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Agricultural Density
The Ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture.
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Anthropogenic
Human-induced changes on the natural environment
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Arithmetic Density
The total number of people divided by the total land area.
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Base Line
An east-west line designated under the Land Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate surveying and numbering of townships in the United States.
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Cartography
The science of making maps.
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Concentration
The spread of something over a given area.
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Connections
Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space.
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Contagious Diffusion
the rapid widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population.
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Cultural Ecology
Geographic approach that emphasizes human-environmental relationships
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Cultural Landscape
Fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group.
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Culture
The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people's distinct traditions.
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Density
the frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area.
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Diffusion
The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time.
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Distance Decay
The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin.
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Distribution
The arrangement of something across Earth's surface.
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Environmental Determinism
A nineteenth- and early twentieth- century approach to the study of geography that argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences. Geography was therefore the study of how the physical environment caused human activities.
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Expansion Diffusion
The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in a snowballing process.
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Formal Region (or Uniform Region or Homogeneous Region)
An area in which everyone shares in one or more distinctive characteristics.
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Functional Region (or Nodal Region)
An area organized around a node or focal point.
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Geographic Information System (GIS)
A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data.
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Global Positioning System (GPS)
A system that determines a precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers.
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Globalization
Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide scope.
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Gravity Model
A mathematical formula that describes the level of interaction between two places, based on the size of their populations and their distance from each other
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Greenwich Mean Time
The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian, or 0� longitude.
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Hearth
The region from which innovative ideas originate.
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Hierarchical Diffusion
The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places.
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International Date Line
An arc that for the most part follows 180� longitude, although it deviates in several places to avoid dividing land areas. When you cross the international date line heading east (toward America), the clock moves back 24 hours, or one entire day. when you go west (toward Asia), the calendar moves ahead one day.
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Intervening Opportunities
If one place has a demand for one good or service and two places have a supply of equal price and quality, the supplier closer to the buyer will represent an intervening opportunity, thereby blocking the third from being able to share its supply of goods or services. Intervening opportunities are frequently used because transportation costs usually decrease with proximity
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Land Ordinance of 1785
A law that divided much of the United States into a system of townships to facilitate the sale of land to settlers.
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Latitude
The numbering system used to indicate the location of parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance north and south of the equator (0 �).
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Longitude
The numbering system used to indicate the location of parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance east and west of the prime meridian (0 �).
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Location
The position of anything on Earth's surface.
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Map
A two-dimensional, or flat, representation of Earth's surface or a portion of it.
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Mental Map
An internal representation of a portion of the Earth's surface based on what an individual knows about a place, containing personal impressions of what is in a place and where places are located.
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Meridian
An arc drawn on a map between the north and south poles.
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Parallel
A circle drawn around the globe parallel to the equator and at right angles to the meridians.
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Pattern
The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area.
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Physiological Density
The number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture.
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Place
A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular character.
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Polder
Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area.
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Possibilism
The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions, but the people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives.
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Prime Meridian
The meridian, designated as 0� longitude, which passes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwhich,England
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Principal Meridian
A north-south line designated in the Land of Ordinance of 1785 to facilitate the surveying and numbering of townships in the United States
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Projection
The system used to transfer locations from the Earth's surface to a flat map.
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Region
An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features.
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Regional Studies
An approach to geography that emphasizes the relationships among social and physical phenomena in a particular study area.
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Relocation Diffusion
the spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another.
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Remote Sensing
The acquisition of data about Earth's surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or other long-distance methods.
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Resource
A substance in the environment that is useful to people, is economically and technologically feasible to access, and is socially acceptable to use.
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Scale
Generally, the relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole. Specifically, the relationship between the size of an object on a map and the size of the actual feature on the Earth's surface.
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Site
The physical character of a place.
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Section
A square normally 1 mile on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided townships in the United States into 36 sections.
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Situation
The location of a place relative to other places.
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Space
The physical gap or interval between two objects.
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Space-Time Compression
The reduction in the time it takes to do something to a distant place, as a result of improved communications and transportation systems.
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Spatial Diffusion
The ways in which phenomena, such as technological innovations, cultural trends, or even outbreaks of diseases, travel over space
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Spatial Perspective
An intellectual framework that looks at the particular locations of a specific phenomenon, how and why that phenomenon is where it is, and finally, how it is spatially related to the phenomena in other spaces
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Stimulus Diffusion
The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected.
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Time-space Convergence
The idea that distance between some places is actually shrinking as technology enables more rapid communication and increased interaction among those places
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Tobler's "First Law of Geography"
Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things
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Toponym
The name given to a portion of the Earth's surface.
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Township
A square normally 6 miles on a side. The Land Ordinance of 1785 divided much of the United States into a series of townships.
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Transnational Corporation
A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters or shareholders are located.
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Uneven Development
The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of economy.
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Vernacular Region
An area that people believe to exist as part of their cultural identity.
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Mercator Projection
Maintains compass direction, distorts relative size of areas of landmasses
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Fuller Projection
Maintains size and shape, distorts direction
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Robinson Projection
Balance and minimizes projection errors
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Peters Projection
Equal area purposely centered in Africa
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Azimuthal Projection
Planar, and orientated around the North or South Pole
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