World Geography Review

World Regional Geography Chapter 1 • Agriculture - the practice of producing food and other products through animal husbandry, or the raising of animals, and the cultivation of plants. • Authoritarianism - a political system that subordinates individual freedom to the power of the state or of elite regional and local leaders. • Birth rate - the number of births per 1000 people in a given population, per unit of time (usually per year). • Capitalism – an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, driven by the profit motive and characterized by a competitive marketplace; an economic system characterized by privately owned businesses and industrial firms that adjust prices and output to match the demands of the market. • Carrying Capacity - the maximum number of people that a given territory can support sustainably with food, water, and other essential resources. • Cartographers - geographer who specializes in depicting geographic information on maps. • Climate change - a slow shifting of climate patterns due to the general cooling or warming of the atmosphere. • Climate - the long-term balance of temperature and precipitation that characteristically prevails in a particular region. • Culture - all the ideas, materials, and institutions that people have invented to use to live on Earth that are not directly part of our biological inheritance. • Death rate - the ratio of total deaths to total population in a specified community, usually expressed in numbers per 1000 or in percentages. • Democratization - the transition toward political systems guided by competitive elections. • Development - an inexact concept typically referring to the shift from primary activities to secondary, tertiary, and quaternary activities. • Domestication - the process whereby humans used selective breeding to develop plants and animals for use as food, construction materials, and sources of energy, or to improve life in other ways. • Ecological footprint - the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to sustain a person at the current average standard of living for a given population. • Ethnic group - a group of people who share a common ancestry and sense of common history, a set of beliefs, a way of life, a technology, and usually a common geographic location of origin. • Extraction - mining, forestry, and agriculture (the primary sector). • Floodplain - the flat land around a river where sediment is deposited during flooding. • Food security - the ability of a society to consistently supply a sufficient amount of basic food to the entire population; when people consistently have access to sufficient amounts of food to maintain a healthy life. • Free trade - the unrestricted international exchange of goods, services, and capital. • Gender - the ways a particular social group defines the differences between the sexes. • Gender Roles - the socially assigned roles for males and females although exceptions and variations exist. • Global economy - the worldwide system in which goods, services, and labor are exchanged. • Globalization - the growth of worldwide linkages and the changes these linkages are bringing about in daily life, especially in economies, but also in cultural and biological spheres. • Green Revolution - increases in food production brought about through the use of new seeds, fertilizers, mechanized equipment, irrigation, pesticides, and herbicides. • Greenhouse gases (GHG) - gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, released into the atmosphere by human activities, which become harmful when released in excessive amounts. • Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita - the total market value of all goods and services produced within a particular country’s borders and within a given year, divided by the number of people in the country. • Gross National Income (GNI) per capita - the sum of a country’s gross domestic product plus all net income received from overseas, divided by the mid-year population. • Human geography - the study of patterns and processes that have shaped human understanding, use, and alteration of Earth’s surface. • Human well-being - various measures of the extent to which people are able to obtain a healthy and socially rewarding standard of living in an environment that is safe and sustainable. • Immigration - in-migration to a place or country. • Industrial Revolution - a series of innovations and ideas that occurred broadly between 1750 and 1850, which changed the way goods were manufactured. • Landforms - physical features of Earth’s surface, such as mountain ranges, river valleys, basins, and cliffs. • Latitude - the distance in degrees north or south of the equator; lines of latitude run parallel to the equator, and are also called parallels. • Less developed countries (LDC) - countries that have labor-intensive and lowwage, often agricultural, economies. • Longitude - the distance in degrees east and west of Greenwich, England; lines of longitude, also called meridians, run from pole to pole (the line of longitude at Greenwich is 0° and is known as the prime meridian). • Map projections - the various ways of showing the spherical Earth on a flat surface. • Migration - the movement of people from one place or country to another, often for safety or economic reasons. • More developed countries (MDCs) - countries that have economies often generated by tertiary and quaternary sectors and that generally provide adequate education, health care, and other social services to help their people contribute to economic development. • Multicultural society - a society in which many culture groups live in close association. • Orographic rainfall - rainfall produced when a moving moist air mass encounters a mountain range, rises, cools, and releases condensed moisture that falls as rain. • Physical geography - the study of Earth’s physical processes: how they work and interact, how they affect humans, and how they are affected by humans. • Plate tectonics - the scientific theory that Earth’s surface is composed of large plates that float on top of an underlying layer of molten rock; the movement and interaction of the plates create many of the large features of Earth’s surface, particularly mountains. • Political freedoms - the rights and capacities that support individual and collective liberty and public participation in political decision making. • Population pyramid - a graph that depicts the age and