AP HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
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339 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 Acid deposition | sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides, emitted by burning fossil fuels, enter the atmosphere - where they combine with oxygen and water to form sulfuric acid and nitric acid - and return to Earth's surface |
| Acid precipitation | Conversion of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides to acids that return to Earth as rain, snow, or fog |
| Active solar energy systems | Solar energy system that collects energy through the use of mechanical devices like photovoltaic cells or flat-plate collectors |
| Agribusiness | Commercial agriculture characterized by integration of different steps in the food-processing industry, usually through ownership by large corporations. |
| Agricultural density | The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture. |
| Agricultural revolution | The time when human beings first domesticated plants and animals and no longer relied entirely on hunting and gathering |
| Agriculture | The deliberate effort to modify a portion of Earth's surface through the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock for sustenance or economic gain. |
| Air pollution | Concentration of trace substances, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and solid particulates, at a greater level than occurs in average aIr. |
| Animate power | Power supplied by people or animals. |
| Animism | Belief that objects, such as plants and stones, or natural events, like thunderstorms and earthquakes, have a discrete spirit and conscious life. |
| Annexation | Legally adding land area to a city in the United States. |
| Apartheid | Laws (no longer in effect) in South Africa that physically separated different races into different geographic areas. |
| Arithmetic density | The total number of people divided by the total land area. |
| Autonomous religion | A religion that does not have a central authority but shares ideas and cooperates informally. |
| Balance of power | Condition of roughly equal strength between opposing countries or alliances of countries. |
| Balkanization | Process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities |
| Balkanized | A small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states because it was inhabited by many ethnicities with complex, long-standing antagonisms toward each other. |
| Base Line | An east-west line designated under the Land Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the United States. |
| Basic industries | Industries that sell their products or services primarily to consumers outside the settlement. |
| Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) | Amount of oxygen required by aquatic bacteria to decompose a given load of organic waste; a measure of water pollution |
| Biodiversity | the number of different species in a given area |
| Biomass fuel | Fuel that derives from plant material and animal waste |
| Blockbusting | A process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices because of fear that persons of color will soon move into the neighborhood |
| Boundary | Invisible line that marks the extent of a state's territory |
| Brain drain | Large-scale emigration by talented people. |
| Branch (of religion) | A large and fundamental division within a religion |
| Break-of-bulk point | A location where transfer is possible from one mode of transportation to another. |
| Breeder reactor | A nuclear power plant that creates its own fuel from plutonium |
| British Received Pronunciation (BPR) | The dialect of English associated with upper-class Britons living in the London area and now considered standard in the United Kingdom |
| Bulk-gaining industry | An industry in which the final product weighs more or comprises a greater volume than the inputs |
| Bulk-reducing industry | An industry in which the final product weights less or comprises a lower volume than the inputs |
| Business services | Services that primarily meet the needs of other businesses, including professional, financial, and transportation services. |
| Cartography | The science of making maps |
| Caste | the class of distinct hereditary order into which a Hindu is assigned according to religious law |
| Census | A complete enumeration of a population |
| Census tract | an area delineated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census for which statistics are published; in urbanized areas, census tracts correspond roughly to neighborhoods |
| Central business district (CBD) | the area of a city where retail and office activities are clustered |
| Central place | A market center for the exchange of services by people attracted from the surrounding area |
| Central place theory | A theory that explains the distribution of services, based on the fact that settlements serve as centers of market areas for services; larger settlements are fewer and farther apart than smaller settlements and provide for a larger number of people who are willing to travel farther |
| centripetal force | An attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state |
| Cereal grain | A grass yielding grain for food |
| Chaff | Husks of grain separated from the seed by threshing |
| Chain migration | Migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously migrated there. |
| Cholorfluorocarbon (CFC) | a gas used as a solvent, a propellant in aerosols, a refrigerant, and in plastic foams and fire extinguishers |
| Circulation | short-term repetitive, or cyclic movements that recur on a regular basis. |
| City-state | A sovereign state comprising a city and its immediate hinterland |
