Tools of Geography
The spread of ideas, characteristics, or cultural traits from one location to another.
What is diffusion?
The average pattern of weather over a 30-year period for a particular region.
What is climate?
The number of dependents in a population that each 100 working-age people must support.
What is the dependency ratio?
A group of related languages that share a common ancestry.
What is a language family?
An independent political unit with a centralized authority that makes claim to sole legal, political, and economic jurisdiction over a region with defined boundaries.
What is a state or country?
This geographic area is a central point where the functions of a functional region are coordinated and directed.
What is a node?
A crop raised to be sold for profit rather than to feed the farm family and the livestock.
What are cash crops?
A disease that causes deterioration over time, such as cancer, heart disease, or stroke.
What is a degenerative disease?
This type of religion actively seeks new members and believes its message has universal importance and application.
What is a universalizing religion?
The ideal political geographical unit; one in which the nation's geographic boundaries exactly match the state's territorial boundaries.
What is a nation-state?
This geographic scale identifies and analyzes geographic phenomena within a specific country.
What is National Scale Analysis?
A land survey system created by the U.S. Land Ordinance of 1785, which divides most of the country's territory into a grid of square-shaped townships with 6-mile sides.
What is the township and range system?
People who today subscribe to the Malthusian view of population
Who are neo-Maltusians?
A functional, rational, and orderly style for building designs.
What is modernist architecture?
The set of economic and political strategies by which wealthy and powerful countries indirectly maintain or extend their influence over less wealthy areas.
What is neocolonialism?
This formerly accepted geographic concept states that the physical environment is the dominant force shaping cultures and that humanity is a passive product of its physical surroundings.
What is Environmental Determinism?
A farming operation where the owner doesn't live on the land and relies on hired labor or outsourced operations to manage the farm's day-to-day activities.
What is a suitcase farm?
Increase in food production resulting from the use of new farming methods.
What is the Boserup effect?
The feeling resulting from the standardization of the built environment; occurs where local distinctiveness is erased and many places end up with similar cultural landscapes.
What is placelessness?
A political boundary that developed with the cultural landscape.
What is a subsequent boundary?
A map projection that avoids shape distortion and the restrictions of a rectangular map by creating "interruptions" in the map's continuity; in each section, map projection regions are shown "equally", like an orange peel being laid out in a flat surface.
What is the Goode homolosine projection?
A measure of the concentration of dissolved salts in the soil.
What is soil salinity?
When migrants move back and forth between their home countries and those to which they have migrated.
What is transnational migration?
A type of faith that subscribes to the idea that souls or spirits exist not only in humans, but also in animals, plants, rocks, natural phenomena such as thunder, geographic features such as mountains or rivers, and other entities of the natural environment.
What is an animistic religion?
Abrupt slopes that break up the general continuity of the terrain.
What are escarpments?