| A | B |
|---|
| Annexation | The formal act of acquiring something (especially territory) by conquest or occupation. |
| Anocracy | A country that is not fully democratic or fully autocratic, but rather displays a mix of the two types. |
| Autocracy | A country that is run according to the interests of the ruler rather than the people. |
| Balance of power | A condition of roughly equal strength between opposing countries or alliances of countries. |
| Border landscape | The complex representation of the environment around a particular area's boundaries. |
| Boundary | An invisible line that marks the extent of a state's territory. |
| Buffer state | Country that lies between two other states, but remains neutral in the conflict between them. |
| Capital | A town or city that is the official seat of government in a political entity. |
| City-state | A sovereign state comprising a city and its immediately surrounding countryside. |
| Colonialism | An attempt by one country to establish settlements and to impose its political, economic, and cultural principles in another country. |
| Colony | A territory that is legally tied to a sovereign state rather than completely independent. |
| Compact state | A state in which the distance from the center to any boundary does not vary significantly. |
| Confederation | Association of sovereign states by a treaty or agreement. |
| Conference of Berlin 1884 | Regulated European colonization and trade in Africa, resulting in the "scramble for Africa," and the subjugation of African nations. |
| Core | Areas that incorporate higher levels of education, higher salaries, and more technology. |
| Decolonization | The action of changing from colonial to independent status. |
| Democracy | A country in which citizens elect leaders and can run for office. |
| Devolution | The delegation of authority from a central to a regional government. |
| Domino theory | When one country experiences a rebellion or political disunity, other countries around it will also experience turmoil as a result, leading to political instability. |
| Electoral regions | The different voting districts that make up local, state, and national regions. |
| Elongated state | A state with a long, narrow shape. |
| Ethnic conflict | Disagreement between groups of people of common backgrounds as they struggle to achieve certain political or economic goals at each other's expense. |
| European Union | International organization comprised of European countries promoting free trade amongst its members. |
| Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) | An area, usually 370 km from the shore, in which a state has rights to explore, exploit, and manage natural resources in the seas. |
| Federal state | An internal organization of a state that allocates most powers to units of local government. |
| Forward capital | Symbolically relocated capital city, usually for either economic or strategic reasons; sometimes used to integrate outlying parts of a country into the state. |
| Fragmented state | A state that includes several discontinuous pieces of territory. |
| Frontier | A zone separating two states in which neither state exercises political control. |
| Geopolitics | The study of the interplay between political relations and the territorial context in which they occur. |
| Gerrymandering | The process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the party in power. |
| Global commons | Those parts of our environment available tot everyone but no one owns (the atmosphere, fresh water, forests, wildlife, and ocean fisheries) |
| Heartland Theory | Suggests that whoever owns Eastern Europe and Western Asia has the political power and capital to rule the world. |
| Immigrant states | A type of receiving state which is the target of many immigrants; popular because of their economy, political freedom, and opportunity. |
| Imperialism | Control of territory already occupied and organized by an indigenous society. |
| International organization | An alliance of two or more countries seeking cooperation with each other without giving up either's autonomy or self-determination |
| Iron Curtain | Divided democratic, capitalist Western Europe from totalitarian, communist Eastern Europe. |
| Irredentism | The attempt by one country to provoke coups or separatist movements in another country. |
| Landlocked state | A state that does not have a direct outlet to the sea. |
| Law of the Sea | The UN-sanctioned international agreement primarily cementing the ocean as neutral territory. |
| Mackinder, Halford J. | Devised Heartland Theory. |
| Manifest destiny | The belief that the United States was destined to stretch across the continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. |
| Median-line principle | Statement in UNCLOS declaring, that when there is not enough water for each country on opposite sides of the sea to have 200 nautical miles of exclusive economic zone, the two or more countries involved will divide the water evenly. |
| Microstate | A state that encompasses a very small land area. |
| Ministate | An imprecise term for a territory, extremely small in both area and population. |
| Nation | Referring to tightly-knit group of people possessing bonds of language, ethnicity, religion, and other cultural attributes. |
| National iconography | Figural representations, either individual or symbolic, religious or secular. |
| Organic Theory | State is like a living entity that constantly needs to grow to thrive by getting need territory to meet the needs of ever-growing population. |
| Perforated state | A state that completely surrounds another one. |
| Periphery | Regions that incorporate lower levels of education, lower salaries, and less technology. |
| Prorupted state | An otherwise compact state with a large projecting extension. |
| Raison d’être | Reason for being; purpose that justifies something's existence. |
| Ratzel, Friedrich | Devised Organic Theory. |
| Reapportionment | Boundaries separating legislative districts redrawn periodically to ensure each district has approximately the same population. |
| Regionalism | A foreign policy that defines the international interests of a country in terms of particular geographic areas. |
| Reunification | When parts of a state that were formerly together become one again. |
| Rimland | Believed in forming alliances to keep the heartland in check by containing its surrounding areas and controlling the seas. |
| Satellite state | National state that is economically dependent and politically and militarily subservient to another--in its orbit, figuratively speaking. |
| Shatterbelt | A zone of chronic political splintering and fracturing, strategically located in a region occupied by a number of conflicting interests adjoining powerful states. |
| Sovereignty | Ability of a state to govern its territory free from control of its internal affairs by other states. |
| Spykman, Nicholas | Devised Rimland Theory. |
| State | An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its internal and foreign affairs |
| Stateless ethnic groups/stateless nations | A nationality without a state to call its own. |
| Suffrage | The right to vote. |
| Supranationalism | Resulting in an entity or organization composed of three or more states that forge an association and form an administrative structure for mutual benefit in pursuit of shared goals. |
| Territorial disputes | Any conflict over land ownership. |
| Territorial morphology | Examining the shapes of states. |
| Territoriality | A state's sense of property and attachment to that particular land, expressed by its desire to keep it strongly defended. |
| Terrorism | The systematic use of violence by a group in order to intimidate a population or coerce a government into granting its demands. |
| Treaty ports | A port open for foreign trade according to the terms of an agreement between two or more countries. |
| Unitary state | An internal organization of a state that places most power in the hands of central government officials. |
| United National Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) | International agreement that resulted from the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. |
| United Nations | The world's pre-eminent supranational organization, a world governing body enforcing the upkeep of peace and basic human rights worldwide. |
| Women’s enfranchisement | The right for females to vote. |
| Active solar energy systems | Solar energy systems that collects energy through the use of mechanical devices such as photovoltaic cells or flat-plate collectors. |
| Adolescent fertility rate | The number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19. |
| Biomass fuel | Fuel that derives from plant material and animal waste. |
| Breeder reactor | A nuclear power plant that creates its own fuel from plutonium. |
| Calorie consumption | The total number of calories in a daily diet allocation. |
| Core-periphery model | A model of the spatial structure of an economic system in which underdeveloped or declining areas of the world are defined with respect to their dependence on a dominating core region. |
| Demand | The quantity of something that consumers are willing and able to buy. |
| Dependency theory | Theory of international relations holding that major states influence other states through their economic power. |
| Developed country (more developed country [MDC] or relatively developed country) | A country that has progressed relatively far along a continuum of development. |
| Development | A process of improvement in the material conditions of people through diffusion of knowledge and technology. |
| Energy consumption | The use of energy as a source of heat or power or as a raw material input to a manufacturing process. |
| Fair Trade | An alternative to international trade that emphasizes small businesses and worker-owned and democratically run cooperatives and requires employers to pay workers fair wages, permit union organization, and comply with minimum environmental and safety standards. |