| Clustered rural settlement | A rural settlement in which the houses and farm building of each family are situated close to each other and fields surround the settlement |
| Colonialism | Attempt by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles in another territory. |
| Colony | A territory that is legally tied to a sovereign state rather than completely independent. |
| Combine | A machine that reaps, threshes, and cleans grain while moving over a field |
| Commercial agriculture | Agriculture undertaken primarily to generate products for sale off the farm. |
| Compact state | A state in which the distance from the center to any boundary does not vary significantly. |
| Concentration | The spread of something over a given area |
| Concentric zone model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially arranged in a series of rings |
| Connections | Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space |
| Conservation | The sustainable use and management of natural resource, through consuming at a less rapid rate than it can be replaced. |
| Consumer services | Business that provide services primarily to individual consumers, including retail services and education, health and leisure services. |
| Contagious diffusion | The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population. |
| Cosmogony | A set of religious beliefs concerning the origin of the universe |
| Cottage industry | Manufacturing based in homes rather than in a factory, commonly found before the industrial revolution |
| Council of government | A cooperative agency consisting of representatives of local governments in a metropolitan area in the United States |
| Counterurbanization | Net migration from urban to rural areas in more developed countries. |
| Creole or creolized language | A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language and the indigenous language of the people being dominated |
| Crop | Grain or fruit gathered from a field as a harvest during a particular season |
| Crop rotation | The practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year, to avoid exhausting the soil |
| Crude birth rate (CBR) | The total number of live births in a year for every 1,000 people alive in society |
| Crude death rate (CBR) | The total number of deaths in a year for every 1,000 people alive in society |
| Cultural ecology | Geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships. |
| Cultural ecology | Geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships |
| Cultural landscape | Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group. |
| Culture | The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people's distinct tradition. |
| Custom | The frequent repetition of an act, to the extent that it becomes characteristic of the group of people performing the act |
| Demographic transition | The process of change in a society's population from a condition of high crude birth and death rates and low rate of natural increase to a condition of low crude birth and death rates, low rate of natural increase, and higher total population. |
| Demography | The scientific study of population characteristics |
| Denomination | A division of a branch that unites a number of local congregations in a single legal and administrative body |
| Density | The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area |
| Density gradient | The change in density in an urban area from the center to the periphery |
| Dependency ratio | The number of people under the age of 15 and over the age of 64, compared to the number of active in the labor force. |
| Desertification | Degradation of land, especially in semiarid areas, primarily because of human actions like excessive crop planting , animal grazing and tree cutting. |
| Development | A process of improvement in the material conditions of people through diffusion of knowledge and technology |
| Dialect | A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. |
| Diffusion | the process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time. |
| Diocese | The basic unit of geographic organization in the Roman Catholic Church |
| Dispersed rural settlement | A rural settlement pattern characterized by isolated farms rather than clustered villages |
| Distance decay | The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin. |
| Distribution | The arrangement of something across Earth's surface |
| Double cropping | Harvesting twice a year from the same field. |
| Doubling time | The number of years needed to double a population, assuming a constant rate of natural increase. |
| Ebonics | Dialect spoken by some African Americans. |
| Economic base | A community's collection of basic industries. |
| Ecumene | The portion of Earth's surface occupied by permanent human settlement. |
| Edge city | City that is located on the outskirts of larger cities and serves many of the same functions of urban areas, but in a sprawling, decentralized suburban environment. |
| Elongated state | A state with a long, narrow shape. |
| Emigration | migration from a location |
| Enclosure movement | The process of consolidating small landholdings into a smaller number of larger farms in England during the 18th century. |
| 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 caused human activities. |
| epidemiologic transition | Distinctive causes of death in each stage of the demographic transition. |
| Epidemiology | Branch of medical science concerned with the incidence, distribution, and control of diseases that affect large numbers of people. |
| Ethnic cleansing | Process in which more powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically homogeneous region |
