Notes

Culture - The body of customary beliefs, social forms and material traits that together constitute a group's distinct tradition
Site - The physical character of a place
Situation - The location of a place relative to another place
Absolute location - Position on Earth's surface using the coordinate system of longitude and latitude
International Date Line - An arc that for the most part follows 180° longitude, although it deviates in several places to avoid dividing land areas
Independent invention - Development of the same culture in separate cultures, as a result of comparable needs and circumstances
Fieldwork - The study of geographic phenomena by visiting places and observing how people interact and thereby change those places
Time-distance decay - The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place, as a result of improved communications and transportation systems
Tobler's First Law of Geography - "Everything is related to everything else, but more things are more related than distant things"
Goode Homolosine Projection - An example of an equal-area projection, which distorts the shape of objects in favor of accurately representing area and divides the globe by continent and ocean to spread distortion equally across landmasses and bodies of water
Global Positioning System (GPS) - A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receievers
Choropleth Maps - A thematic map that uses tones or colors to represent spatial data as average values per unit area
Mercator projection - Cylindrical maps famous for their distortion in area that makes landmasses at the poles appear oversized, useful for navigation
Cultural landscape - The fashioning of a natural landscape by a cultural group
Contagious diffusion - The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population
Sequent occupance - The notion that successive societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, each contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape
Toponyms - The name given to a portion of Earth's surface
Functional region - An area organized around a node or focal points
Cultural diffusion - The process of a spread of one culture to another
Spatial perspective - Observing variations in geographic phenomena across space
Possibilism - The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives
Relocation diffusion - The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another
Spatial diffusion (distribution) - The ways in which phenomena, such as technological innovations, cultural trends, or outbreaks of disease, travel over space
Sense of place - Feelings evoked by people as a result of certain experiences and memories associated with a particular place
Azimuthal projection - Planar projection with North and South Poles in the center of the map
Activity Space - Area in which an individual moves about as he or she pursues a regular, day-to-day activities
Environmental determinism - A 19th and early 20th-century approach to the study of geography which argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences
Mental map - A representation of a portion of Earth's surface based on what an individual knows about a place, containing personal impressions of what is a place and where it is located
Large-Scale Map - A relatively small ratio between map units and ground units
Meridian - An arc drawn on a map between the North and South Poles