Lecture notes for Mr. English's World Geography class

1. The Study of Geography
Understanding the World We Live In

2. Objectives
• Students will explain how geographers use tools
to understand the world.
• Students will identify and discuss the
importance of the five themes of geography.

3. Vocabulary I
• geography - the study of the earth’s surface and
the processes that shape it, the connections
between places and the complex relationships
between people and their environments
• absolute location - the position on the earth in
which a place can be found
• relative location - the position of a place in
relation to another place

4. Vocabulary II
• hemisphere - a half of the earth; the Equator
divides the Northern and Southern hemispheres;
the Prime Meridian divides the Eastern and
Western hemispheres
• perception - a viewpoint that is influenced by
one’s own culture and experiences
• character of a place - the physical and human
characteristics that help to distinguish a place
from other places

5. Geographic Tools
• Living in an ever-changing world, humans develop
tools to better understand those changes
• Geography is the study that helps us track those
changes
• most important is the ability to examine those
changes from many perspectives
• Use of modern technology helps us track many
changes
• SONAR (ocean floor), Landsat (remote sensing),
GPS, GIS (geographic information systems)

6. Geographic Concepts
• Think in terms of how the earth is ever changing
(both in terms of it’s own change and how
humans change it)
• Maps, charts and so on
help describe those changes
• So do geographic concepts
• Process of thinking geographically leads to
understanding of our world and our place in it

7. The Five Themes
• Geographers think of our world in 5 basic
themes
• Location
• Place
• Regions
• Movement
• Human-Environment Interaction
• MR. HELP

8. Location: Absolute
• Usually the first step to identifying a place -
finding it’s location
• Absolute location is it’s position on the globe
• Latitude and longitude
• Latitude: imaginary lines that run parallel to
the Equator (line that divides the Earth into
two hemispheres - north and south)
• Longitude: imaginary lines that run between
poles starting at Prime Meridian

10. Relative Location
• Relative location - describes where something is
in relation to other places
• St. Louis is several
hundred miles east
of Kansas City
• 1850 - trip would
take a week or so;
2012 - 4-5 hour by
car (less than an
hour by plane)

11. Place
• How is a particular place
unique?
• Things that define this are
both physical characteristics
and human characteristics -
the character of a place
• Physical: terrain, ecosystems,
climate, so on
• Human: Culture, numbers of
people living, working,
economy

12. Regions
• Those characteristics of a group of places with at
least one common factor
• Boundaries or definitions of a particular region
usually depend on the perceptions based on
culture and experience
• Broken down into three
types of regions: formal,
functional, perceptual

13. Formal Regions
• Certain characteristics are found throughout the
area
• Political regions - states, countries, cities ---
boundaries that have common laws
• Other common
characteristics - Wheat
Belt
• Chinatown

14. Functional Regions
• Central place and the
surrounding places affected
by it
• Amazon drainage basin in
South America
• Dallas-Fort Worth
• Northeast Mega-Region

15. Perceptual Regions
• Defined by people’s feelings and attitudes about
areas
• Kansas: MidWest or
Great Plains?
• Mexico: North
America or Central
and South America?

16. Movement
• Movement of people, culture, goods will change
the overall definition of an area
• New Orleans: Founded in 1700s - port city at the
base of the Mississippi River
• 1800s - Railroad changed the needs of
transportation
• 1900s - Limited importance in
local economy, adapted by late
1900s (tourism, oil & gas
production)

17. Human-Environment Interaction
• How do people use their environment? How does that
impact the landscape and how people respond to that
change?
• Thousands of years: Proximity to water determined
where civilization grew - Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc.
• Why do millions of people live in Phoenix, Arizona?