Chapter 1 Summary & Review PDF
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This document provides a summary and review of the basics of geography including what geography is overall and its core concepts. It includes several key concepts, like place, regions, and scale. It asks questions to prompt further thought and further learning about specific geographic topics.
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## The Cultural Landscape ### Chapter 1: This Is Geography **KEY ISSUE** **1.1 Why Is Geography a Science?** Geography has ancient and medieval roots. Maps are tools of reference and increasingly are tools of communication. Reading a map requires recognizing its scale and projection. Contempor...
## The Cultural Landscape ### Chapter 1: This Is Geography **KEY ISSUE** **1.1 Why Is Geography a Science?** Geography has ancient and medieval roots. Maps are tools of reference and increasingly are tools of communication. Reading a map requires recognizing its scale and projection. Contemporary mapping utilizes electronic technologies, such as GPS and GIS. **KEY ISSUE** **1.2 Why Is Every Place Unique?** Location is identified through name, site, and situation. Regions can be formal, functional, or vernacular. Culture encompasses what people care about and what people take care of. **KEY ISSUE** **1.3 Why Are Different Places Similar?** Geographers examine at all scales, though they are increasingly concerned with the global scale. Distribution has three properties-density, concentration, and pattern. Different cultural groups display different distributions in space. Places are connected through networks, and phenomena spread through relocation and expansion diffusion. In spite of space-time compression, peripheral regions in the global economy often have unequal access to the goods and services available in core regions. **KEY ISSUE** **1.4 Why Are Some Actions Not Sustainable?** Sustainability combines environment, economy, and society. Earth's resources encompass three abiotic systems and one biotic system. Ecology is the study of living organisms and the abiotic spheres with which they interact. Ecosystems may or may not be sustainable. ## Thinking Geographically **KEY ISSUE** **1.1 Why Is Geography a Science?** Geography plays an important role on our electronic devices. 1. *What was the most recent geographic item that you consulted on your elec- tronic device? Describe how this item illustrated each of geography's five basic concepts of place, region, scale, space, and connection.* **KEY ISSUE** **1.2 Why Is Every Place Unique?** *Figure 1CR-2 displays one day's movements recorded by a woman through her smartphone's Strava app. She drove from home (1) to drop off a child at high school (2), then to work (3), then to pick up another child at middle school (4), then to the dry cleaner (5), then to the supermarket (6), then to the pharmacy (7), then home, then to a fitness class (8), then home. Total distance was 40 kilometers (25 miles).* *2. How might gender influence a typical day of travel? 3. How does this person's travel patterns compare with yours?* **KEY ISSUE** **1.3 Why Are Different Places Similar?** *Identify a place other than your hometown where you have a connection.* *4. What is the nature of the interaction that you have with that place? Explain how the interaction illustrates one or more types of diffusion.* **KEY ISSUE** **1.4 Why Are Some Actions Not Sustainable?** *Name a park (national, state, or local) that is familiar to you.* *5. In what ways does your experience in the park illustrate each of the three pillars of sustainability?* <br> ## **1.1 Why Is Geography a Science?** Geography has ancient and medieval roots. People have been making maps for a long time - it's a core part of recognizing the world around us. Maps are tools of reference. Maps are helpful for finding places and learning about what's around us. Maps are increasingly tools of communication. Maps now often have layers, or multiple pieces of data, like roads, businesses, or elevation, that are overlaid to provide more information. Reading a map requires recognizing its scale and projection. A _scale_ tells you how much space on the map represents a certain amount of real space, and a _projection_ tells you how a round Earth is made flat. Contemporary mapping utilizes electronic technologies, such as GPS and GIS. _GPS_ (global positioning system) is how we are able to get our location on our smart phones and use maps on our phones to navigate. _GIS_ (geographic information system) is how we can overlay multiple layers of data to create maps that are even more informative. ## **1.2 Why Is Every Place Unique?