| Ethnic religion | A religion with a relatively concentrated spatial distribution whose principles are likely to be based on the physical characteristics of the particular location in which its adherents are concentrated. |
| Ethnicity | Identity with a group of people that share distinct physical and mental traits as a product of common heredity and cultural traditions. |
| Expansion diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in a snowballing process |
| Extinct language | A language that was once used by people in daily activities but is no longer used |
| Fair trade | Alternative to international trade that emphasizes small businesses and worker owned and democratically run cooperatives and requires employers to pay workers fair wages, permit union organizing, and comply with minimum environmental and safety standards. |
| Federal state | An internal organization of a state that allocates most powers to units of local government. |
| Ferrous | Metals, including iron ore, that are utilized in the production of iron and steel. |
| Filtering | A process of change in the use of a house, from single-family owner occupancy to abandonment. |
| Fission | The splitting of an atomic nucleus to release energy |
| Floodplain | The area subject to flooding during a given number of years according to historical trends. |
| Folk culture | Culture traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups. |
| Forced migration | Permanent movement compelled usually by cultural factors. |
| Fordist production | Form of mass production in which each worker is assigned one specific task to perform repeatedly. |
| Foreign direct investment (FDI) | Investment made by a foreign company in the economy of another country |
| Formal region | (or uniform or homogeneous region) an area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics |
| Fossil fuel | Energy source formed from the residue of plants and animals buried millions of years ago. |
| Fragmented state | A state that includes several discontinuous pieces of territory. |
| Franglais | A term used by the French for English words that have entered the French language, a combination of franfais and anglai." the French words for "French" and "English," respectively. |
| Frontier | A zone separating two states in which neither state exercises political control. |
| Functional (or nodal) region | An area organized around a node or focal point. |
| Fundamentalism | Literal interpretation and strict adherence to basic principles of a religion (or a religious branch, denomination, or sect). |
| Fusion | Creation of energy by joining the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms to form helium. |
| Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) | compares the ability of women and men to participate in economic and political decision making. |
| Gender-related Development Index (GDI) | Compares the level of development of women with that of both sexes. |
| Gentrification | a process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominantly low-income renter-occupied area to a predominantly middle-class owner-occupied area |
| Geographic information system (GIS) | A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and display geographic data |
| Geothermal energy | Energy from steam or hot water produced from hot or molten underground rocks. |
| Gerrymandering | Process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the party in power. |
| Ghetto | During the middle Ages, a neighborhood in a city set up by law to be inhabited only by Jews; now used to denote a section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal, or economic pressure. |
| Globalization | Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope |
| Global Positioning System (GPS) | a system that determines the precise position of something on earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers |
| Grain | Seed of a cereal grass |
| Gravity model | A model that holds that the potential use of a service at a particular location is directly related to the number of people in a location and inversely related to the distance people must travel to reach the service |
| Green revolution | Rapid diffusion of new agricultural technology, especially new high-yield seeds and fertilizers |
| Greenbelt | A ring of land maintained as parks, agricultural, or other types of open space to limit the sprawl of an urban area |
| Greenhouse effect | Anticipated increase in Earth's temperature, caused by carbon dioxide (emitted by burning fossil fuels) trapping some of the radiation emitted by the surface. |
| Greenwich Mean Time | The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0° longitude. |
| Gross domestic product (GDP) | The value of the total number of goods and services produced in a country in a given time period (normally one year). |
| Guest workers | Workers who migrate to the more developed countries of Northern and Western Europe, usually from Southern of Eastern Europe or from North Africa, in search of higher-paying jobs. |
| Habit | A repetitive act performed by a particular individual |
| Hearth | The region from which innovative ideas originate |
| Hierarchical diffusion | The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places |
| Hierarchical religion | A religion in which a central authority exercises a high degree of control. |
| Horticulture | The growing of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. |
| Hull | The outer covering of a seed |
| Human Development Index (HDI) | Indicator of level of development for each country, constructed by United Nations, combining income, literacy, education, and life expectancy. |
| Hydroelectric power | Power generated from moving water |
