Praxis Geography flashcards
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31 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Formal region
- An area whose residents or environment share one or more measurable, uniform traits, such as a climate zone, a language area, or a wheat belt. Boundaries are drawn where the trait changes.
- Functional region
- A nodal area organized around a central point and the flows that connect to it, such as a metropolitan commuter shed, a watershed draining to one river, or a newspaper's delivery area.
- Perceptual (vernacular) region
- An area defined by popular image or cultural identity rather than precise measurement, such as 'the Midwest' or 'Dixie.' Its boundaries vary by who is asked and are not fixed.
- Contagious diffusion
- Expansion diffusion in which a trait spreads outward through direct person-to-person contact among nearby places, like a disease outbreak or a local fashion trend moving across adjacent neighborhoods.
- Hierarchical diffusion
- Expansion diffusion in which a trait jumps from larger or more prominent centers to smaller ones, such as a corporate chain opening first in major cities before reaching small towns.
- Stimulus diffusion
- Expansion diffusion in which the underlying idea spreads but is modified by each receiving culture rather than copied exactly, such as fast food adapted to local cuisines.
- Conformal projection
- A map projection that preserves local angles and small shapes, making it useful for navigation charts, but it distorts area increasingly toward the map edges.
- Equal-area projection
- A map projection that preserves the relative size of regions, so continents appear in correct proportion, at the cost of distorting shape, angle, or both.
- Coriolis effect
- The apparent deflection of freely moving objects caused by Earth's rotation: to the right in the Northern Hemisphere and to the left in the Southern. Deflection is zero at the equator.
- Rain shadow
- The dry leeward side of a mountain range. Moist air rises on the windward slope, cools, and drops precipitation; descending leeward air warms and dries.
- Subduction zone
- A convergent boundary where a denser oceanic plate descends beneath another plate, generating deep-sea trenches, volcanic arcs, and frequent powerful earthquakes.
- Transform boundary
- A plate boundary where two plates slide laterally past each other without creating or destroying much crust, producing shallow earthquakes along faults such as the San Andreas.
- Orographic precipitation
- Precipitation caused when moist air is forced to rise over a topographic barrier, cooling and condensing. It concentrates rainfall on windward slopes and dries leeward areas.
- U-shaped valley
- A trough with steep walls and a broad floor carved by a glacier. It contrasts with the V-shaped valley cut by a river and often contains a misfit stream after the ice retreats.
- Moraine
- An accumulation of unsorted glacial till deposited at a glacier's terminus, along its sides, or beneath it. Terminal moraines mark the maximum advance of past glaciers.
- Alluvial fan
- A fan-shaped deposit of sediment where a steep mountain stream abruptly enters a flatter valley floor, losing gradient and dropping its coarse bedload across the plain.
- Demographic transition model
- A four- or five-stage model of population change in which death rates fall before birth rates, producing rapid growth in the middle stages and stability or decline later.
- Rule of 70
- A shortcut for doubling time: divide 70 by the annual percentage growth rate. At 2 percent growth a population doubles in roughly 35 years.
- Ravenstein's migration laws
- Generalizations that most migrants move short distances, that migration proceeds stepwise toward cities, that each stream generates a counterstream, and that young adults migrate most.
- Central place theory
- A model in which settlements are spaced to serve surrounding areas. Higher-order centers offer specialized goods with large thresholds and ranges, so there are fewer of them.
- Von Thünen model
- A model of agricultural land use in which intensity and land rent decline with distance from market, placing perishable and bulky products closest and extensive grazing farthest away.
- Prorupt state
- A state with a narrow extension projecting from its main body, often created to reach a resource, a port, or to separate neighboring rivals, as with Namibia's Caprivi Strip.
- Exclusive economic zone
- A coastal state's sovereign rights over marine resources extending 200 nautical miles from its baseline. Foreign vessels may pass through but not exploit resources without permission.
- Tragedy of the commons
- The overuse of an open-access resource by individuals acting in self-interest, because no one bears the full cost of depletion. Regulation, privatization, or shared rules can prevent it.
- Ecological footprint
- A measure of the productive land and water area needed to supply a population's resources and absorb its wastes, compared against available biocapacity to reveal overshoot.
- Environmental justice
- The principle that no group should bear a disproportionate share of environmental hazards. It examines siting of waste sites and pollution burdens by income, race, and region.
- Ice-albedo feedback
- A warming feedback in which melting ice exposes darker land or water, which absorbs more solar energy, raising temperatures and causing further melt.
- Hazard vulnerability
- The conditions that make a population likely to be harmed by a hazard, including wealth, building standards, warning systems, and social factors. Risk rises with both hazard and vulnerability.
- Choropleth map
- A map that shades whole administrative units by a data value. It is appropriate for standardized rates such as deaths per 1,000 people, not raw counts, which reflect population size.
- Raster versus vector data
- Raster stores values in a grid of cells, suited to continuous surfaces like elevation. Vector stores points, lines, and polygons, suited to discrete features like roads and parcels.
- Contour lines
- Lines on a topographic map connecting points of equal elevation. Their spacing shows slope steepness, and they never cross; V shapes pointing upstream mark valleys.