| Female-labor force participation rate | The percentage of women holding full-time jobs outside the home. |
| Fission | The splitting of an atomic nucleus to release energy. |
| Foreign direct investment | Investment made by a foreign company in the economy of another country. |
| Fossil fuel | An energy source formed from the residue of plants and animals buried millions of years ago. |
| Fracking (hydraulic fracturing) | The pumping of water at high pressure to break apart rocks in order to release natural gas. |
| Fusion | Creation of energy by joining the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms to form helium. |
| Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) | Compares the ability of women and men to participate in economic and political decision making. |
| Gender Inequality Index (GII) | A measure of the extent of each country's gender inequality. |
| Gender-Related Development Index (GDI) | Compares the level of development of women with that of both sexes. |
| Geothermal energy | Energy from steam or hot water produced from hot or molten underground rocks. |
| Gross domestic product (GDP) | The value of the total output of goods and services produced in a country in a given time period (normally one year). |
| Gross national income (GNI) | The value of the output of goods and services produced in a country in a year, including money that leaves and enters the country. |
| Housing bubble | A rapid increase in the value of houses followed by a sharp decline in their value. |
| Human Development Index (HDI) | An indicator of the level of development for each country, constructed by the United Nations, that is based on income, literacy, education, and life expectancy. |
| Hydroelectric power | Power generated from moving water |
| Inequality-adjusted HDI (IHDI) | Modification of the HDI to account for inequality within a country. |
| Less developed country (LDC) | A country that is at a relatively early stage in the process of economic development. |
| Literacy rate | The percentage of a country's people who can read and write. |
| Maternal mortality ratio | The number of women who die giving birth per 100,000 births. |
| Microfinance | Provision of small loans and other financial services to individuals and small businesses in developing countries. |
| Millennium Development Goals | Eight international development goals that all members of the United Nations have agreed to achieve by 2015. |
| More developed country (MDC) | A country that has progressed relatively far along a continuum of development. |
| Neocolonialism | Referring to economic and political policies by which major developed countries are sent to retain or extend influence over the economies of less developed countries and peoples. |
| Nonrenewable energy | A source of energy that has a finite supply capable of being exhausted. |
| Passive solar energy systems | Solar energy systems that collects energy without the use of mechanical devices. |
| Photovoltaic cell | A solar energy cell, usually made from silicon, that collects solar rays to generate electricity. |
| Physical Quality of Life Index | An attempt to measure the well-being of a country. |
| Potential reserve | The amount of resources in deposits not yet identified but thought to exist. |
| Primary sector | The portion of the economy concerned with the direct extraction of materials from Earth's surface, generally through agriculture, although sometimes by mining, fishing, and forestry. |
| Productivity | The value of a particular product compared to the amount of labor needed to make it. |
| Proven reserve | The amount of a resource remaining in discovered deposits. |
| Purchasing Power Parity | The amount of money needed in one country to purchase the same goods and services in another country; adjusts income figures to account for differences among countries in the cost of goods. |
| Radioactive waste | Materials from a nuclear reaction that emit radiation; contract with such particles may be harmful or lethal to people; therefore, the materials must be safely stored for thousands of years. |
| Relatively developed country | A country that has progressed relatively far along a continuum of development. |
| Renewable energy | A resource that has a theoretically unlimited supply and is not depleted when used by humans. |
| Rostow's Stages of Development | Model of economic development that describes a country's progression which occurs in five stages, transforming them from least-developed countries to most-developed countries. |
| Secondary sector | The portion of the economy concerned with manufacturing useful products through processing, transforming, and assembling raw materials. |
| Structural adjustment program | Economic policies imposed on less developed countries by international agencies to create conditions encouraging international trade, such as raising taxes, reducing government spending, controlling inflation, selling publicly owned utilities to private corporations, and charging citizens more for services. |
| Supply | The quantity of something that producers have available for sale. |
| Technology gap | Contrast between advancements available in developed core regions and that available in peripheral areas of underdevelopment. |
| Technology transfer | The diffusion to, or acquisition, by one culture or retention of advancements possessed by another, usually more developed, society. |
| Tertiary sector | The portion of the economy concerned with transportation, communications, and utilities, sometimes extended to the provision of all goods and services to people in exchange for payment. |
| Third World | Applied to countries considered not fully developed. |
| Transnational corporation | A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters or shareholders are located. |
| Uneven development | Development of core regions at the expense of those on the periphery. |
| Value added | The gross value of the product minus the costs of raw materials and energy. |
| World Systems Theory | Wallerstein's theoretical approach which analyses societies in terms of their position within global systems |
| “Tragedy of the commons” | The depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group's long-term best interests, as asserted by ecologist Hardin. |
| Agrarian | Societies made up of farmers and promote agricultural interests |
| Agribusiness | Commercial agriculture characterized by the integration of different steps in the food-processing industry, usually through ownership by large corporations. |
| Agricultural Revolution | The time when human beings first domesticated plants and animals and no longer relied entirely on hunting and gathering. |
| Agriculture | The deliberate effort to modify a portion of Earth's surface through the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock for sustenance or economic gain. |
| Aquaculture/aquafarming | The cultivation of seafood under controlled conditions. |
| Biorevolution | Genetic engineering of plants and animals with the potential to greatly exceed the productivity improvements of the Green Revolution. |
| Biotechnology | The application of scientific techniques to modify and improve plants, animals, and microorganisms to enhance their value. |
| Cereal grain | A grass yielding grain for food. |
| Chaff | Husks of grain separated from the seed by threshing. |
| Collective farm | Regards a system of agricultural organization where as farm laborers are not compensated via wages but receive a share of the farm's net productivity. |
| Combine | A machine that reaps, threshes, and cleans grain while moving over a field. |
| Commercial agriculture | Agriculture undertaken primarily to generate products for sale off the farm. |
| Crop | Any plant gathered from a field as a harvest during a particular season. |
| Crop rotation | The practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year, to avoid exhausting the soil. |
| Cultivation regions | An area suited by climate and soil conditions to the growing of a certain type of crop or plant group. |
| Dairying | Branch of agriculture that encompasses the breeding, raising, and utilization of cows, primarily for the production of milk. |
| Debt-for-nature swap | Financial transactions in which a portion of a developing nation's foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for local investments in conservation measures. |
| Desertification | Degradation of land, especially in semiarid areas, primarily because of human actions such as excessive crop planting. |
| Dietary energy consumption | The amount of food that an individual consumes, measured in kilocalories (calories in the United States). |
| Double cropping | Harvesting twice a year from the same field. |
| Feedlot | Type of animal feeding operation which is used in factory framing for finishing livestock, notably beef cattle. |
| First Agricultural Revolution | Occurring about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in Eastern Africa, South and East Asia, and Latin America, it domestication of plants and animals developed, subsequently allowing permanent settlements, rise of trade, currency and classes, disease, famine, expansion, and labor specialization. |
| Food chain | Representations of the predator-prey relationships between species within an ecosystem or habitat. |
| Food security | Physical, social, and economic access at all times to safe and nutritious food sufficent to meet dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. |
| Forestry | The are and science of managing forests, tree plantations, and related natural resources. |
| Grain | Seed of a cereal grass. |
| Green Revolution | Rapid diffusion of new agricultural technology, especially new high-yield seeds and fertilizers. |
| Growing season | The period of each when native plants and ornamental plants grow. |
| Horticulture | The growing of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. |