| Ideograms | The system of writing used in China and other East Asian countries in which each symbol represents an idea or concept rather than a specific sound, as is the case with letters in English. |
| Immigration | Migration to a new location |
| Imperialism | Control of territory already occupied and organized by an indigenous society. |
| Inanimate power | Power supplied by machines |
| Industrial revolution | A series of improvements in industrial technology that transformed the process of manufacturing goods. |
| Infant mortality rate (IMR) | The total number of deaths in a year among infants under 1 year old for every 1,000 live births in a society |
| Intensive subsistence agriculture | A form of subsistence agriculture in which farmers must expend a relatively large amount of effort to produce the maximum feasible yield from a parcel of land. |
| Internal migration | Permanent movement within a particular country. |
| International Date Line | An arc that for the most part follows 180º longitude, although it deviates in several place to avoid dividing land areas. When you cross it heading east, the clock moves back 24 hours, and when you cross it going west the calendar moves ahead one day. |
| International migration | Permanent movement from one country to another |
| interregional migration | Permanent movement from one region of a country to another |
| Intervening obstacle | An environmental or cultural feature of the landscape that hinders migration |
| Intraregional migration | Permanent movement or cultural feature of the landscape |
| isogloss | A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate. |
| Isolated language | A language that is unrelated to any other languages and therefore not attached to any language family. |
| Labor-intensive industry | An industry for which labor costs comprise a high percentage of total expenses. |
| Land ordinance of 1785 | A law that divided much of the United States into a system of townships to facilitate the sale of land to settlers. |
| Landlocked state | A state that does not have a direct outlet to the sea. |
| Language | A system of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning. |
| Language branch | A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago. Differences are not as extensive or old as with language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that these derived from the same family. |
| Language family | A collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded history. |
| Language group | A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary. |
| Latitude | The numbering system used to indicate the location of parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance north and south of the equator |
| Less developed country (LDC) | Also known as a developing country, a country that is at a relatively early stage in the process of economic development. |
| Life expectancy | The average number of years an individual can be expected to live, given current social, economic, and medical conditions. Life expectancy at birth is the average number of years a newborn infant can expect to live. |
| Lingua franca | A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages |
| Literacy rate | The percentage of a country's people who can read and write. |
| Literary tradition | A language that is written as well as spoken |
| Location | The position of anything on Earth's surface |
| Longitude | The numbering system used to indicate the location of meridians drawn on a globe and measuring distance east and west of the prime meridian |
| Map | A two-dimensional, or flat, representation of Earth's surface or a portion of it. |
| Maquilladora | Factories built by U.S. companies in Mexico near the U.S.` border, in order to take advantage of the cheep labor in Mexico |
| Market area | (or hinterland) the area surrounding a central place from which people are attracted to use the place's goods and services |
| Medical revolution | Medical technology invented in Europe and North America that is diffused to the poorer countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Improved medical practices have eliminated many of the traditional causes of death in poorer countries and enabled more people to live longer and healthier lives. |
| Mental map | An internal representation of a portion of Earth's surface based on what an individual knows about a place, containing personal impressions of what is in a place and where places are located. |
| Meridian | An arc drawn on a map between the North and South poles. |
| Metropolitan statistical area | In the United States, a central city of at least 50,000 population, the county within which the city is located, and adjacent counties meeting one of several tests indicating a functional connection to the central city. |
| micropolitan statistical area | An urbanized area of between 10,000 and 50,000 inhabitants, the county in which it is found, and adjacent counties tied to the city. |
| microstate | A state that encompasses a very small land area |
| migration | Form of relocation diffusion involving permanent move to a new location. |
| Migration transition | Change in the migration pattern in a society that results from industrialization, population growth, and other social and economic changes that also produce the demographic transition. |
| milkshed | The area surrounding a city from which milk is supplied. |
| missionary | An individual who helps to diffuse a universalizing religion. |
| mobility | All types of movement from one location to another. |
| monotheism | the doctrine or belief that there is only one God |
| More developed country (MDC) | Also known as a relatively developed country or a developed country, a country that has progressed relatively far along a continuum of development. |
