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