number of deaths of children b/w 1 and 5. CMR=\frac{deaths}{live births}*1000
    Maternal Mortality Rate: Annual number of deaths of women during childbirth. MMR= \frac{deaths}{1,000\; women}

Natural Increase

  • Percentage population grows in a year (CBR-CDR).

Population Growth

  • Linear: Constant amount per unit time.
  • Exponential: Doubles each population.

Population Structure

*Population Structure can be seen as a population pyramid that displays males and females in 5 year age increments showing population characteristics. This is important because from the pyramid's age distribution notable trends in a country can be observed (war/deadly disease.

Population Densities

  • Arithmetic: People / Land Area.
  • Physiological: People /arable land.
    *Agricultural: Farmers / area of farmland. Indicator for a country’s agricultural efficiency.

Population Policies

  • Expansive: Encourage large families.
  • Restrictive: Reduce natural increase.
  • Eugenic: Favor one racial sector.

Population Theorists

  • Thomas Malthus: Food production (linear), reproduction (geometric).
    • Neo-Malthusianism: Considers LDC growth and resource depletion.
  • Esther Boserup: Growth stimulates agricultural intensification.
  • Karl Marx: Lack of food due to unequal distribution.

Sustainability

Providing best outcome for human and natural environment both now and in the future.

Total Fertility Rate (TFR)

Average total number of children born to a women in her childbearing year. TFR = \frac{number \;of \;children}{woman}

Migration

*Brain Drain: Emigration of intellectually gifted to a more-developed country.
*Catalysts of Migration: Economic conditions, political conditions, ect.
*Commute: Traveling between residence and work.
Distance Decay: Phenomenon where interaction with cultures decreases with distance from it's origins. Distance = more money/effort.
The Gravity Model: Predicts optimal service location is directly related to the number of people in the area, and inversely related to the distance people must take to access the service.
Intervening Opportunity: The presence of a nearer opportunity that diminishes the the need to travel to opportunities that are further away.
Laws of Migration: Most migration is due to economic causes, migration increases w/ economic growth, short distance, ect.. (Ravenstein)

Migration:

Physical movement by humans from one area to another.
*Chain Migration: Individuals following the path of migration of friends/family who have already migrated.

Voluntary vs Involuntary Migration:

  • Voluntary Migration: Migrations where people relocate based on perceived opportunity.
  • Forced Migration: People removed from their countries and forced to live in other countries because of war, natural disaster, and government. (Atlantic Slave Trade, Jewish Diaspora)
    Migration Patterns: emigration = out of a region; immigration = into a region.
    Migrant: people who move from one location to another.
    Push Factors: factors that incentivize people to leave a place.
    Pull Factors: attractions that draw migrants to a place.
    Quota: numerical limits on immigration or emigration

The 3 Classes of Movement.

Cyclic Movement: Movement that repeats annually or seasonally (action space).
Periodic Movement: Happens periodically or temporarily (military service/college attendance).
Migratory Movement: a change in residence that is intended to be permenant.
Carl Sauer – defined cultural landscape, as an area fashioned from nature by a cultural group. A combination of cultural features such as language and religion; economic features such as agriculture and industry; and physical features such as climate and vegetation.
*Culture: The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people’s distinct tradition.
Culture Types: a single element of normal practice in a culture (e.g., turban).
Culture Complex: : a combination of related cultural traits (e.g., prevailing modes of dress; nationalism)
Culture Hearth: The region from which innovate ideas originate. Can be ancient: Fertile Crescent, Indus Valley, Nile River Delta. Or modern: Europe, North America, Japan (Industrial Revolution Beginning).

Cultural Landscape:

The visible imprint and fashioning of a natural landscape on a cultural group (built environment).
Cultural Modification:

  • Acculturation: process of adopting only certain customs that will be to their advantage
  • Transculturation: A near equal exchange of culture traits or customs.
  • Assimilation: Process of less dominant societies or people losing their cultural traits and distinctiveness to a more dominant culture..

Language

Languages: a set, combination of sounds, and symbol used for communication.
*Language Family: Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin.
*Language Subfamily: Group of languages with more commonality than a language family.
*Language Group: Set of languages with a relatively recent origin with common characteristics.
Dialect: Local or regional characteristics of a language.
Language Convergence: Collapsing of 2 languages due to spatial interaction.
Language Divergence: Language breaks into dialects due to lack of spatial interaction.
Language Reconstruction:
Sound Shift: slight change in a word across related languages from the present backward toward its origin (using backward reconstruction)
Deep reconstruction: Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that preceded it.
Language Replacement (Extinction): obliteration of an entire culture through war, disease, assimilation, or any combination of the three.
Modern linguistic mosaic - literacy, technology, political organization: three areas of innovation have shaped the location and nature of language in the modern world … literacy, technology (e.g., Gutenberg’s printing press), and political organization (e.g., nation-states that set up linguistic laws).

