6 Themes of Geography
Latitude and longitude, street addresses, and descriptions of where something is found relate to this theme.
What is location?
Mountains, rivers, climate, vegetation, and wildlife are all examples of this type of characteristic of a place.
What are physical characteristics?
An area organized around a central point, such as all the towns that receive the same TV station or travel to the same major city for services, is this type of region.
What is a functional region?
Humans build a dam that changes the flow of a river. This represents this type of human/environment interaction.
What is modification?
This ridiculous-sounding word can describe someone who is silly, flighty, or extremely talkative.
What is a flibbertigibbet?
Geographers use this theme when they group areas together because they share common physical or human characteristics.
What is region?
Language, religion, architecture, population, and economic activity are examples of this other type of characteristic.
What are human characteristics?
The United States and Canada share these five enormous freshwater lakes along part of their border.
The United States and Canada share these five enormous freshwater lakes along part of their border.
People put on heavy coats and boots during a South Dakota blizzard but return to different clothing when the weather warms. This short-term response is an example of this.
What is accommodation?
This word means crooked, diagonal, sideways, or just generally not where it is supposed to be.
What is cattywampus?
Asking “What is it like there?” including its physical and human characteristics, focuses on this theme.
What is place?
Cold winters, vast forests, thousands of lakes, and mountainous areas would all describe this type of characteristic of Canada.
What are physical characteristics?
"The South” and “the Midwest” do not have universally agreed-upon boundaries, and people may disagree about which states belong. These are this type of region.
What are vernacular regions?
Over generations, a population's way of life changes to better handle the climate and environmental conditions where they live. This long-term adjustment is called this.
What is adaptation?
In this rodeo event, a rider attempts to stay aboard a bucking horse for eight seconds without using a saddle.
What is bareback riding?
The spread of people, products, information, and ideas from one location to another is studied under this theme.
What is movement?
A geographer describes a Canadian city by discussing the languages people speak, the types of jobs they have, and how densely populated the city is. The geographer is describing these.
What are human characteristics of place?
A geographer creates a “Corn Belt” based on where corn production is especially important. Unlike a region defined by political borders, this type of region is based on a shared characteristic.
What is a formal region?
Farmers use irrigation systems to bring water into dry areas so crops can grow. Because humans are physically changing the environment, this is an example of this.
What is modification?
Before it was officially released as Roblox, the project originally went by this extremely school-sounding name: Dyna_____.
What is DynaBlocks?
Words such as north, south, above, below, near, far, left, and right help geographers describe how things are arranged or positioned. These belong to this theme.
What are spatial terms?
A student writes: “This area has snowy winters, mountains, ski resorts, highways, and several large cities.” Identify two physical and two human characteristics from that description.
Physical: snowy winters and mountains
Human: ski resorts, highways, or cities
Someone groups the United States and Canada together because both are wealthy, highly developed countries in North America. In geography, grouping places according to shared characteristics creates this.
What is a region?
Identify all three types of interaction:
A) Wearing a winter coat during the cold months
B) A population making long-term changes in how it lives because of its environment
C) Building a canal to redirect water
What are A) accommodation, B) adaptation, and C) modification?
This animal's fingerprints are so similar to human fingerprints that they can be difficult to tell apart.
What is a koala?