| Hull | The outer covering of a seed. |
| Hunting and gathering | The subsistence method based on edible plants and animals from the wild. |
| Intensive subsistence agriculture | A form of subsistence agriculture in which farmers must expend a relatively large amount of effort to produce the maximum feasible yield from a parcel of land. |
| Intertillage | Turning up land between rows of crop plants. |
| Market gardening | The growing of vegetables or flowers for market. |
| Mediterranean agriculture | A form of specialized agriculture in which crops grown in a Mediterranean climate of warm, year-round temperatures and sunny summers (grapes, olives, figs, citrus fruits, etc.) are grown. |
| Milkshed | The area surrounding a city from which milk is supplied. |
| Paddy | The Malay word for wet rice, commonly but incorrectly used to describe a sawah. |
| Pastoral nomadism | A form of subsistence agriculture based on herding domesticated animals. |
| Pasture | Grass or other plants grown for feeding grazing animals, as well as land used for grazing. |
| Plantation | A large farm in tropical and subtropical climates that specializes in the production of one or two crops for sale, usually to a more developed country. |
| Prime agricultural land | The most productive farmland. |
| Ranching | A form of commercial agriculture in which livestock graze over an extensive area. |
| Reaper | A machine that cuts grain standing in the field. |
| Ridge tillage | A system of planting crops on ridge tops in order to reduce farm production costs and promote greater soil conservation. |
| Sawah | A flooded field for growing rice. |
| Second Agricultural Revolution | Just before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th c., it allowed a shift in work force beyond subsistence farming to allow labor to work in factories. |
| Seed agriculture | Reproduction of plants through annual introduction of seeds, which result from sexual fertilization. |
| Shifting cultivation | A form of subsistence agriculture in which people shift activity from one field to another; each field is used for crops for relatively few years and left fallow for a relatively long period. |
| Slash-and-burn agriculture | Another name for shifting cultivation, so named because fields are cleared by slashing the vegetation and burning the debris. |
| Spring wheat | Wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the late summer. |
| Subsistence agriculture | Agriculture designed primarily to provide food for direct consumption by the farmer and the farmer's family. |
| Suitcase farm | Commercial grain agriculture done on a farm on which no one lives; planting and harvesting is done by hired migratory crews. |
| Survey pattern: long lot | System implemented in Quebec, Louisiana, Texas, and areas of French influence, that divide the land into narrow parcels stretching back from rivers, roads, or canals. |
| Survey pattern: metes and bounds | A system of land surveying east of the Appalachian Mountains that depends on descriptions of land ownership and natural features. |
| Sustainable agriculture | Farming methods that preserve long-term productivity of land and minimize pollution, typically by rotating soil-restoring crops with cash crops and reducing inputs of fertilizer and pesticides. |
| Swidden | A patch of land cleared for planting through slashing and burning. |
| Third Agricultural Revolution | Known as the Green Revolution, the rapid diffusion of new agricultural technology, especially new high-yield seeds and fertilizer with productivity increasing faster at the global level than population. |
| Thresh | To beat out grain from stalks. |
| Transhumance | The seasonal migration of livestock between mountains and lowland pastures. |
| Truck farming | Commercial gardening and fruit farming, so named because truck was a Middle English word meaning bartering or the exchange of commodities. |
| Undernourishment | Dietary energy consumption that is continuously below the minimum requirement for maintaining a healthy life and carrying out light physical activity. |
| Vegetative planting | Reproduction of plants by direct cloning from existing plants. |
| Von Thünen Model | Illustrates the relationship between the cost of land and the transportation costs involved in getting a product to market. |
| Wet rice | Rice planted on dry land in a nursery and then moved to a deliberately flooded field to promote growth. |
| Winnow | To remove chaff by allowing it to be blown away by the wind. |
| Winter wheat | Wheat planted in the autumn and harvested in the early summer |
| Acid deposition | Sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides; emitted by burning fossil fuels, that enter the atmosphere --where they combine with oxygen and water to form sulfuric acid and nitric acid-- and return to Earth's surface. |
| Acid precipitation | Conversion of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides to acids that return to Earth as rain, snow, or fog. |
| Agglomeration | A process involving the concentrating of people that benefit from close proximity because they share skilled labor pools and tech and financial amenities. |
| Air pollution | Concentration of trace substances, such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and solid perticulates, at a greater level than occurs in average air. |
| Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) | The amount of oxygen required by aquatic bacteria to decompose a given load of organic waste; a measure of water pollution. |
| Break-of-bulk point | A location where transfer is possible from one mode of transportation to another. |
| Bulk-gaining industry | An industry in which the final product weighs more or comprises a greater volume than the inputs. |
| Bulk-reducing industry | An industry in which the final product weighs less or comprises a lower volume than the inputs. |
| Carrier efficiency | The ratio of output to input for a given transporter. |
| Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) | A gas used as a solvent, a propellant in aerosols, a refrigerant, and in plastic foams and fire extinguishers. |
| Comparative advantage | The ability of a party (an individual, a firm, or a country) to produce a particular good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another party. |
| Cottage industry | Manufacturing based in homes rather than in factories, commonly found prior to the Industrial Revolution. |
| Cumulative causation | A mechanism by which an output is enhanced. |
| Deglomeration | The process of industrial deconcentration in response to technological advances and/or increasing costs due to congestion and competition. |
| Deindustrialization | Process by which companies move industrial jobs to other regions with cheaper labor, leaving the newly vacated region to switch to a service economy and to work through a high period of high unemployment. |
| Economies of scale | The characteristics of a production process in which an increase in the scale of the firm causes a decrease in the long run average cost of each unit. |
| Entrepot | A warehouse, depot; a commercial center, a place where merchandise is sent for additional processing and distribution. |
| Export processing zone | Established by many countries in the periphery and semi-periphery where they offer favorable tax, regulatory and trade arrangements to attract foreign trade and investment. |
| Ferrous | Metals, including iron, that are utilized in the production of iron and steel. |
| Fixed costs | Business expenses that are not dependent on the activities of the business; tending to be time-related, such as salaries or rents being paid per month. |
| Footloose industry | An industry that can be placed and located at any location without effect from factors such as resources or transport. |
| Fordist production | A form of mass production in which each worker is assigned one specific task to perform repeatedly. |
| Greenhouse effect | The anticipated increase in Earth's temperature caused by carbon dioxide (emitted by burning fossil fuels) trapping some of the radiation emitted by the surface. |
| Industrial location theory | Theory that relates locational factors to the goals of the industry such as minimizing costs (least-cost location) or maximizing profits. |
| Industrial Revolution | A series of improvements in industrial technology that transformed the process of manufacturing goods. |
| Infrastructure | The basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. |
| International division of labor | Economic specialization of cooperative labor in specific, circumscribed tasks and roles, intended to increase the productivity of labor around the world. |
| Just-in-time delivery | Shipment of parts and materials to arrive at a factory moments before they are needed. |
| Labor-intensive industry | An industry for which labor costs comprise a high percentage of total expenses. |
| Least-cost location | Location of manufacturing establishments is determined by the minimization of three critical expenses: labor, transportation and agglomeration. |
| Manufacturing export zones | A feature of economic development in peripheral countries whereby the host country establishes areas with favorable tax, regulatory and trade arrangements in order to attract foreign manufacturing operations. goods destined for global market. |
| Maquiladora | A factory built by a US company in Mexico near the US border, to take advantage of the much lower labor costs in Mexico. |
| Multiplier effect | The idea that an initial amount of spending (usually by the government) leads to increased consumption spending and so results in an increase in national income greater than the initial amount of spending. |
| Nonferrous | Metals utilized to make products other than iron and steel. |
| Nonpoint-source pollution | Pollution that originates from a large, diffuse area. |
| Outsourcing | A decision by a corporation to turn over much of the responsibility for production to independent suppliers. |