| Multi-ethnic state | State that contains more than one ethnicity |
| Multinational State | State that contains two or more ethnic groups with traditions of self-determination that agree to coexist peacefully by recognizing each other as distinct nationalities. |
| Multiple nuclei model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a collection of nodes of activities. |
| Nationalism | Loyalty and devotion to a particular nationality |
| Nationality | Identity with a group of people that share legal attachment and personal allegiance to a particular place as a result of being born there. |
| Nation-State | A state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity that has been transformed into a nationality |
| Natural increase rate (NIR) | The percentage growth of a population in a year, computed as the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate. |
| Net migration | The difference between the level of immigration and the level of emigration. |
| New international division of labor | Transfer of some types of jobs, especially those requiring low-paid less skilled workers, from more developed to less developed countries. |
| Nonbasic industries | Industries that sell their products primarily to consumers in the community. |
| Nonferrous | metals utilized to make products other than iron and steel. |
| Nonrenewable energy | A source of energy that is a finite supply capable of being exhausted. |
| Official language | The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents. |
| Outsourcing | A decision by a corporation to turn over much of the responsibility for production to independent suppliers. |
| Overpopulation | The number of a people in an area exceeds the capacity of the environment to support life at a decent standard of living. |
| Ozone | gas that absorbs ultraviolet solar radiation, found in the stratosphere, a zone between 15 and 50 kilometers (9 to 30 miles) above Earth's surface. |
| Paddy | Malay word for wet rice, commonly but incorrectly used to describe a sawah. |
| Pagan | A follower of a polytheistic religion in ancient times. |
| Pandemic | Disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects a very high proportion of the population. |
| Parallel | A circle drawn around the globe parallel to the equator and at right angles to the meridians. |
| Passive solar energy systems | Solar energy that collects energy without the use of mechanical devices. |
| Pastoral nomadism | A form of subsistence agriculture based on herding domesticated animals. |
| Pasture | Grass or other plants grown for feeding grazing animals, as well as land used for grazing |
| Pattern | the geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area |
| Perforated state | A state that completely surrounds another one |
| Peripheral model | A model of North American urban areas consisting of an inner city surrounded by large suburban residential and business areas tied together by a beltway or ring road. |
| Photochemical smog | An atmospheric condition formed through a combination of weather conditions and pollution, especially from motor vehicle emissions. |
| Photovoltaic cell | Solar energy cells, usually made from silicon, that collect solar rays to generate electricity. |
| Physiological density | the number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture |
| Pidgin language | A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca, used for communications among speakers of two different languages. |
| Pilgrimage | A journey to a place considered sacred for religious purposes. |
| Place | A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular character |
| Plantation | A large farm in tropical and subtropical climates that specializes in the production of one or two crops for sale, usually to a more developed country. |
| Polder | Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area. |
| Pollution | Addition of more waste than a resource can accommodate |
| Polytheism | Belief in or worship of more than one god |
| Popular culture | Culture found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics |
| Population pyramid | A bar graph representing the distribution of population by age and sex. |
| 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. |
| Post-Fordist production | Adoption by companies of flexible work rules, such as the allocation of workers to teams that perform a variety of tasks. |
| Potential reserve | The amount of energy in deposits not yet identified but thought to exist. |
| Preservation | Maintenance of a resource in its present condition, with as little human impact as possible. |
| Primary sector | The portion of the economy concerned with the direct extraction of materials from Earth's surface, generally through agriculture, although sometimes by mining, fishing, and forestry. |
| Primate city | The largest settlement in a country, if it has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement. |
| Primate city rule | A pattern of settlements in a country, such that the largest settlement has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement. |
| Prime agricultural land | The most productive farmland |
| Prime meridian | The meridian, designated at 0° longitude, which passes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. |
| Principal meridian | A north-south line designated in the Land Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the United States. |
| Productivity | The value of a particular product compared to the amount of labor needed to make it. |
| Projection | the system used to transfer locations from earth's surface to a flat map |
| Prorupted state | an otherwise compact state with a large projecting extension |
| Proven reserve | The amount of a resource available in discovered deposits |