** Location is identified through name, site, and situation. Every place on Earth has its own unique characteristic. A _name_ (or _toponym_) is a place's common identifying term. A _cite_ is the physical feature of a place, like soil, topography, or vegetation. A _situation_ is where a place sits in relation to other places. Regions can be formal, functional, or vernacular. _Formal regions_ are unified around a characteristic, like a country with defined borders; _functional regions_ are organized around a central focal point, like the geographic area served by an airport, and _vernacular regions_ are places people believe exist as part of their cultural identity, like the concept of "the South." Culture encompasses what people care about and what people take care of. _Care about_ is the set of beliefs and practices people use to organize their world, like religion, language, and art; _care of_ are the things people produce to meet their needs, like food, clothing, and shelter. ## **1.3 Why Are Different Places Similar?** Geographers examine at all scales, though they are increasingly concerned with the global scale. Geographers study the world at different scales, from local communities to the whole Earth. Distribution has three properties-density, concentration, and pattern. _Density_ is how many items there are in a given unit of area, _concentration_ is how clustered those items are, and _pattern_ is the geometric arrangement of those items. Different cultural groups display different distributions in space. Cultural groups often have a distinct geographic pattern, due to factors like history, economics, or migration. Places are connected through networks, and phenomena spread through relocation and expansion diffusion. _Networks_ are chains of communication that connect places. _Relocation diffusion_ involves the transfer of a feature from one place to another, like people moving to a new location and carrying their cultural practices. _Expansion diffusion_ is the spreading of a feature from one place to another without needing to relocate. In spite of space-time compression, peripheral regions in the global economy often have unequal access to the goods and services available in core regions. _Space-time compression_ is when technology or innovation makes the distance between places seem smaller because it takes less time to get there; this does not mean that everyone has equal opportunity to participate in the global economy, and some places, especially in peripheral regions, are at a disadvantage. ## **1.4 Why Are Some Actions Not Sustainable?** Sustainability combines environment, economy, and society. _Sustainability_ is the idea that we can't just take everything we need from the Earth without thinking about future generations. It includes environmental factors, economic factors, and social factors that impact how people interact with the planet. Earth's resources encompass three abiotic systems and one biotic system. The _abiotic systems_ are the nonliving parts of the Earth - the _atmosphere_ (gases), the _hydrosphere_ (water), and the _lithosphere_ (rocks). The _biotic system_ is the living part, the _biosphere_. Ecology is the study of living organisms and the abiotic spheres with which they interact. _Ecology_ studies the relationships between living organisms and their environments. Ecosystems may or may not be sustainable. _Ecosystems_ are a community of living organisms and their nonliving surroundings. Whether an ecosystem is sustainable depends on whether human interaction is destroying the ecosystem faster than it can regenerate itself. ## **Thinking Geographically** **KEY ISSUE** **1.1 Why Is Geography a Science?** *Geography plays an important role on our electronic devices.* *1. *What was the most recent geographic item that you consulted on your elec- tronic device? Describe how this item illustrated each of geography's five basic concepts of place, region, scale, space, and connection.* **KEY ISSUE** **1.2 Why Is Every Place Unique?** *Figure 1CR-2 displays one day's movements recorded by a woman through her smartphone's Strava app. She drove from home (1) to drop off a child at high school (2), then to work (3), then to pick up another child at middle school (4), then to the dry cleaner (5), then to the supermarket (6), then to the pharmacy (7), then home, then to a fitness class (8), then home. Total distance was 40 kilometers (25 miles).* *2. How might gender influence a typical day of travel? 3. How does this person's travel patterns compare with yours?* **KEY ISSUE** **1.3 Why Are Different Places Similar?** Identify a place other than your hometown where you have a connection. *4. What is the nature of the interaction that you have with that place? Explain how the interaction illustrates one or more types of diffusion.* **KEY ISSUE** **1.4 Why Are Some Actions Not Sustainable?** *Name a park (national, state, or local) that is familiar to you.* *5. In what ways does your experience in the park illustrate each of the three pillars of sustainability?*