Human Geography
Human Geography
This domain tests population, migration, culture, political geography, economic development, agriculture, and urbanization. Expect items that ask you to interpret demographic data, classify migration, explain cultural diffusion, or compare development measures.
Core rules
- Demographic transition: Stage 1 high birth/high death; Stage 2 death rates fall, population grows; Stage 3 birth rates fall; Stage 4 low birth/low death; Stage 5 may have below-replacement fertility and aging.
- Population measures: crude birth/death rates, natural increase rate (births minus deaths), total fertility rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, dependency ratio.
- Migration: push-pull factors; Ravenstein’s regularities include short-distance moves, step migration, rural-to-urban flow, and return migration.
- Culture: language families and diffusion; religion’s spatial patterns; ethnicity vs. race; cultural landscape as human imprint.
- Political geography: state, nation, nation-state, stateless nation; boundaries; devolution vs. supranationalism.
- Development: GDP/GNI per capita, HDI, gender inequality, core-periphery, Rostow and dependency critiques.
Worked example
A country has a crude birth rate of 38 per 1,000, a crude death rate of 12 per 1,000, and a high infant mortality rate. Which demographic transition stage is most likely? Reasoning: natural increase is 26 per 1,000 (2.6%), with high birth and still-moderate death rates. That pattern fits Stage 2 (early expanding), before fertility declines. A Stage 4 country would have low birth and death rates.
Traps
- Confusing rate with absolute number: a small country can have a high rate but few people.
- Treating nation and state as synonyms.
- Assuming urbanization always means economic development.
- Reading a population pyramid’s width as time rather than age cohorts.
- Confusing push factors (origin) with pull factors (destination).