| Ozone | A gas that absorbs ultraviolet solar radiation, found in the stratosphere, a zone 15 to 50 kilometers (9 to 30 miles) above Earth's surface. |
| Photochemical smog | An atmospheric condition formed through a combination of weather conditions and pollutions, especially from motor vehicle emissions. |
| Point-source pollution | Pollution that enters a body of water from a specific source. |
| Post-Fordist production | Adoption by companies of flexible work rules, such as the allocation of workers to teams that perform a variety of tasks. |
| Postindustrial | A society in which an economic transition has occurred from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, a diffusion of national and global capital, and mass privatization. |
| Right-to-work laws | A US law that prevents a union and a company from negotiating a contract that requires workers to join the union as a condition of employment. |
| Sanitary landfill | A place to deposit solid waste, where a layer of earth is bulldozed over garbage each day to reduce emissions of gases and odors from the decaying trash, to minimize fires, and to discourage vermin. |
| Site factors | Location factors related to the costs of factors of production inside a plant, such as land, labor, and capital. |
| Situation factors | Location factors related to the transportation of materials into and from a factory. |
| Special Economic Zones | A geographical region that has economic laws that are more liberal than a country's typical economic laws |
| Substitution principle | Focused on alternatives for a product, service, or process that is more efficient or beneficial in some way while retaining the same functionality. |
| Textile | A fabric made by weaving, used in making clothing. |
| Topocide | The deliberate killing of a place through industrial expansion and change, so that its earlier landscape and character are destroyed. |
| Trade | The commercial exchange (buying and selling on domestic or international markets) of goods and services. |
| Ubiquitous | The state of being everywhere at any given time. |
| Variable costs | Costs that change directly with the amount of production. |
| Vertical integration | An approach typical of traditional mass production in which a company controls all phases of a highly complex production process. |
| Weber, Alfred | A German economist, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography; developed least cost location theory. |
| Basic industries | Industries that sell their products or services primarily to consumers outside the settlement. |
| Bid-rent theory | Geographical economic theory that refers to how the price and demand on real estate changes as the distance to the Central Business District increases. |
| Business services | Services that primarily meet the needs of other businesses, including professional, financial, and transportation services. |
| Central business district | The area of a city where retail and office activities are clustered. |
| Central place | A market center for the exchange of services by people attracted from the surrounding area. |
| Central place theory | A theory that explains the distribution of services, based on the fact that settlements serve as centers of market areas for services; larger settlements are fewer and farther apart than smaller settlements and provide services for a larger number of people |
| Christaller, Walter | He created the Central Place Theory to explain how services are distributed and why there are distinct patterns in this distribution. |
| City | Conglomeration of people and buildings clustered together to serve as a center of politics, culture, and economics. |
| City-state | A sovereign state comprising a city and its immediate hinterland. |
| Clustered rural settlement | A rural settlement in which the houses and farm buildings of each family are situated close to each other and fields surround the settlement. |
| Colonial city | Cities founded by foreign powers. |
| Consumer services | Businesses that provide services primarily to individual consumers, including retail services and education, health, and leisure services. |
| Dispersed rural settlement | A rural settlement pattern characterized by isolated farms rather than clustered villages. |
| Economic base | A community's collection of basic industries. |
| Elongated settlement | A settlement that is clustered linearly along a street, river, etc. |
| Employment structure | Graph showing how primary, secondary, and tertiary sector jobs are separated. |
| Enclosure movement | The process of consolidating small landholdings into a smaller number of larger farms in England during the eighteenth century. |
| Gravity model | A model that holds that the potential use of a service as a particular location is directly related to the number of people in a location and inversely related to the distance people must travel to reach the service. |
| High-tech corridors | Areas along or near major transportation arteries that are devoted to the research, development, and sale of high-technology products. These areas develop because of the networking and synergistic advantages of concentrating high-technology enterprises in close proximity to one another; Silicon Valley. |
| Hydraulic civilization | A civilization based on large-scale irrigation systems as the prime mover behind urbanization, with a class of technical specialists. |
| Indigenous city | A center of population, commerce, and culture that is native to a place. |
| Informal Sector | Economic activity that is neither taxed nor monitored by a government; and is not included that government's Gross National Product. |
| Market area/hinterland | The area surrounding a central place, from which people are attracted to use the place's goods and services. |
| Medieval cities | Cities that developed in Europe during the Middle Ages, containing such unique features as extreme density of development with narrow buildings, winding streets, ornate churches, and high walls surrounding the city center. |
| Multiplier effect | The expect addition of nonbasic workers and their dependents to a city's local employment and population that accompanies new basic sector employment. |
| Nonbasic industries | Industries that sell their products primarily to consumers in the community. |
| Nucleated settlement | A compact, closely-packed settlement sharply demarcated from adjoining farmland. |
| Primate city | The largest settlement in a country, if it has more than twice as many people as the second-ranking settlement. |
| Primate city rule | A pattern of settlements in a country such that the largest settlement has more than twice as many people as the second -ranking settlement. |
| Public services | Services offered by the government to provide security and protection for citizens and businesses. |
| Range (of a service) | The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service. |
| Rank-size rule | A pattern of settlements in a country such that the nth largest settlement is 1/n the population of the largest settlement. |
| Service | Any activity that fulfills a human want or need and returns money to those who provide it. |
| Settlement | A permanent collection of buildings and inhabitants. |
| Social structure | The differentiation of society into classes based on wealth, power, production, and prestige. |
| Specialization | Development of skills in a specific kind of work. |
| Threshold | The minimum number of people needed to support the service. |
| Town | A municipality smaller than a city. |
| Underemployment | A situation in which people work less than full time even though they would prefer to work more hours. |
| Urban hearth area | A region in which the world's first cities evolved. |
| Urban hierarchy | A ranking of settlements (hamlet, village, town, city, metropolis) according to their size and economic functions. |
| Urbanization | An increase in the percentage of the number of people living in urban settlements. |
| World city | Dominant city in terms of its role in the global political economy; not necessarily biggest, but rather centers of strategic control of the world's economy. |
| Annexation | Legally adding land area to a city in the United States. |
| Barriadas | Squatter settlements found in the periphery of Latin American cities. |
| Census tract | An area delineated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census for which statistics are published; in urbanized areas, census tracts correspond roughly to neighborhoods. |
| Central business district (CBD) | The area of a city where retail and office activities are clustered. |
| Centrality | The strength of an urban center in its capacity to attract producers and consumers to its facilities; a city's "reach" into the surrounding region. |
| Centralization | The movement of people, capital, services, and government into the central city. |
| City | An urban settlement that has been legally incorporated into an independent, self-governing unit. |
| Cityscapes | Similar to a landscape, but used to refer to that of a large urban area. |
| Combined statistical area (CSA) | In the United States, two or more contiguous core-based statistical areas tied together by commuting patterns. |
| Commercialization | The transformation of an area of a city into an area attractive to residents and tourists alike in terms of economic activity. |
| Commuter zone | Outermost zone of the concentric zone model that represents people who choose to live in residential suburbs and drive into the Central Business District to work each day. |
| Concentric zone model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially arranged in a series of rings. |
| Core based statistical area (CBSA) | In the United States, the combination of all metropolitan statistical areas and micropolitan statistical areas. |
| Council of government | A cooperative agency consisting of representatives of local governments in a metropolitan area in the United States. |
