Key Spatial Concepts
The belief that the physical environment is the chief factor influencing human behavior.
What is environmental determinism?
This model assumes high birth and death rates will gradually be replaced by low rates over time.
What is the Demographic Transition Model?
The Indus Valley and Mesopotamia are classic examples of these, where cultures and innovations originate.
What are cultural hearths?
"Little Italy" is an example of this type of region based on people's perceptions.
What is a vernacular/perceptual region?
Religions that seek to convert non-believers, such as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.
What are universalizing religions?
The belief that people, not their surroundings, are the forces behind cultural development.
What is possibilism?
Migrants today usually have these three traits.
What are male, young, and single?
The French language, basket weaving, and belief in ancestral spirits are examples of these basic units of culture.
What are cultural traits?
A geographic area defined by a specific set of economic or social activities and interactions, organized around a central point or "node," is known as a
A stable, fully developed language that originates from the mixing of a colonizer's language with an indigenous or a slave group's language, which then becomes the native language of a new generation of speakers.
What is a creole language?
This term describes the Earth's surface as modified by human activity.
What is the cultural landscape?
Finding a better job in a city you were just passing through is an example of this migration concept.
What is an intervening opportunity?
The Egyptian and Mayan pyramids are likely a result of this process, not diffusion.
What is independent invention?
The European Union, with its shared rules and currency, is best characterized as this type of region.
What is a formal region?
Judaism is considered this type of religion because people are usually born into it.
What is an ethnic religion?
Judging another culture by the standards of one's own culture.
What is ethnocentrism?
Population pressure on agricultural land is measured by this type of density.
What is physiological density?
A British celebrity popularizing her hairstyle in Brazil is an example of this type of diffusion.
What is hierarchical diffusion?
The physical characteristics of a specific location, such as its topography, soil, and climate, is known as:
What is site?
The primary desire of these people is to separate marriage (or other institutions) from religious constraints.
Who are secularists?
This term refers to the number of people a piece of land can support sustainably.
What is carrying capacity?
The seasonal movement of livestock to pasture lands.
What is transhumance?
This term describes why a person living far from a mall visits it less often.
What is distance decay?
The description "Singapore is located on an island at the northwestern end of the Straits of Malacca" describes its ______.
What is situation?
This language is considered the lingua franca of East Africa.
What is Swahili?