AP Human Geography Vocab #1

Terms in this set (41)

Globalization
growth to a global or worldwide scale
Cartography
art of map making
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.
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.
Arithmetic Density
The total number of people divided by the total land area.
Agricultural Density
The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture.
Physiological Density
The number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture.
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.
Formal region
An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics
Functional region
An area organized around a node or focal point
Expansion diffusion
The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in a snowballing process.
GIS
A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data.
GPS
a navigational system involving satellites and computers that can determine the latitude and longitude of a receiver on Earth by computing the time difference for signals from different satellites to reach the receiver
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.
Mercator projection
a map projection of the earth onto a cylinder
Place
A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular character.
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.
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.
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.
Robinson projection
Projection that attempts to balance several possible projection errors. It does not maintain completely accurate area, shape, distance, or direction, but it minimizes errors in each.
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.
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 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 system.
Spatial perspective
they way geographers look at everything-- in relation to space
Stimulus diffusion
The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected.
Time zones
region of the Earth that has adopted the same standard time
Toponym
The name given to a portion of Earth's surface.
Uneven development
The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of the economy.
Vernacular region
A place that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity.
Cultural landscape
Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.
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