| Decentralization | The process of dispersing decision-making outwards from the center of authority. |
| Density gradient | The change in density in an urban area from the center to the periphery. |
| Edge city | A large node of office and retail activities on the edge of an urban area. |
| Emerging cities | City currently not having a significant population but increasing in size at a fast rate. |
| Ethnic neighborhood | Neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs. |
| Favela | A shantytown or slum, especially in Brazil. |
| Filtering | A process of change in the use of a house, from single-family owner occupancy to abandonment. |
| Food desert | An area in a developed country where healthy food is difficult to obtain. |
| Gateway city | A settlement which acts as a link between two areas. |
| Gentrification | A process of converting an urban neighborhood from a predominantly low-income renter-occupied area to a predominantly middle-class owner-occupied area. |
| Great cities | Cities with populations over one million. |
| Greenbelt | A ring of land maintained as parks, agriculture, or other types of open space to limit the sprawl of an urban area. |
| In-filling | Building on empty parcels of land within a checkerboard pattern of development. |
| Inner city | Central area of a major city; often applied to poorer parts of a US city center. |
| Invasion and succession | Process by which new immigrants to a city move to dominate or take over areas or neighborhoods occupied by older immigrant groups. |
| Lateral commuting | Traveling from one suburb to another suburb to work. |
| Megacities | Cities with more than 10 million people. |
| Megalopolis/conurbation | Term used to designate large coalescing supercities that are forming in diverse parts of the world. |
| Metropolitan statistical area | In the U.S., a central city of at least 50,000 population, the county within the city is located, and adjacent counties meeting of several tests indicating a functional connection to the central city. |
| Micropolitan statistical area | An urbanized area of between 10,000 and 50,000 inhabitants, the county in which it is found, and adjacent counties tied to the city. |
| Multiple nuclei model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a collection of nodes of activities. |
| Office park | Agglomeration of office buildings with facilities established for infrastructure to enhance the possibility of business success. |
| Peak land value intersection | The area with the greatest land value and commercial trade. |
| Peripheral model | A model of North American urban areas consisting of an inner city surrounded by large suburban residential and business areas tied together by a beltway or ring road. |
| Planned communities | A city, town, or community that was designed from scratch, growing more or less to a particular plan. |
| Postindustrial city | A stage of economic development in which service activities become relatively more important than secondary and primary economic activities. |
| Postmodern urban landscape | The material character of a more contemporary urban area. |
| Primary census statistical area (PCSA) | In the United States, all of the combined statistical areas plus all of the remaining metropolitan statistical areas and micropolitan statistical areas. |
| Public housing | Housing owned by the government; in the United States, it is rented to residents with low incomes, and the rents are set as 30% of the families' incomes. |
| Racial steering | The practice in which real estate brokers guide prospective home buyers towards or away from certain neighborhoods based on race or ethnicity. |
| Redlining | A process by which banks draw lines on a map and refuse to lend money to purchase or improve property within the boundaries. |
| Restrictive covenants | A statement written into a property deed that restricts the use of land in some way. |
| Rush (or peak) hour | The four consecutive 15-minute periods in the morning and evening with the heaviest volumes of traffic. |
| Sector model | A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a series of sectors, or wedges, radiating out from the central business district. |
| Segregation | The separation of people based on racial, ethnic, or other differences. |
| Slum | A district of a city marked by poverty and inferior living conditions. |
| Smart growth | Legislation and regulations to limit suburban sprawl and preserve farmland. |
| Social area analysis | Statistical analysis used to identify where people of similar living standards, ethnic background, and lifestyle live within an urban area. |
| Sprawl | Development of new housing sites at relatively low density and at locations that are not contiguous to the existing built-up area. |
| Squatter settlement | An area within a city in a less developed country in which people illegally establish residences on land they do not own or rent and erect homemade structures. |
| Street pattern (grid, dendritic, access, control) | Way in which streets are designed; types are grid, dendritic (few streets based on the amount of traffic each is intended to carry). |
| Suburb | A subsidiary urban area surrounding and connected to the central city; many are exclusively residential; others have their own commercial centers or shopping malls. |
| Suburbanization | Movement of upper- and middle-class people from urban core areas to the surrounding outskirts to escape pollution as well as deteriorating social conditions. |
| Symbolic landscape | Smaller landscapes that symbolize a bigger area or category. |
| Tenement | A building in which several families rent rooms or apartments, often with little sanitation or safety. |
| Underclass | A group in society prevented from participating in the material benefits of a more developed society because of a variety of social and economic characteristics. |
| Urban area | A dense core of census tracts, densely settled suburbs, and low density land that links the dense suburbs with the core. |
| Urban cluster | In the United States, an urban area with between 2,500 and 50,000 inhabitants. |
| Urban growth rate | The rate of an urban population. |
| Urban hydrology | How a city manages to get clean water to its citizens and back into the water cycle. |
| Urban morphology | The study of the physical form and structure of urban places. |
| Urban renewal | Program in which cities identify blighted inner-city neighborhoods, acquire the properties from private owners, reallocate the residents and businesses, clear the site, build new roads and utilities, and turn the land over to private developers. |
| Urbanization | An increase in the percentage and in the number of people living in urban settlements. |
| Urbanized area | In the United States, an urban area with at least 50,000 inhabitants. |
| Urbanized population | The proportion of a country's population living in cities. |
| Zone in transition | An area of mixed commercial and residential land uses surrounding the Central Business District. |
| Zoning ordinance | A law that limits the permitted uses of land and maximum density of development in a community |
| Absolute distance | Actual length of space that can be measured with a standard unit of length, such as a mile or kilometer. |
| Absolute location | Position of an object on the global grid, using latitude and longitude. |
| Cartogram | A map that has been simplified to present a single idea in a diagrammatic way; the base is not normally true to the actual locations' scale. |
| Cartography | The science of making maps. |
| Choropleth map | A thematic map in which ranked classes of some variable are depicted with shading patterns or colors for predefined zones. |
| Cultural landscape | Fashioning of a landscape by a cultural group. |
| Culture | The body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits that together constitute a group of people's distinct tradition. |
| Distortion | Necessary error resulting from trying to represent the round, nearly spherical earth on a flat plane map. |
| Dot map | A thematic map in which a dot represents some frequency of the mapped variable. |
| Equator | The great circle of Earth, existing at 0 degrees latitude, that is equidistant from the North Pole and South Pole. |
| Formal/Uniform/Homogenous Region | Section composed of areas that have a common cultural or physical feature |
| Functional/nodal region | An area organized around a node or focal point. |
| Geographic Information Science (GIScience) | The development and analysis of data about Earth acquired through satellite and other electronic information technologies. |
| Geographic Information system (GIS) | A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data. |
| Global Positioning System (GPS) | A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers. |
| Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) | The time in that time zone encompassing the prime meridian (0 degrees longitude). |
| International Date Line | An arc that for the most part follows 180 degrees longitude (although it deviates in several places to avoid dividing land areas); when heading east and crossing it, the calendar moves back 24 hours; when going west and crossing it, the calendar moves ahead one day. |
| Isoline map | A thematic map with lines that connect points of equal value. |
| Latitude | Numbering system used to indicate the location of the parallels drawn on a globe and measuring distance north and south of the equator. |
| Location | The position of anything on Earth's surface. |
| Longitude | The numbering system used to indicate the location of meridians drawn on a globe and measuring distance east and west of the prime meridian. |
| Map | A two-dimensional, or flat, representation of Earth's surface or a portion of it. |
| Map scale | The relationship between the size of an object on a map and the size of the actual feature on Earth's surface. |
