GEOG100 - FINAL

Physical geography

A branch of geography dealing with Earth's natural processes and their outcomes

Geographical imagination

A capacity that allows us to understand changing patterns, processes, and relationships among people, places, and regions

Biometric census

A census in which individuals are photographed and fingerprinted to create a national database

Spatial interaction

A collective term for all kinds of movements and flows involving human activity

Landscape

A comprehensive product of human action such that every landscape is a complex repository of society

Environmental determinism

A doctrine holding that human activities are shaped and constrained by the environment

Capitalism

A form of economic and social organization characterized by the profit motive and the control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods by private ownership

Cohort

A group of individuals who share a common temporal demographic experience

Demographic transition

A model of population change in which high birth and death rates are replaced by low birth and death rates

Density

A numerical measure of the relationship between the number of people and some other unit of interest expressed as a ratio

Eco-migration

A population movement caused by the degradation of land and essential natural resources

Staples thesis

A proposition arguing that the export of Canada's natural resources, or staples, locked this country into dependency as a resource hinterland for more advanced economies and so delayed the maturing of its own economy

Age-sex pyramid

A representation of the population based on its composition according to age and sex

Minisystem

A society with a single cultural base and a reciprocal social economy

Place

A specific geographic setting with distinctive physical, social, and cultural attributes

Hydraulic empire

A state in which despotic rulers organized labour-intensive irrigation and drainage schemes that allowed for significant increases in agricultural productivity

Global Positioning System (GPS)

A system of satellites that orbit Earth on precisely predictable paths, broadcasting highly accurate time and locational information

Map projection

A systematic rendering on a flat surface of the geographic coordinates of the features found on Earth's surface

Region

A territory that encompasses many places, all or most of which share similar attributes that are distinct from the attributes of places elsewhere

Sense of place

Feelings evoked among people as a result of the experiences and memories that they associate with a place and the symbolism they attach to it

Hearth areas

Geographic settings where new practices have developed and from which they have spread

Digital divide

Inequality of access to telecommunications and information technology, particularly the Internet

Geodemographic research

Investigation using census data and commercial data (such as sales data and property records) about the populations of small districts to create profiles of those populations for market research

Climate change

Is defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as "a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/ or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. It refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity."

Plantations

Large landholdings that usually specialize in the production of one particular crop for market

Conformal Projections

Map projections on which compass bearings are rendered accurately

Equal-area (equivalent) projections

Map projections that portray areas on Earth's surface in their true proportions

Equidistant projections

Map projections that represent distance accurately in only one direction (usually north-south), although they usually provide accurate scale in the perpendicular direction (which in most cases is the equator)

World-empire

Minisystems that have been absorbed into a common political system while retaining their fundamental cultural differences

Commodity chains

Networks of labour and production processes beginning with the extraction or production of raw materials and ending with the delivery of a finished commodity

Risk society

Notion of a society in which the significance of wealth distribution is being eclipsed by the distribution of risk and in which politics—both domestic and international—is increasingly about avoiding hazards

Fast world

People, places, and regions directly involved, as producers and consumers, in transnational industry, modern telecommunications, materialistic consumption, and international news and entertainment

Slow world

People, places, and regions whose participation in transnational industry, modern telecommunications, materialistic consumption, and international news and entertainment is limited

Leadership cycles

Periods of international power established by individual states through economic, political, and military competition

Cognitive Images (Mental Maps)

Psychological representations of locations that are created from people's individual ideas and impressions of these locations

External arenas

Regions of the world not yet absorbed into the modern world-system

Semiperipheral regions

Regions that are able to exploit peripheral regions but are themselves exploited and dominated by core regions

Core regions

Regions that dominate trade, control the most advanced technologies, and have high levels of productivity within diversified economies

Functional regions (nodal regions)

Regions that, while they may exhibit some variability in certain attributes, share an overall coherence in structure and economic, political, and social organization

Peripheral regions

Regions with dependent and disadvantageous trading relationships, obsolete technologies, and undeveloped or narrowly specialized economies with low levels of productivity

Symbolic landscapes

Representations of particular values or aspirations that the builders and financiers of those landscapes want to impart to a larger public

Intersubjectivity

Shared meanings that are derived from everyday practice

Cognitive space

Space defined and measured in terms of people's values, feelings, beliefs, and perceptions about places and regions

Areal Units

Spatial units of measurement, such as a city block or province, used for recording statistics

Spatial justice

The fairness of the distribution of society's burdens and benefits, taking into account spatial variations in people's needs and in their contributions to the production of wealth and social well-being

Regionalization

The geographer's equivalent of scientific classification, with individual places or areal units being the objects of classification

Baby boom

The increased number of births in the two decades following World War II

Globalization

The increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world through common processes of economic, environmental, political, and cultural change

