WGU - Introduction to Geography Exam with complete verified solutions 2024

Physical geography Studies the characteristics of the physical environment. When geography concentrates on topics such as climate, soil , and vegetation, it is a natural science. Human geography Studies human groups and their activities, such as language, industry, and the building of cities; it is a social science. Cartography Mapmaking. Remote sensing Mapping Earth from satellites and aircraft. Geographic information systems (GIS) For storing, displaying, and analyzing geographic data. Regional geography Describes and analyzes places in terms of categories such as local population, customs, politics, economy, and religion. Topical or systematic geography The geography of climate, water, vegetation, or minerals. Site Describes the exact location of a place and can be described either in terms of latitude and longitude or in terms of the characteristics of the place. Situation The location of a place relative to other places, and knowledge of a place's situation helps us understand how it interacts with the rest of the world. Relative location Location in reference to another place. Relative location may describe accessibility, which is indicated by terms such as nearer and farther, easier or more difficult to reach, between, and on the way or out of the way. Globalization Many activities have expanded their scale of organization to cover the whole globe, which is a process called globalization. Economic globalization has far outpaced cultural or political integration. Regions Areas defined by one or more distinctive characteristics or features, such as climate, soil type, language, or economic activity. Formal region One that exhibits essential uniformity in one or more physical or cultural features, such as a climate type or language area. Functional region One defined by interactions among places, such as trade or communication. The city of Chicago, for example, is a formal region, whose government covers the legal limits of the city's incorporation. The many commuters and shoppers who circulate daily throughout the city and its suburbs, however, would more readily identify a region larger than Chicago; they would identify the functional region of the Chicago metropolitan area, or "Chicagoland," which includes parts of Illinois, Indiana, and even Wisconsin. The desire of people in northwest Indiana to be in the same time zone as Chicago confirms that northwest Indiana is part of the Chicago functional region. Vernacular region Vernacular means "everyday language," and vernacular regions are defined by widespread popular perception of their existence by people within or outside them. Spatial analysis Looks for patterns in the distribution of human actions, environmental processes, and interactions among and between places or regions. Distribution Its position, placement, or arrangement throughout space. Density The frequency of occurrence of a phenomenon in relation to geographic area, usually expressed as a number per square kilometer or square mile. Examples include road density (the number of kilometers of roads per square kilometer) and population density (the number of people per square kilometer). Concentration The distribution of a phenomenon within a given area is described by concentration. If all the occurrences are found in close proximity, the distribution would be described as concentrated, but if they are scattered far from each other, the distribution would be described as dispersed. For example, in many parts of the world farmers live in villages and travel to their fields in the countryside. The population of such an agricultural landscape is concentrated in villages. In North America, on the other hand, most farmers live in isolated farmhouses located on the land they farm, so the population is dispersed. Pattern Refers to the geometric arrangement of objects within an area. For example, in most modern cities, streets are arranged in a rectangular grid pattern, whereas in older cities the street layout is more irregular. In areas where rock structures exert strong controls on stream erosion, we sometimes see streams with many right-angle bends; this pattern is called a trellis pattern. Conversely, in areas without structural control, streams and their tributaries form branching or treelike patterns, called dendritic patterns. Friction of distance No matter how we choose to measure distance, we must make some effort to overcome distance when we want to move or transport items. We call that effort or cost the friction of distance. The friction of distance usually limits interactions across great distances. However, the growing importance of communication as a means of economic interaction, and the growth of communication technologies, are dramatically changing the way we think about distance and its role in geography. Distance decay The presence or impact of any phenomenon may diminish away from its origin, just as the volume of a sound diminishes the further it gets from its source. The further you are from a city, for example, the less likely you are to go there for shopping or recreation, and the less likely you are to be interested in things that happen there. Medical geographers have long noted that the frequency of patient visits to a doctor or clinic decreases with distance. People who live nearer the doctor's office are likely to visit more often than people who live farther away. This is especially important in poorer countries where there are fewer doctors, most of whom are located in cities and towns. Poorer populations living in the countryside must travel a long way for a doctor. The "friction of distance," measured in time and cost, means many poor or rural people go without regular health care. Relocation diffusion Relocation diffusion occurs when people or things move between two points. A nomadic tribe, for example, might wander until it finds a physical environment similar to the one that it left, and then the tribe might settle down. The ancestors of today's Hungarians wandered all the way from Central Asia to the plains of today's Hungary. The ideas and practices they brought with them were spread by relocation diffusion. Contiguous, or contagious, diffusion Contiguous, or contagious, diffusion occurs from one place to a neighboring place through direct contact. Contagious disease provides an obvious example of how a virus can spread between people and communities that are contiguous or next to each other. Culture and innovation can also spread by contiguous diffusion as ideas are passed from one area to another without population relocation. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the music styles of rock and roll and heavy metal that had developed in Western Europe and North America diffused into the communist countries of Eastern Europe and Russia. Albums and bootleg recordings were secretly passed among friends because government officials censored music they deemed threatening to the regime. Movies and books also spread Western ideas in these countries. A similar diffusion is taking place today under culturally oppressive governments like Iran and Saudi Arabia where western music and film are enjoyed privately, now often spread through the Internet, out of sight of the government censors. Hierarchical diffusion Sometimes diffusion does not occur contiguously across space, but downward or upward in a hierarchy of organization. When such hierarchical diffusion is mapped, it shows up as a network of spots, rather than as an inkblot, spreading across a map. The Roman Catholic Church illustrates both an organizational hierarchy and a geographic hierarchy, with lower level regions reporting to higher level regions. Model A model is an ideal