WGU - Introduction to Geography
Physical geography - ANS-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 - ANS-Studies human groups and their activities, such as language,
industry, and the building of cities; it is a social science.
Cartography - ANS-Mapmaking.
Remote sensing - ANS-Mapping Earth from satellites and aircraft.
Geographic information systems (GIS) - ANS-For storing, displaying, and analyzing
geographic data.
Regional geography - ANS-Describes and analyzes places in terms of categories such
as local population, customs, politics, economy, and religion.
Topical or systematic geography - ANS-The geography of climate, water, vegetation, or
minerals.
Site - ANS-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 - ANS-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 - ANS-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 - ANS-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 - ANS-Areas defined by one or more distinctive characteristics or features,
such as climate, soil type, language, or economic activity.
, Formal region - ANS-One that exhibits essential uniformity in one or more physical or
cultural features, such as a climate type or language area.
Functional region - ANS-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 - ANS-Vernacular means "everyday language," and vernacular
regions are defined by widespread popular perception of their existence by people
within or outside them.
Spatial analysis - ANS-Looks for patterns in the distribution of human actions,
environmental processes, and interactions among and between places or regions.
Distribution - ANS-Its position, placement, or arrangement throughout space.
Density - ANS-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 - ANS-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 - ANS-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
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