Geography
What the exam tests
Map and spatial reasoning, human-environment interaction, population and migration, and regional analysis.
Core rules and concepts
- Five themes: location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, region.
- Latitude controls climate through insolation; altitude, ocean currents, and continentality modify it.
- Projections trade off: Mercator preserves shape and direction but inflates high-latitude area; equal-area projections preserve area but distort shape; Robinson is a compromise.
- Demographic transition: high birth and death rates, falling death rates, falling birth rates, then low/low. Population pyramids show age structure and dependency ratios.
- Push-pull factors drive migration; intervening obstacles such as borders and cost matter.
- Plate boundaries: divergent (ridges), convergent (mountains, subduction, earthquakes), transform (faults).
- Urban models (Burgess concentric zone, Hoyt sector) describe land use and fit U.S. cities better than others.
Worked example
On a Mercator map, Greenland appears roughly the size of Africa. Mercator stretches latitude and longitude equally, so area inflation grows toward the poles. Greenland is about 2.2 million square kilometers; Africa is about 30 million - roughly fourteen times larger. A student judging size from that map will be wrong; use an equal-area projection or coordinate estimates.
Traps
Treating a projection as "wrong" rather than fit for a purpose; confusing weather with climate; assuming population growth is driven mainly by birth rates when death-rate decline usually starts the transition.