Geographic Concepts
A map projection that preserves the shape of landmasses but distorts their relative size.
Mercator projection
The total number of live births per 1,000 people in a year.
Crude Birth Rate
The smallest unit of sound in a language.
phoneme
The rapid spread of an idea or characteristic from a node to nearby places.
contagious diffusion
An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its internal and foreign affairs.
state
The relationship between the length of an object on a map and that object's actual length on Earth's surface.
scale
The average number of children a woman will have during her childbearing years.
Total Fertility Rate
A collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed before recorded history.
language family
The spread of a characteristic through the movement of people from one place to another.
relocation diffusion
A state that completely surrounds another state.
perforated state
The notion that the physical environment limits human action, but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment.
possibilism
A bar graph that displays a country's population by age and gender.
population pyramid
A language used in trade by people who speak different native languages.
lingua franca
The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places.
hierarchical diffusion
A boundary that is drawn to accommodate religious, ethnic, or economic differences.
subsequent boundary
The precise spot on Earth where something is located, usually expressed by latitude and longitude.
absolute location
The time it takes for a population to double, assuming a constant rate of natural increase.
doubling time
A religion that attempts to appeal to all people, not just those living in a particular location.
universalizing religion
A form of expansion diffusion where all people in a place adopt an idea or innovation.
contagious diffusion (also acceptable: expansion diffusion)
A model that attempts to explain and predict how and why states behave and compete on a global scale, suggesting land-based power is key.
Heartland Theory
The geographic study of human-environment relationships, a fundamental theme in geography.
cultural ecology
The stage of the Demographic Transition Model characterized by low birth rates and low death rates.
Stage 4
A place of worship where a universalizing religion's founder received a key revelation or performed a significant miracle.
hearth
A specific type of stimulus diffusion where the underlying idea or principle spreads, but the characteristic itself is rejected.
reverse hierarchical diffusion or maladaptive diffusion
The process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the party in power.
Gerrymandering