| Mental map | An internal representation of a portion of Earth's surface based on what an individual knows about a place, containing personal impressions of what is in a place and where places are located. |
| Meridian | An arc drawn on a map between the North and South poles. |
| North Pole | The end of Earth's axis of rotation, marking the northernmost point on Earth. |
| Parallel | A circle drawn around the globe parallel to the equator and a right angles to the meridians. |
| Perceptual/vernacular region | An area that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity. |
| Place | A specific point on Earth distinguished by a particular character. |
| Prime meridian | The meridian, designated at 0 degrees longitude, that passes through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England. |
| Projection | System used to transfer locations from Earth's surface to a flat map. |
| Region | An area distinguished by a unique combination of trends or features. |
| Regional (or cultural landscape) studies | An approach to geography that emphasizes the relationships among social and physical phenomena in a particular study area. |
| Relative location | The position of a place with regard to places around it. |
| Remote sensing | The acquisition of data about Earth's surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or from other long-distance methods. |
| Sequent occupance | Theory that a place is occupied by different groups of people, each group leaving an imprint on the place from which the next group learns. |
| Site | The physical character of a place. |
| Situation | The location of a place relative to another place. |
| South Pole | The southern end of Earth's axis. |
| Statistical map | A special type of map in which the variation in quantity of a factor such as rainfall, population, or crops in a geographic area is indicated. |
| Thematic map | Map that zeroes in on one feature such as climate, population, or voting patterns. |
| Time zones | One of the 24 regions or divisions of the globe approximately coinciding with meridians at successive hours from the Prime Meridian. |
| Toponym | The name given to a portion of Earth's surface. |
| Township | A square normally 6 miles on a side, originally set up in the U.S. by the Land Ordinance of 1785. |
| Tropic of Cancer | Boundary of the Torrid Zone, extending 23 1/2 degrees north of the equator. |
| Tropic of Capricorn | Boundary of the Torrid Zone, extending 23 1/2 degrees south of the equator. |
| Abiotic | Composed of nonliving or inorganic matter. |
| Atmosphere | The thin layer of gases surrounding Earth. |
| Biosphere | All living organisms on Earth, including plants and animals, as well as microorganisms. |
| Biotic | Composed of living organisms |
| Built landscape | An area of land represented by its features and patterns of human occupation and use of natural resources. |
| Climate | The long-term average weather condition at a particular location. |
| Concentration | The spread of something over a given area. |
| Connection | Relationships among people and objects across the barrier of space. |
| Conservation | The sustainable management of a natural resources. |
| Contagious diffusion | The rapid, widespread diffusions of a feature or trend throughout a population. |
| Cultural ecology | A geographic approach that emphasizes human-environment relationships. |
| Density | The frequency with which something exists within a given unit of area. |
| Diffusion | The process of spread of a feature or trend from one place to another over time. |
| Distance decay | The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin. |
| Distribution | The arrangement of something across Earth's surface. |
| Ecology | The scientific study of ecosystems. |
| Ecosystem | A group of living organisms and the abiotic spheres with which they interact. |
| Environmental determinism | A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography which argued that the general laws sought by human geographers could be found in the physical sciences. |
| Expansion diffusion | The spread of a feature from one place to another in a snowballing process; there are three types: contagious, hierarchical, and stimulus. |
| Friction of distance | Negative impact that distance has on spatial interaction, including communication and travel. |
| Globalization | Actions or processes that involve the entire world and result in making something worldwide in scope. |
| Hearth | The region from which innovative ideas originate. |
| Hierarchical diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places. |
| Housing bubble | A rapid increase in the value of houses followed by a sharp decline in their value. |
| Hydrosphere | All of the water on and near Earth's surface. |
| Lithosphere | Earth's crust and a portion of upper mantle directly below the crust. |
| Natural landscape | Physical environment that has not been affected by human activities. |
| Network | A chain of communication that connects places. |
| Nonrenewable resource | Something produced in nature more slowly than it is consumed by humans. |
| Pattern | The geometric or regular arrangement of something in a study area. |
| Polder | Land created by the Dutch by draining water from an area. |
| 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. |
| Preservation | The maintenance of resources in their present condition, with as little human impact as possible. |
| Relative distance | Length of space that includes the costs of overcoming the friction separating two places; often describes the amount of social, cultural, or economic connectivity between two places. |
| Relocation diffusion | The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another. |
| Renewable resource | Something produced in nature more rapidly than it is consumed by humans. |
| Resource | A substance in the environment that is useful to people, is economically and technologically feasible to access, and is socially acceptable to use. |
| Scale | Generally, the relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole; specifically, the relationship between the size of an object on a map and the size of the actual feature on Earth's surface. |
| Space | The physical gap or interval between two objects. |
| Space-time compression | The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place as a result of improved communications and transportation systems. |
| Stimulus diffusion | The spread of an underlying principle even though a specific characteristic is rejected. |
| Sustainability | The use of Earth's renewable and nonrenewable natural resources in ways that do not constrain resource use in the future. |
| Transnational corporation | A company that conducts research, operates factories, and sells products in many countries, not just where its headquarters or shareholders are located. |
| Uneven development | The increasing gap in economic conditions between core and peripheral regions as a result of the globalization of the economy. |
| Age distribution | The proportion of individuals of different ages within a population. |
| Agricultural density | The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture. |
| Agricultural Revolution | The time when human beings first domesticated plants and animals an no longer relied entirely on hunting and gathering. |
| Arithmetic density | The total number of people divided by the total land area. |
| Carrying capacity | Maximum number of people an area can reasonably sustain. |
| Census | A complete enumeration of a population. |
| Cohort | A particular group of people that share a common characteristic, usually age. |
| Crude birth rate (CBR) | The total number of live births in a year for every 1,000 people alive in the society. |
| Crude death rate (CDR) | The total number of deaths in a year for every 1,000 people alive in the society. |
| Demographic equation | CBR-CDR = NIR; used for evaluating population change on global and subglobal levels; at the global level, CBR and CDR are the only two factors of change; at the subglobal level, immigration and emigration are taken into account. |
| Demographic momentum | Phenomenon of a growing population size even after replacement-level fertility has been reached; occurs when the base of the population pyramid is so wide that the generation of parents will take time to cycle out before zero population growth occurs. |
| Demographic regions | Areas grouped together by the stage of the demographic transition model that most countries in the area are in. |
| Demographic transition | The process of change in a society's population from a condition of high crude birth and death rates and low rate of natural increase to a condition of low crude birth and death rates, low rate of natural increase, and higher total population. |
| Demography | The scientific study of population characteristics. |
| Dependency ratio | The number of people under age 15 and over age 64 compared to the number of people active in the labor force. |
| Diffusion of fertility control | The rate at which family planning methods are distributed throughout the world. |
| Doubling time | The number of years needed for a population to be twice its size, assuming a constant rate of natural increase. |
| Ecumene | The portion of Earth's surface occupied by permanent human settlement. |
| Epidemiological transition | Distinctive causes of death in each stage of the demographic transition. |
| Epidemiology | The branch of medical science concerned with the incidence, distribution, and control of diseases that are prevalent among a population at a special time and are produced by some special causes not generally present in the affected locality. |
| Gendered space | Place designed for or claimed by men or women. |
| Industrial Revolution | A series of improvements in industrial technology that transformed the process of manufacturing goods. |
| Infant mortality rate (IMR) | The total number of deaths in a year among infants under one year of age for every 1,000 live births in a society. |