| Public housing | Housing owned by the government; in the United States, it is rented to low-income residents, and the rents are set at 30 percent of the families' incomes. |
| Public services | Services offered by the government to provide security and protection for citizens and businesses |
| Pull factor | Factor that induces people to move to a new location. |
| Push factor | Factor that induces people to leave old residences |
| Quotas | In reference to migration, laws that place maximum limits on the number of people who can immigrate to a country each year. |
| Race | Identity with a group of people descended from a common ancestor. |
| Racism | the belief that one race is superior to others |
| Racist | A person who subscribes to the beliefs of racism. |
| Radioactive waste | Particles from a nuclear reaction that emit radiation; contact with such particles may be harmful or lethal to people and must therefore be safely stored for thousands of years. |
| Ranching | A form of commercial agriculture in which livestock graze over an extensive area |
| Range (of a service) | The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service |
| Rank-size rule | A pattern of settlements in a country, such that the nth largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement. |
| Reaper | A machine that cuts grain standing in the field. |
| Recycling | the separation, collection, processing, marketing, and reuse of unwanted material |
| Redlining | A process by which banks draw lines on a map and refuse to lend money to purchase or improve property within the boundaries. |
| Refugees | People who are forced to migrate from their home country and cannot return for fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion. |
| Region | An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features. |
| Regional Studies (cultural landscape) | An approach to geography that emphasizes the relationships among social and physical phenomena in a particular study area. |
| Relocation diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another |
| Remote sensing | The acquisition of data about Earth's surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or other long-distance methods. |
| Renewable resource | a natural resource that can be replaced at the same rate at which the resource is consumed |
| Resource | A substance in the environment that is useful to people, is economically and technologically feasible to access, and is socially acceptable to use. |
| Ridge tillage | System of planting crops on ridge tops, in order to reduce farm production costs and promote greater soil conservation. |
| Right-to-work state | A U.S. state that has passed a law preventing a union and company from negotiating a contract that requires workers to join a union as a condition of employment. |
| Rush (or Peak) hour | The four consecutive 15 minute periods in the morning and evening with the heaviest volumes of traffic |
| Sanitary landfill | A place to deposit solid waste, where a layer of earth is bulldozed over garbage each day to reduce emissions of gases and odors from the decaying trash, to minimize fires, and to discourage vermin. |
| Sawah | A flooded field for growing rice |
| Scale | Generally, the relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole, specifically the relationship between the size of an object on a map and the size of the actual feature on Earth's surface. |
| Secondary sector | The portion of the economy concerned with manufacturing useful products through processing, transforming, and assembling raw materials. |
| Sect | A relatively small group that has broken away from an established denomination |
| Section | A square normally 1 mile on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided townships in the United States into 36 sections. |
| Sector model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a series of sectors, or wedges, radiating out from the central business district (CBD). |
| Seed agriculture | Reproduction of plants through annual introduction of seeds, which result from sexual fertilization. |
| Self-determinism | Concept that ethnicities have the right to govern themselves. |
| Service | any activity that fulfills a human want or need and returns money to those who provide it |
| Settlement | A permanent collection of buildings and inhabitants. |
| Sex ratio | the number of males per 100 females in the population |
| Sharecropper | A person who works fields rented from a landowner and pays the rent and repays loans by turning over to the landowner a share of the crops. |
| Shifting cultivation | A form of subsistence agriculture in which people shift activity from one field to another; each field is used for crops for relatively few years and left fallow for a relatively long period. |
| Site | The physical character of a place. |
| Site factors | Location factors related to the costs of factors of production inside the plant, such as land, labor, and capital. |
| Situation | location of a place relative to other places |
| Situation factors | Location factors related to the transportation of materials into and from a factory. |
| Slash-and-burn agriculture | Another name for shifring cultivation, so named because fields are cleared by slashing the vegetation and burning the debris. |
| Smart growth | legislation and regulations to limit suburban sprawl and preserve farmland |
| Solstice | Time when the Sun is farthest from the equator |
| Sovereignty | ability of a state to govern its territory free from control of its internal affairs by other states |
| 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 |
| Spanglish | Combination of Spanish and English, spoken by Hispanic-Americans. |
