AP Human Geography Chapter 1 Vocab
Terms
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- Geography
- The scientific study of the location of people and activities across the Earth's surface, the resons for their distribution, the organization of material by place, and the analysis of regional similarities and differences.
- Map
- A two-dimensional, or falt representation of the Earth's surface, or a portion of it. It can be used to show physical traits of the lanscape, or to display thematics data.
- Cartography
- The science of making maps. In the past most were made largely by hand but, with computers and software, they are now mostly created electronically.
- Scale
- The relationship between the size of an object on a map, and that object's truee dimensions on the Earth. Large-scale maps show more detail for small areas; small-scale maps show less detail for larger areas.
- Projection
- The system used to transfer locations from the globe onto a map. Projections distort the shape, distance, relatice size, or direction of the Earth. Some projections minimize one or more types of distortion.
- Equal Area Projection
- A projection maintaining the realative areas of the Earth.
- Mercator Projection
- It is computed so all meridians and parallels intersecting at right angles distorting land areas in polar regions while maintaining direction.
- Remote Sensing
- The process by which images (captured by electronic equipment in satellites and airplanes) can be used to observe and analyze the Earth's surface.
- Geographic Information System (GIS)
- Computer software that facilitates the storage, retrieval, analysis, and display of geographic data, usually as an intgrated series of map coveragtes (layers)
- Global Positioning System (GPS)
- Satellite projection of times to hand held GPS units which triangulate a horizontal and vertical location.
- Enviornment Determinism
- An approach to the study of geograpy (very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century) which argued that general laws sought by human geogrpahers could be found using approached developed in the physical science. Geography was, therefore, the study of how physical enviornmnet determined human activities.