| J-curve | The shape of a line on a population graph when growth is exponential. |
| Life expectancy | The average number of years an individual can be expected to live, given current social, economic, and medical conditions. |
| Maladaptation | An adaption that does more harm than good. |
| Malthus, Thomas | British demographer who wrote An Essay on the Principles of Population, alarming those living at the time during the Industrial Revolution; he predicted food production would outpace population growth rates; warned of negative checks, such as famine, and called for positive checks, such as birth control. |
| Medical revolution | Medical technology invented in Europe and North America that has diffused to the poorer countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, that have eliminated many of the traditional causes of death in poorer countries and enabled more people to live longer and healthier lives. |
| Mortality | Death-related activity in a population; related to crude death rate. |
| Natality | Birth-related activity in a population; related to crude birth rate. |
| Natural increase rate (NIR) | The percentage growth of a population in a year, computed as the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate. |
| Neo-Malthusian | Contemporary believers in the idea of population checks, such as disease; promote sustainable population growth to be achieved through birth control teachings and regional attention to birth patterns. |
| Overpopulation | A situation in which the number of people in an area exceeds the capacity of the environment to support life at a decent standard of living. |
| Pandemic | Disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects a very high proportion of the population. |
| Physiological density | The number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture. |
| Population density | Measurement of the number of people per given unit of land. |
| Population distribution | Description of locations on the earth's surface where populations live. |
| Population explosion | Rapid growth of the world's human population during the past century, attended by ever-shorter doubling times and accelerating rates of natural increase. |
| Population projection | Estimated population at a certain time in the future. |
| Population pyramid | A bar graph representing the distribution of population by age and sex. |
| S-curve | Traces the cyclical movement upwards and downwards in a graph; relates to growth and decline in the natural increase. |
| Sex ratio | The number of males per 100 females in the population. |
| Standard of living | Refers to the quality and quantity of goods and services available to people and the way they are distributed within a population. |
| Total fertility rate (TFR) | The average number of children a woman will have throughout her childbearing years. |
| Underpopulation | Occurs when a population size is below its carrying capacity and cannot sustain the economic development it has reached; measure that is difficult to pinpoint |
| Zero population growth (ZPG) | A decline of the total fertility rate to the point where the natural increase rate equals zero. |
| Activity space | Places in a local area where cyclic movement takes place. |
| Asylum seeker | Someone who has migrated to another country in the hop of being recognized as a refugee. |
| Brain drain | Large-scale emigration by talented people. |
| Chain migration | Migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously migrated there. |
| Circulation/Periodic movement | Short-term, repetitive, or cyclical movements that recur on a regular basis. |
| Counterurbanization | Net migration from urban to rural areas in more developed countries. |
| Emigration | Migration from a location. |
| Floodplain | The area subject to flooding during a given number of years, according to historical trends. |
| Forced migration | Permanent movement, usually compelled by cultural factors. |
| Guest worker | A term once used for a worker who migrated to the developed countries of Northern and Western Europe, usually from Southern and Eastern Europe or from North Africa, in search of a higher-paying job. |
| Immigration | Migration to a new location. |
| Internal migration | Permanent movement within a particular country. |
| Internally displaced person (IDP) | Someone who has been forced to migrate for similar political reasons as a refugee but has not migrated across an international border. |
| International migration | Permanent movement from one country to another. |
| Interregional migration | Permanent movement from one region of a country to another. |
| Intervening obstacle | An environmental or cultural feature of the landscape that hinders migration. |
| Intervening opportunity | The presence of a nearer, more favorable circumstance that greatly diminishes the attractiveness of sites farther away. |
| Intraregional migration | Permanent movement within one region of a country. |
| Migration | A form of relocation diffusion involving a permanent move to a new location. |
| Migration transition | A change in the migration pattern in a society that results from industrialization, population growth, and other social and economic changes that also produce the demographic transition. |
| Mobility | All types of movement between locations. |
| Net migration | The difference between the level of immigration and the level of emigration. |
| Pull factor | A factor that induces people to move to a new location. |
| Push factor | A factor that induces people to leave old residences. |
| Quotas | In reference to migration, laws that place maximum limits on the number of people who can immigrate to a country each year. |
| Refugees | People who have been forced to migrate from their homes and cannot return for fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion. |
| Step migration | Migration to a distant destination that occurs in stages. |
| Undocumented/Unauthorized immigrants | People who enter a country without proper documents to do so. |
| Voluntary migration | Permanent movement undertaken by choice. |
| Acculturation | When weaker of two cultures coming in contact with one another adopts traits from the more dominant culture. |
| Adaptive strategies | The unique way in which each culture uses its particular physical environment, especially those that serve to provide the necessities of life. |
| Architectural form | The look of housing, affected by the available materials, the environment the house is in, and the popular culture of the time. |
| Assimilation | The loss of the original traits of a weaker culture when coming in contact with a more dominant culture, when they become completely erased and replaced by the traits of the dominant culture. |
| Cultural adaptation | When a foreigner readily accepts the new culture as part of his or her life and practice. |
| Cultural core/periphery pattern | Idea that the core maintains the main economic power of a region and the outlying region or periphery possesses lesser economic ties. |
| Cultural identity | Ones belief in belonging to a group or certain cultural aspect. |
| Cultural realm | The entire region that displays the characteristics of a culture. |
| Custom | The frequent repetition of an act, to the extent that it becomes characteristic of the group of people performing the act. |
| Folk Culture | Body of customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits traditionally practiced by a small, homogenous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups. |
| Folk food | Cuisine that is traditionally made by the common people of a region and forms part of their culture. |
| Folk house | Dwelling units that reflect cultural heritage, current fashion, functional needs, and the impact of environment. The form of each house is related in part to environmental as well as social conditions. |
| Folk songs | Composed anonymously and transmitted orally, a tuneful expression that is derived from events in daily life that are familiar to the majority of the people, that tell a story or convey information about daily activities, life cycle events, or mysterious events, such as storms and earthquakes. |
| Folklore | The traditional beliefs, myths, tales, and practices of a people, transmitted orally. |
| Habit | A repetitive act performed by a particular individual. |
| Innovative adoption | Study of how, why, and at what rate new technology spreads throughout a culture. |
| Material culture | The physical manifestations of human activities, including tools, campsites, art, and structures. |
| Nonmaterial culture | Ideas, knowledge, and beliefs -the non-tangible components- that influence people's behavior in a region. |
| Popular Culture | Culture found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics. |
| Taboo | A restriction on behavior imposed by social custom. |
| Terroir | The contribution of a location's distinctive physical features to the way food tastes. |
| Traditional architecture | Common or time-honored building styles of different cultures, religions, and places. |
| Creole/Creolized language | A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated. |
| Denglish | A combination of German and English. |
| Dialect | A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. |
| Ebonics | A dialect spoken by some African Americans. |
| Extinct language | A language that was once used by people in daily activities but is no longer used. |
| Franglais | A term used by the French for English words that have entered the French language. |
| Ideograms | The system of writing used in China and other East Asian countries in which each symbol represents an idea or a concept rather than a specific sound, as in the case with letters in English. |
| Indo-European languages | Language family of which its languages are spoken by half of the world's population which includes Germanic, Romance, and Slavic subfamilies. |
| Isogloss | A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate. |