Lingua Franca: A common language that is used among people speaker different languages with a common trade.
-Pidgin: When part of 2 languages or more are mixed.
-Creole: A language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as a mother tough of a region or people.
Monolingual state: Country where only one language is primarily spoken
Multilingual state: Country where 2 more languages are spoken.
Official languages: In multilingual states, the language that is selected
Toponymy: The study of place names
-Preliterate Societies: A culture without any written languages.
-Standard Language: The variant of language a country’s intellect or politics elect seeks to promote as their norm.
Sacred Space: Place or space people infuse with religious meanings

Religions:

Faithfulness to codified beliefs and rituals that generally involve a faith in a spiritual nature.
*Universalizing Religions:(Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). Seeks convert.

  • Ethnic Religions:(Hinduism, Folk, Mormonism). More concentrated distribution.
    *Syncretic Religions:A religion where they are combined into a new religion.
    Monotheims/Polytheism: Mono is belief in one god while poly is belief in many gods.
    Secularism: the belief that humans should base their reality on facts, not religious beliefs; this has caused conflict in many different areas including politics.
    Interfaith Boundaries: Boundaries b/w world's major faiths. For case studies … Nigeria, Sudan, Kashmir, Armenia/Azerbaijan, and Yugoslavia … (see the religion reading guide)
    Intrafaith Boundaries: describes the boundaries within a major religion (e.g., Belgium; Switzerland; Northern Ireland is mostly Protestant, whereas the rest of Ireland is mostly Catholic)
    Cultural Types:
    Folk Culture: Cultural traits such as dread modes, dwellings, customs.
    Local Cultures: People who see themselves as part of a community who work to preserve their traits and customs to be unique.
    Popular Cultures: (mass culture) - cultural traits.
    Gender Gap: gender refers to social differences between men and women
    Xenophobia: A fear or dislike of foreigners or people significantly different than oneself.
    Ethnocentrism: Is judging another culture in the values and standards of one's own culture grooup.
    Gendered Space: an area of region designed for one gender or another.
    Impact of Globalization:(Commercialization, Commodification, Global-local continuum, Glocalization, Homogenization, Regionalization, Placelessness, Noe-localism, Reterritorialization).
    Invasion and Succession:
    *Annexation: Incorporation of a territory into another geo- political entity.
    *Apartheid: Separating the blacks, color, and Asia in South Africa.
    *Balkanization: The break up of a country in a area.
    Boundary: Vertical plane between states that cuts through the rocks below, and the airspace above (even outer space).
    Centrifugal foreces: forces that divides a state.
    Centripetal force: forces that unifiy a state.
    Cold War era: Between the US and USSR between WWI towards the end of 1991.
    First World:US and Europe after cold war
    Second world: USSR/China after cold war
    Thrid world: Africa/Asia/Latin America after cold war.
    Colonialism: Attempt try country to install political and economic control and of those principles.
    Core-Preipher model: is at higher levels of development, the capacity at innovation and a
    convergence of trade flows and the more poor countries less development.
    Devolution: Process in which regions demand and gain political strength.
    Domino Theory: Region would come under communist.
    Electoral geography: the process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the political party in power.
    Enclave: Small and relatively homogeneous group or region surrounded by a larger and different group or region,.
    Frontier: an area where borders are shifting and weak, and where peoples of different cultures or nationalities meet and lay claim to the land.
    Microstate -Is a terriort that is both smart population and area
    Nation: Group of people sharing similar characteristics.
    Nation-State: Population has a substantial degree of cultural homegeneity adn unity.
    Territorial morphology: The study is states shapes and the effects.
    The UN Low of the See: Laws making states rights responsiblities concerning the Earth's waters.
    Liberal model - States all have different economical ways
    Structuralist Model - Economic Disparies that is the result if economic, political and relationships between two reasons control and limit the possibilities of less of areas (imperalism has caused colonies to be dependent and helps sustain the prosperity of dominant areas and poverty of other reasons)
    Time-Space Convergence: Refers to greatly excellated movment of items and ideas duing the 20th century made possible through modern technlogy.
    Informal Economy: Not monitorted by govenrment such as black market.
    Agricultural landscape Effect on much yield the farmers get from crops
    Survey System: long lots (french) metes and bounds (engish.) rectangular (public land survey) US
    Organic ARgiculture: no fertlizer
    Industrial Revolution
    Core- periphery model - is at higher levels of development, the capacity at innovation and a
    convergence of trade flows and the more poor countries less development
    Factors of Idustry : market, personal prefence, the product it self etc.
    Mass prodection - requies much labro and capital.
    Foreign direct investment
    Renewable, replaced continuous in a human lifespan
    Enviromental Geography the aspect interactions between humans and the natural wolrd