Maps, Scale, and Tech
In a store's sales database, this piece of customer information (not number of transactions or dollar totals) is what a GIS would actually use to map where customers are coming from.
What is ZIP code?
According to World Bank data on secondary school enrollment, most countries below 70% enrollment are found on this continent.
What is Africa (sub-Saharan Africa)?
A rise in electric vehicle use is a strong example of this concept, since it reduces pollution from emissions.
What is sustainability?
To compare one urban neighborhood's demographics with other neighborhoods across the whole country, this is the smallest, most useful scale of analysis.
What is the census tract (enumeration area)?
This type of region is defined by having uniformity in one or more physical or human characteristics.
What is a formal region?
Every map projection has some degree of distortion because of this basic geometric problem.
What is a curved surface (Earth) cannot be represented on a flat surface without distortion?
This decennial nationwide survey is the main data source behind market research reports and voter profiles like household size, age, and homeownership.
What is the (U.S.) Census?
This is the core assumption of environmental determinism — what the physical environment does to human culture.
What is controls human culture?
Comparing population density maps of Michigan by county versus the U.S. by state shows how this factor can change the "truth" a map reveals.
What is scale of inquiry/analysis?
A formal culture region is set apart from other region types by having this — a specific, selected feature or internal uniformity, without gradations like core/domain/sphere.
What is a selected feature (or internal uniformity)?
On this map projection, meridians are drawn as straight, evenly-spaced vertical lines, causing high-latitude landmasses like Greenland and Antarctica to appear far larger than they really are.
What is a Mercator projection?
Of everything collected on a census form, this is the one voter-related statistic a polling company could actually map — unlike party affiliation, past votes, or future intentions.
What is the number of voting-age residents per household?
Environmental determinists believed settlements in this type of climate zone were the most productive.
What are temperate regions?
When national, state, metro, city, and borough-level income data all tell a different story, this is the safest conclusion to draw.
What is comparing data across different scales can lead to a flawed analysis?
Because they're organized around a central point (a river mouth, a dairy farm) and defined by connections like water flow or delivery distance, watersheds and milksheds are both this type of region.
What is a functional region?
Of these scales — 1:3,000,000, 1:1,000,000, 1:750,000, and 1:10,000 — this one would best show the fine landscape details of a farming community.
What is 1:10,000?
This world region is projected to have the fastest-growing working-age population between 2015 and 2030, making it attractive to labor-intensive factories.
What is Sub-Saharan Africa?
Golf courses in the UAE desert, Dutch dikes and polders, and China's Three Gorges Dam all illustrate this human–environment theory in action.
What is possibilism?
Deciding where to open a new factory or which market to expand into using neighborhood-level ethnic data is a decision made at this scale.
What is the local (neighborhood) scale?
"The American West" and "The American Midwest" are classic examples of this type of region, defined by people's shared perceptions rather than official boundaries.
What are vernacular (perceptual) regions?
This satellite-based system uses at least 24 orbiting objects transmitting time-coded radio signals, letting you find your absolute location anywhere on Earth.
What is GPS (a satellite navigation system)?
This type of organization would most likely use maps of Singapore's ethnic-neighborhood makeup to guide decisions within its market area.
What is a business analyzing demographic patterns/change in its market?
This theory is best illustrated by the idea that humans can modify and adapt their landscape through technology and culture, rather than being controlled by it.
What is possibilism?
When a country's overall enrollment rate looks high but individual regions within it look very different, this is what's being revealed.
What is a spatial pattern (regional variation within a larger scale)?
In Singapore, this ethnic group makes up the majority across most of the city's core neighborhoods, while the other two major groups cluster in peripheral areas.
What is the Chinese population?