Geography Skills Perspectives Quiz

Geography Skills Perspectives

• Social: How people's daily lives are impacted by health, inequality, culture, and migration.
• Economic: Impact on the economy and wealth, including income, GDP, exports, commodities, and jobs.
• Environmental: How nature is impacted, such as the effects on vegetation, soil, air, and water.
• Political: Government decisions' impact and role in international agreements, organizations, activism, policies, and laws.

Geo Technologies

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS): A computer system that analyzes geographic data
  • Remote Sensing: Measuring or seeing from a distance, such as in weather forecasting or viewing areas from space.
  • GPS: Global Positioning System

Types of Interrelationships

• Human: Studying humans, their lifestyles, cultures, and impacts on Earth (like immigration, population shifts, economic development, and politics).
• Physical (Natural): Anything concerning the physical Earth, including geology, climate, ecosystems, plate tectonics, and natural resources.

Spatial Patterns

• Linear: Arranged in a straight line (e.g., houses along a road).
• Dispersed: Things spread out over a large area (e.g., farms in the countryside).
• Clustered: Things grouped together in one area (e.g., a neighborhood with many houses).

Landform Regions

• Main Landforms: Glaciers, volcanoes, plateaus, canyons, valleys, deserts, lakes, hills, and plains.
  • Canadian Shield: Oldest, largest landform, based on nickel, zinc, and gold; igneous and metamorphic rocks. The shield's surface is rocky due to erosion over time.
  • Interior Plains: Surrounds the Canadian Shield, flat, sedimentary, suited for farming.
  • Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Lowlands: Surrounds the Canadian Shield, flat, sedimentary, suited for farming.
  • Hudson Bay–Arctic Lowlands: Surrounds the Canadian Shield, flat, sedimentary.
  • Appalachian Mountains: Edges of Canada formed by folded sedimentary rock creating mountains.
  • Innuitian Mountains (High Arctic): Edges of Canada formed by folded sedimentary rock that create mountains.
  • Western Cordillera: Formed by folded sedimentary rock to create mountains.

Plate Tectonics

• Convergent: Mountains and volcanoes.
• Divergent: Mid-ocean ridges and seafloor spreading.
• Transform: Earthquakes and faults.
• Subduction: Oceanic plates sinking under other plates, which creates volcanoes.
• Collision Zones: Mountain ranges.
• Ridge Push/Slab Pull: Forces causing plate movement (ridge push – the weight of the mid-ocean ridge, slab pull – the weight of the subducting section).

Glaciers

• Continental Glaciers: Found in high latitudes, formed by compression melting.
• Alpine Glaciers: Found at high elevations, formed by rivers of ice flowing from mountains to valleys (e.g., Western Cordillera).

Climate

• Continental: High latitudes, compression melting (found only in Antarctica and Greenland)
• Alpine: High elevation, gravity-driven ice flows from mountains to valleys (e.g., Western Cordillera, Artic).
• Lower Latitudes : Further away from the Equator with potentially colder temperatures, sun's energy spread over larger area. Ocean currents also affect air temperature through pole-to-equator water movement.
• Weather patterns: Maritime (wet), Continental (dry), Elevation impacts on air temperature, Warm/cold air masses, Convectional patterns, precipitation along mountains and bodies of water.
• Climate Graphs: Understanding a region's weather data through temperature and precipitation in a line graph format.

Greenhouse Gases

• Gases in the atmosphere that trap heat before it escapes into space.
  • Carbon Dioxide
  • Methane
  • Nitrous Oxide
  • Ozone
  • Water Vapour
• Causes: Industrial Revolution, Carbon Sink (absorbs more carbon than releases), Carbon Source (releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere), Mitigation (reducing GHG emissions).
• Adaptation: Adjustments to changing climates, such as by addressing avalanches, landslides, wildfires, tsunamis, storm surges, heat waves, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, sinkholes, earthquakes, and hail storms

Managing Resources

• Types of Natural Resources
  • Renewable: Can be replenished.
  • Non-renewable: Limited, slow regeneration.
  • Flow resources: Constantly produced, cannot be damaged.
  • Other resources: Classification challenges, potential as tourist attractions.
• Sustainable resources: Sunlight, wind, water, trees, plants, animals, and soil
• Non-renewable resources: Oil, coal, and natural gas

Ecological Footprint

• Biocapacity: Capacity of ecosystems to produce resources.
• Global Hectares: Measure of ecological footprint.
• Biocapacity Deficit: Ecological footprint greater than biocapacity.
• Freshwater: Limited water resources, 1% in oceans, Aquifers are groundwater deposits. Desalination is the removal of minerals in water. Day Zero: Estimated day a water supply will be depleted.
  • Minerals: Metals, non-metals (like gypsum, potash, salt).
  • Fuels: Coal, oil, natural gas
  • Diamonds: Mining areas, such as Alberta, the North West Territories, and Newfoundland.

Types of Industries

• Primary: Raw materials (mining, agriculture, forestry, fishing).
• Secondary: Assembling raw materials (manufacturing, processing, construction).
• Tertiary: Commercial activities (retail, transportation, entertainment, restaurants).
• Quaternary: Information-based activities (research, analysis, statesmanship).
  • Agriculture: Fertilizer use, impact on crops, sustainability practices.
  • Fishing: Importance, challenges like pollution.
  • Forestry: Canada's forest area, products, issues like climate change effects and harvesting methods.

Mining

• Strip Mining: Removing horizontal layers of surface material to access minerals.
• Open-Pit Mining: Extracting minerals near the surface or underground.
• Underground Mining: Used for inaccessible minerals below the Earth's surface.
  • Different minerals mined, and types of mining methods.

Natural Gas and Energy Sources

• Natural gas: Obtained from shale (sedimentary rock) using hydraulic fracturing.
• Energy sources: Solar power, wind power, biomass, hydropower, geothermal, and nuclear power.

Globalization

• MNCs, trade agreements, UN, etc.: Worldwide spread of products, technology, information, and jobs.
• Trade agreements (like USMCA): Removing trade barriers to increase trade across countries.
  • Exports and Imports: Goods and services exchanged between countries.

Changing Populations

Demographic trends, like exponential growth, population pyramids (rapid, stable, declining), Canada's population trends (getting larger, older), and population distribution. Causes of population change (factors that impact population change like declining fertility rates), immigration.

Immigration

• Economic factors, family class, refugee class, pull and push factors, census (official population count every few years).

Liveable Communities

• Urbanization trends, urban sprawl, smart growth (protecting green space, high density, mixed use zoning and buildings, active transportation, green belts).
• Urban issues (food deserts, traffic, heat islands).
• Transportation and land use.
• Major factors (land costs, age of area).

Types of minerals:

• Metallic minerals (iron, copper, lead, gold, silver)
• Non-metallic minerals (gypsum, potash, salt, asbestos)
• Structural Minerals
• Fuels and energy (coal, oil, natural gas)
• Diamonds: Mining in specific locations, important in Canada.
• In-situ (In-place) Oil sands extraction.