| Isolated language | A language that is unrelated to any other languages and therefore not attached to any language family. |
| Language | A system of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning. |
| Language branch/subfamily | A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago. Differences are not as extensive or as old as with language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that the branches derived from the same family. |
| Language family | A collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded history. |
| Language group | A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary. |
| Lingua franca | A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages. |
| Linguistic diversity | Where a variety of languages are spoken within a particular area. |
| Literary tradition | A language that is written as well as spoken. |
| Logogram | A symbol that represents a word rather than a sound. |
| Monolingual | Describes states where only one language is spoken. |
| Multilingual | Describes states where more than one language is spoken. |
| Official language | The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents. |
| Pidgin language | A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua France; used for communications among speakers of two different languages. |
| Received Pronunciation (RP) | The dialect of English associated with upper-class Britons living in London and now considered standard in the United Kingdom. |
| Spanglish | A combination of Spanish and English spoken by Hispanic Americans. |
| Standard Language | The form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications. |
| Trade language | Also referred to as a lingua franca. |
| Vulgar Latin | A form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents. |
| Agnosticism | Belief that nothing can be known about whether God exists. |
| Animism | Belief that objects, such as plants and stones, or natural events, like thunderstorms and earthquakes, have a discrete spirit and conscious life. |
| Atheism | Belief that God does not exist. |
| Autonomous religion | A religion that does not have a central authority but shares ideas and cooperates informally. |
| Branch | A large and fundamental division within a religion. |
| Buddhism | The teaching of an Indian prince (Siddhartha Gautama) that life is permeated with suffering caused by desire, that suffering ceases when desire ceases, and that enlightenment obtained through right conduct, wisdom, and meditation releases one from desire and suffering and rebirth. |
| Caste | The class or distinct hereditary order into which a Hindu is assigned, according to religious law. |
| Christianity | A monotheistic system of beliefs and practices based on the Old Testament and the teachings of Jesus as embodied in the New Testament, emphasizing his role as savior. |
| Confucianism | The system of ethics, education, and statesmanship taught by a Chinese administrator and his disciples, stressing love for humanity, ancestor worship, reverence for parents, and harmony in thought and conduct. |
| Cosmogony | A set of religious beliefs concerning the origin of the universe. |
| Denomination | A division of a branch that unites a number of local congregations into a single legal and administrative body. |
| Diocese | The basic unit of geographic organization in the Roman Catholic Church. |
| Ethnic religion | A religion with a relatively concentrated spatial distribution whose principles are likely to be based on the physical characteristics of the particular location in which its adherents are concentrated. |
| Fundamentalism | Literal interpretation and strict adherence to basic principles of a religion (or a religious branch, denomination, or sect). |
| Geomancy | A method of prediction that interprets markings on the ground or handfuls of dirt. |
| Ghetto | During the Middle Ages, a neighborhood in a city set up by law to be inhabited only by Jews: now used to denote a section of a city in which members of any minority group live because of social, legal, or economic pressure. |
| Hajj | In the fifth pillar of Islam, it is a pilgrimage to Mecca during the month of Dhu al-Qadah. |
| Hierarchical religion | A religion in which a central authority exercises a high degree of control. |
| Hinduism | Created in India, it is based on a wide spectrum of laws and prescriptions based on karma, dharma, and societal norms. |
| Interfaith boundaries | Geographic divisions between the major religions. |
| Islam | The religion of Muslims collectively which governs their civilization and way of life. |
| Jainism | A religion that branched off from Hinduism, founded by Mahavira; its beliefs include that everything has a soul and the soul must be cleansed. |
| Judaism | The monotheistic religion of the Jews having its spiritual and ethical principles embodied chiefly in the Torah and in the Talmud. |
| Landscapes of the dead | Certain area where people have commonly been buried. |
| Missionary | An individual who helps to diffuse a universalizing religion. |
| Monotheism | The doctrine of or belief in the existence of only one God. |
| Mormonism | Religious, ideological, and cultural aspects of the various denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement, primarily concentrated in Utah. |
| Pagan | A follower of a polytheistic religion. |
| Pilgrimage | A journey to a place considered sacred for religious purposes. |
| Polytheism | Belief in or worship of more than one god. |
| Proselytic religion | A universalizing religion that attempts to convert another person to the religion. |
| Reincarnation | Embodiment in a new form. |
| Religion | A system of beliefs and practices that attempts to order life in terms of perceived ultimate priorities. |
| Sacred space | Place that people infuse with religious meaning. |
| Sect | A relatively small group that has broken away from an established denomination. |
| Secularism | Worldly; not pertaining to church or religious matters. |
| Shamanism | An animistic religion of northern Asia having the belief that the mediation between the visible and the spirit worlds is affected by shaman. |
| Shari 'a laws | System of Islamic law, sometimes called Qu'ranic Law; this law can be based on legal precedence. |
| Shi'ite | Adherents to Islam, representing the Persian variation who believe in the infallibility and divine right authority of the Imams, descendants of Ali. |
| Shintoism | Religion located in Japan and related to Buddhism; focuses particularly on nature and ancestor worship. |
| Sikhism | A sect of Hinduism that combines some elements of Islam; although it practiced by many, its worship is concentrated in South Asia. |
| Solstice | An astronomical event that happens twice each year, when the tilt of Earth's axis is most inclined toward or away from the Sun, causing the Sun's apparent position in the sky to reach it most northernmost, or southernmost extreme, and resulting in the shortest and longest days of the year. |
| Sunni | Largest branch of Islam, this belief, considered to be orthodox, acknowledges the first four caliphs as the rightful successors of Muhammad. |
| Syncretic | A religion that combines several traditions. |
| Taoism | A Chinese sect, claiming to follow the teaching of Lao-tzu but incorporating pantheism and sorcery. |
| Theocracy | A state whose government is under the control of a ruler considered to be divinely guided or under the control of a group of religious leaders. |
| Universalizing religion | A religion that attempts to appeal to all people, not just those living in a particular location. |
| Zoroastrianism | Considered to be the oldest monotheistic religion in the world, it is practiced mainly in Iran and India under the motto "Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds." |
| Apartheid | Laws (no longer in effect) in South Africa that physically separated different races into different geographic areas. |
| Balkanization | A process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among its ethnicities. |
| Balkanized | Descriptive of a small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states because it was inhabited by many ethnicities with complex, long-standing antagonisms toward each other. |
| Barrio | An urban area in a Spanish-speaking country. |
| Blockbusting | A process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices because of fear that persons of color will soon move into the neighborhood. |
| Centrifugal force | Something that tends to divide people and countries. |
| Centripetal force | An attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state. |
| Enclave | A small area occupied by a distinctive minority culture. |
| Ethnic cleansing | A process in which a more powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically homogeneous region. |
| Ethnicity | Identity with a group of people that share distinct physical and mental traits as a product of common heredity and cultural traditions. |
| Exclave | An enclave geographically separated from the main part by surrounding alien territory. |
| Genocide | The mass killing of a group of people in an attempt to eliminate the entire group from existence. |
| Nationalism | Loyalty and devotion to a particular nationality. |
| Nationality | Identity with a group of people that share legal attachment and personal allegiance to a particular place as a result of being born there. |
| Race | Identity with a group of people descended from a biological ancestor. |
| Racism | Belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. |
| Racist | A person who subscribes to the beliefs of racism. |
| Sharecropper | A person who works fields rented from a landowner and pays the rent and repays loans by turning over to the landowner a share of the crops. |
| Triangular slave trade | A practice, primarily during the eighteenth century, in which European ships transported slaves from Africa to Caribbean Islands, molasses from the Caribbean to Europe, and trade goods from Europe to Africa. |