Sustainability

The interdependence of the economy, the environment, and social well-being

Situation

The location of a place relative to other places and human activities

Doubling time

The measure of how long it will take the population of an area to grow to twice its current size

Dependency ratio

The measure of the economic impact of the young and old on the more economically productive members of the population

Human geography

The study of the spatial organization of human activity and of people's relationships with their environments

Regional geography

The study of the ways in which unique combinations of environmental and human factors produce territories with distinctive landscapes and cultural attributes

Lifeworld

The taken-for-granted pattern and context for everyday living through which people conduct their day-to-day lives without conscious attention

Law of diminishing returns

The tendency for productivity to decline with the continued application of capital and/or labour to a given resource base

Arithmetic density (crude density)

The total number of people divided by the total land area

Crude density (arithmetic density)

The total number of people divided by the total land area

Infrastructure (fixed social capital)

The underlying framework of services and amenities needed to facilitate productive activity (e.g., canals, railways, harbour installations, roads, and bridges)

Utility

The usefulness of a specific place or location to a particular person or group

Spatial diffusion

The way in which things spread through space and over time

Pandemic

An epidemic that spreads rapidly around the world with high rates of illness and death

Sectionalism

An extreme devotion to regional interests and customs

World-system

An interdependent system of countries linked by economic and political competition

Geographic Information System (GIS)

An organized set of computer hardware, software, and spatially coded data that is designed to capture, store, update, manipulate, and display spatially referenced information

Staples trap

An over-reliance on the export of staples, which makes an economy (national or regional) vulnerable to fluctuations in world prices and without alternatives when resource depletion occurs

Technology systems

Clusters of interrelated energy, transportation, and production technologies that dominate economic activity for several decades at a time

Transnational corporations (TNCs)

Companies with investments and activities that span international boundaries and with subsidiary companies, factories, offices, or facilities in several countries

Import substitution

Copying and making goods previously available only by trading

Economies of scale

Cost advantages to manufacturers that accrue from high-volume production, since the average cost of production falls with increasing output

Hegemony

Domination over the world economy exercised by one national state in a particular historical epoch through a combination of economic, military, financial, and cultural means

Neo-colonialism

Economic and political strategies by which powerful states in core economies indirectly maintain or extend their influence over other areas or people

Longitude

The angular distance of a point on Earth's surface, measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds east or west from the prime meridian (the line that passes through both poles and through Greenwich, England, which is assigned a value of 0°)

Latitude

The angular distance of a point on Earth's surface, measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds north or south of the equator, which is assigned a value of 0°

Cartography

The art and science of making maps

Irredentism

The assertion by the government of a country that a minority living outside its formal borders belongs to it historically and culturally

Ethnocentrism

The attitude that a person's own race and culture are superior to those of others

Demographics

The characteristics of a human population including elements such as gender, race, age, income, disabilities, educational attainment, and migration patterns among different groups and death rates among others

Regionalism

The coexistence of different religious or ethnic groups with distinctive identities within the same state boundaries, often concentrated within a particular region and sharing strong feelings of collective identity

Remote sensing

The collection of information about parts of Earth's surface by means of aerial photography or satellite imagery designed to record data on visible, infrared, and microwave sensor systems

Topological space

The connections between, or connectivity of, particular points in space

Census

The count of the number of people in a country, region, or city

Imperialism

The deliberate exercise of military power and economic influence by powerful states in order to advance and secure their national interests

Friction of distance

The deterrent or inhibiting effect of distance on human activity

Cognitive Distance

The distance that people perceive to exist in a given situation

Colonialism

The establishment and maintenance of political and legal domination by a state over a separate society

Ordinary landscapes (vernacular landscapes)

The everyday landscapes that people create in the course of their lives

Crude death rate (CDR)

The number of deaths in a single year for every thousand people in the population

Accessibility

The opportunity for contact or interaction from a given point or location in relation to other locations

Site

The physical attributes of a location—its terrain, soil, vegetation, and water sources, for example

Colonization

The physical settlement in a new territory of people from a colonizing state

Distance-decay function

The rate at which a particular activity or process diminishes with increasing distance

Time-space convergence

The rate at which places move closer together in travel or communication time or costs

Crude birth rate (CBR)

The ratio of the number of live births in a single year for every thousand people in the population

Identity

The sense a person makes of himself or herself through their subjective feelings based on their everyday experiences and social relations

Comparative advantage

The specialization of a country in an economic activity that does not duplicate or compete with the domestic suppliers within core countries

Division of labour

The specialization of different people, regions, or countries in particular kinds of economic activities

Hinterland

The sphere of economic influence of a town or city

Spatial analysis

The study of many geographic phenomena in terms of their arrangement as points, lines, areas, or surfaces on a map

Demography

The study of the characteristics of human populations