sex structures of a political unit, usually a country. • Primary sector - economic activity based on extracting resources (mining, forestry, and agriculture). • Quaternary sector - economic activities based on intellectual pursuits in education, research, and information technology. • Race - a social or political construct that is based on apparent characteristics such as skin color, hair texture, and face and body shape, but that is of no biological significance. • Region - a unit of Earth’s surface that contains distinct patterns of physical features and/or distinct patterns of human development. • Scale (of a map) - the proportion that relates the dimensions of the map to the dimensions of the area it represents; also, variable-sized units of geographical analysis from the local scale to the regional scale to the global scale. • Secondary sector - economic activity based on processing, manufacturing, and construction. • Spatial distribution - the arrangement of a phenomenon across Earth’s surface. • Spatial interaction - the flow of goods, people, services, or information across space and among places. • Subsistence economy - an economy in which families produce most of their own food, clothing, and shelter. • Sustainable agriculture - farming that meets human needs without poisoning the environment or using up water and soil resources. • Sustainable development - the improvement of current standards of living in ways that will not jeopardize those of future generations. • Tertiary sector - economic activity based on sales, entertainment, and financial services. • United Nations (UN) - an assembly of 193-member states that sponsors programs and agencies that focus on economic development, security, general health and well-being, democratization, peacekeeping assistance in hot spots around the world, humanitarian aid, and scientific research. • United Nations Gender Development Index (GDI) rank - a composite measure of disparity in human development (longevity, education, and income) by gender. The closer the rank is to 1, the smaller the gap between women and men; that is, the more that the genders are tending toward equality. • United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) - an index that calculates a country’s level of well-being, based on a formula of factors that considers income adjusted to PPP, data on life expectancy at birth, and data on educational attainment. • Urbanization - the process whereby cities, towns, and suburbs grow as populations shift from rural to urban livelihoods. • Water footprint - all the water a person consumes, including both virtual water and the water they consume directly. • Weather - the short-term and spatially limited expression of climate that can change in a matter of minutes. Chapter 2 • Agribusiness - the business of farming conducted by large-scale operations that purchase, produce, finance, package, and distribute agricultural products. • Aquifers - ancient natural underground reservoirs of water. • Clear-cutting - a method of logging that involves cutting down all trees on a given plot of land regardless of age, health, or species. • Ethnicity - the quality of belonging to a particular culture group. • Gentrification - the renovation of old urban districts by affluent investors, a process that often displaces poorer residents. • Housing segregation - a common phenomenon in cities, in which ethnic or racial or economic classes live in separate neighborhoods and the segregation is maintained by discriminatory customs, not lawn. • Infrastructure - road, rail, and communication networks and other facilities necessary for economic activity. • Latino - a term used to refer to all Spanish-speaking people from Middle and South America, although their ancestors may have been European, African, Asian, or Native American. • North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - a free trade agreement made in 1994 that added Mexico to the 1989 economic arrangement between the United States and Canada. • Social safety net - the services provided by the government—such as welfare, unemployment benefits, and health care—that prevent people from falling into extreme poverty. • Suburbs - populated areas along the peripheries of cities. • Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - a trade agreement signed by 12 Pacific Rim countries, including the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Chile, and Peru. • Urban sprawl - the encroachment of suburbs on agricultural land. Chapter 3 • Biodiversity - the variety of life forms to be found in a given area. • Creoles - people mostly of European descent born in the Americas. • Dictator - a ruler who claims absolute authority, governing with little respect for the law or the rights of citizens. • Ecotourism - nature-oriented vacations, often taken in endangered and remote areas usually by travelers from affluent nations. • Extended family - a family that consists of related individuals beyond the nuclear family of parents and children. • Favelas - Brazilian urban slums and shantytowns built by the poor; called colonias, barrios, or barriadas in other countries. • Income disparity - the gap in income between rich and poor. • Indigenous - native to a particular place or region. • Mestizos - people of mixed European, African, and indigenous descent. • Middle America - in the book, a region that includes Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean. • Privatization - the selling of formerly government-owned industries and firms to private companies or individuals; the sale of industries that were formerly owned and operated by the government to private companies or individuals. • Temperature-altitude zones - regions of the same latitude that vary in climate according to altitude. Chapter 4 • Asylum seekers - refugees who left their homes because of violent persecution and seek new legal status in an adopted country. • Capitalism - an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, driven by the profit motive and characterized by a competitive marketplace; an economic system characterized by privately owned businesses and industrial firms that adjust prices and output to match the demands of the market. • Communism - an ideology, based largely on the writings of the German revolutionary Karl Marx, that calls on workers to unite to overthrow capitalism and establish an egalitarian society in which workers share what they produce; as practiced, communism was