| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Agricultural density | The ratio if the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture. |
| Arithmetic density | The total number of people divided by the total land area. |
| 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. |
| Cartography | The science of making maps. |
| Concentration | The spread of something over a given area. |
| Connections | Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space. |
| Contagious diffusion | The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population. |
| 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. |
| Density | The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area. |
| Diffusion | The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Expansion diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in a snowballing process. |
| Formal (or uniform or homogeneous) region | An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics. |
| Functional (or nodal) region | An area organized around a node or focal point. |
| Geographic Information System (GIS) | A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data. |
| Global Positioning System (GPS) | A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers. |
| Globalization | Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope. |
| Greenwich Mean Time | The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0° longitude. |
| Hearth | The region from which innovative ideas originate. |
| Hierarchical diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places. |
| International Date Line | An arc that for the most part follows 180° longitude, although it deviates in several places to avoid dividing land areas. When you cross the International Date Line heading east (toward America), the clock moves back 24 hours, or one entire day. When you go west (toward Asia), the calendar moves ahead one day. |
| 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. |
| Latitude | The numbering system used to indicate the location of parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance north and south of the equator (0°). |
| 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 (0°). |
| Map | A two-dimensional, or flat, representation of Earth's surface or a portion of it. |
| 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. |
| Parallel | A circle drawn around the globe parallel to the equator and at right angles to the meridians. |
| Pattern | The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area. |
| Physiological density | The number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture. |
| Place | A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular character. |
| Polder | Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Projection | The system used to transfer locations from Earth's surface to a flat map. |
| Region | An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features. |
| Regional (or cultural landscape) studies | 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. |
| 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 | 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. |
| Section | A square normally 1 mile on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided townships in the United States into 36 sections. |
| Site | The physical character of a place. |
| Situation | The location of a place relative to other places. |
| Space | The physical gap or interval between two places. |
| 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. |
| Stimulus diffusion | The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected. |
| Toponym | The name given to a portion of Earth's surface. |
| 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. |
| 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 (or perceptual) region | An area that people believe to exist as part of their cultural identity. |
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