| Sprawl | Development of new housing sites at relatively low density and at locations that are not contiguous to the existing built-up area. |
| Spring wheat | Wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the late summer. |
| Squatter settlement | An area within a city in a less developed country in which people illegally establish residences on land they do not own or rent and erect homemade structures. |
| Standard language | The form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications. |
| State | an area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government with control over its internal and foreign affairs |
| Stimulus diffusion | The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected. |
| Structural adjustment program | Economic policies imposed on less developed countries by international agencies to create conditions encouraging international trade, such as raising taxes, reducing government spending, controlling inflation, selling publicly owned utilities to private corporations, and charging citizens more for services. |
| Subsistence agriculture | Agriculture designed primarily to provide food for direct consumption by the farmer and the farmer's family |
| Sustainable agriculture | Farming methods that preserve long-term productivity of land and minimize pollution, typically by rotating soil- restoring crops with cash crops and reducing in-puts of fertilizer and pesticides. |
| Sustainable development | The level of development that can be maintained in a country without depleting resources to the extent that future generations will be unable to achieve a comparable level of development. |
| Swidden | A patch of land cleared for planting through slashing and burning. |
| Taboo | A restriction on behavior imposed by social custom. |
| Terrior | The conribution of a location's distinctive physical features to the way food tastes |
| Tertiary sector | The portion of the economy concerned with transportation, communications, and utilities, sometimes extended to the provision of all goods and services to people in exchange for payment. |
| Textile | A fabric made by weaving, used in making clothing |
| Thresh | To beat out grain from stalks by trampling it. |
| Threshold | The minimum number of people needed to support the service |
| Toponym | The name given to a portion of Earth's surface. |
| Total fertility rate (TFR) | The average number of children a woman will have throughout her childbearing years. |
| Township | A square normally 6 miles on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided much of the United States into a series of townships. |
| Trading bloc | A group of neighboring countries that promote trade with each other and erect barriers to limit trade with other blocs |
| Transhumance | The seasonal migration of livestock between mountains and lowland pastures. |
| Transnational corporation | A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters or shareholders are located. |
| Triangular slave trade | A practice, primarily during the eighteenth century, in which European ships transported slaves from Africa to Caribbean islands, molasses from the Caribbean to Europe, and trade goods from Europe to Africa. |
| Truck farming | Commercial gardening and fruit farming, so named because truck was a Middle English word meaning batering or the exchange of commodities. |
| Underclass | A group in society prevented from participating in the material benefits of a more developed society because of a variety of social and economic characteristics. |
| Undocumented immigrants | People who enter a country without proper documents. |
| Uneven development | The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of the economy. |
| Unitary State | An internal organization of a state that places most power in the hands of central government officials |
| Universalizing Religion | A religion that attempts to appeal to all people, not just those living in a particular location. |
| Urban renewal | Program in which cities identify blighted inner-city neighborhoods, acquire the properties from private members, relocate the residents and businesses, clear the site, build new roads and utilities, and turn the land over to private developers. |
| Urbanization | an increase in the percentage and in the number of people living in urban settlements |
| Urbanized area | In the United States, a central city plus its contiguous built-up suburbs. |
| Value added | the gross value of the product minus the costs of raw materials and energy. |
| Vegetative planting | reproduction of plants by direct cloning from existing plants |
| Vernacular region (perceptual) | A place that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity. |
| Voluntary migration | Permanent movement undertaken by choice. |
| Vulgar Latin | A form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents |
| Wet rice | Rice planted on dryland in a nursery, then moved to a deliberately flooded field to promote growth. |
| Winnow | To remove chaff by allowing it to be blown away by the wind. |
| Winter wheat | wheat planted in the fall and harvested in the early summer |
| Zero population growth (ZPG) | A decline of the total fertility rate to the point where the natural increase rate equals zero. |
| Zoning ordinance | A law that limits the permitted uses of land and maximum density of development in a community. |
| Salinization | Process that occurs when soils in arid areas are brought under cultivation through irrigation. In arid climates, water evaporates quickly off the ground surface, leaving salty residues that render the soil infertile. |
| Intertillage | practice of mixing different seeds and seedlings in the same swidden |
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