actually a socialized system of public services and a centralized government and economy in which citizens participated only indirectly through Communist Party representatives. • Economic migrants - those who seek employment opportunities better than what they have at home. • European Union (EU) - a supranational organization that unites most of the countries of West, South, North, and Central Europe. • Nationalism - devotion to the interests or culture of a particular country, nation, or cultural group; the idea that a group of people living in a specific territory and sharing cultural traits should be united in a single country to which they are loyal and obedient. • North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) - a military alliance between European (including Turkey) and North American countries, developed during the Cold War to counter the influence of the Soviet Union; after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO expanded to include much of eastern Europe. NATO now focuses on providing the international security and cooperation needed to expand the European Union. • Paris Climate Agreement - The Paris Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), dealing with greenhouse-gas-emissions mitigation, adaptation, and finance, starting in the year 2020. The Paris Agreement's long-term goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels; and to limit the increase to 1.5 °C, since this would substantially reduce the risks and effects of climate change. • Post-colonial - the conditions and attitudes that persist in a society after colonization is over. • Refugees - those who have fled from their homes because of war or violent social unrest or discrimination. • Socialism - primarily an economic system in which all have access to basic goods and services and all large-scale industries are collectively owned, with any profits benefitting society as a whole. • Social protection - in Europe, tax-supported systems that provide citizens with benefits such as health care, long-term care, pensions, and relief from poverty and social exclusion. Chapter 5 • Caucasia - the mountainous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. • Cold War - a period of conflict, tension, and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union that lasted from 1945 to 1991; the contest that pitted the United States and western Europe, who were espousing free market • • • • • • • capitalism and democracy, against the USSR and its allies, who were promoting a centrally planned economy and a socialist state. Communist Party - the political organization that ruled the USSR from 1917 to 1991; other communist countries, such as China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, also have communist parties. Czar - the ruler of the Russian empire. Glasnost - literally, “openness”; the policies instituted in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev that encouraged greater transparency and openness in Soviet government and society. Mongols - a loose confederation of nomadic pastoral people centered in East and Central Asia, who by the thirteenth century had established by conquest an empire that stretched from Europe to the Pacific. Perestroika - literally, “restructuring”; the restructuring of the Soviet economic system that was done in the late 1980s in an attempt to revitalize the economy. Siberia - the territories of Russia that are located east of the Ural Mountains. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) - the multinational union formed from the Russian empire in 1922 and dissolved in 1991; commonly known as the Soviet Union. Chapter 6 • Christianity - a monotheistic religion based on the belief in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, who described God’s relationship to humans as primarily one of love and support, as exemplified by the Ten Commandments. • Desertification - a set of ecological changes that converts arid lands into deserts. • Diaspora - the dispersion of Jews around the globe after they were expelled from the Eastern Mediterranean by the Roman Empire, beginning in 73 C.E.; the term can now refer to other dispersed culture groups. • Economic diversification - the expansion of an economy to include a wider array of activities. • Fertile Crescent - an arc of lush, fertile land formed by the uplands of the Tigris and Euphrates river systems and the Zagros Mountains, where nomadic peoples began the earliest known agricultural communities. • Fossil fuel - a source of energy formed from the remains of dead plants and animals; fossil fuel includes oil, coal, and natural gas. • Islamism - a grassroots religious revival in Islam that seeks political power to curb what are seen as dangerous secular influences; also seeks to replace secular • • • • • • • • • • • • governments and civil laws with governments and laws guided by Islamic principles. Judaism - a monotheistic religion characterized by the belief in one god (Yahweh), a strong ethical code summarized in the Ten Commandments, and an enduring ethnic identity. Monotheistic - the belief system based on the idea that there is only one god. Muslims - followers of Islam. Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPT) - Palestinian lands occupied by Israel since 1967. OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) - a cartel of oilproducing countries— currently, Algeria, Angola, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Venezuela—that was established to regulate the production and price of oil. Ottoman Empire - influential Islamic empire centered in today’s Turkey that lasted from the 1200s to the early 1900s. Qur’an (or Koran) - the holy book of Islam, believed by Muslims to contain the words Allah revealed to Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel. Seawater desalination - the removal of salt from seawater— usually accomplished through the use of expensive and energy-intensive technologies— to make the water suitable for drinking or irrigating. Secular states - countries that have no state religion and in which religion has no direct influence on affairs of state or civil law. Shi’ite (or Shi’a) - the smaller of two major groups of Muslims; Shi’ites are found primarily in Iran and southern Iraq. Sunni - the larger of two major groups of Muslims. Theocratic states - countries that require all government leaders to subscribe to a state religion and all citizens to follow rules decreed by that religion.