Exploring the World Around Us
Wherever people live, they have shaped the environment to fit their needs. The human ability to change the environment, however, is limited. Often, people must adapt their agriculture, industry, arts, & daily habits to their surroundings. People who live in desert regions wear light, loose-fitting clothing. People who live in the northernmost & southernmost regions of the globe adjust to winters without daylight & summers without night. To understand world cultures, it is important to see the connections between people & their environment.
What is Geography?
Geography is the study of people, their environments, & their resources. In ancient Egypt, priests studied the land. Through careful observation & mathematics, they calculated how much grain the land could produce. They then used that knowledge to collect the taxes that supported their temples. Later, Greek geographers built on these & other advances to create maps of Europe, Africa, & Asia.
Geography has many uses beyond creating maps, & boundaries. Today geographers have developed five basic themes to help us understand the links between people & the earth. The five themes are location, place, interaction between people & their environment, movement, and region. Each theme offers a way of looking at the world and its people.
Location
Imagine that a friend told you she was flying to Goa next week. “Where is that?” you ask. You want to know Goa’s location, its position on the earth’s surface.
Your friend tells you that Goa is a former Portuguese colony on the southwest coast of India. By describing the position of Goa in relation to another place, your friend is giving its relative location. Sometimes people need to know the absolute or exact location of a place. To give absolute location, people use the grid of numbered lines of latitude & longitude seen on many maps or globes.
Lines of Latitude measure distances north or south of the equator. The Equator divides the earth into two halves, called hemispheres. The Northern Hemisphere lies north of the equator, and the Southern Hemisphere lies south of it. Lines of Longitude measure distances east or west of the Prime Meridian. The Prime Meridian is an imaginary line that runs through Greenwich, England. The circle formed by the Prime Meridian divides the earth into the Eastern & Western Hemisphere.
Using lines of latitude & longitude, you can locate any place on earth. If you find Goa on the map, you can see Goa’s exact location is 15 degrees North latitude & 73 degrees East longitude. This location is written as 15°N/73°E.
Place
Geographers describe places in terms of their physical & human characteristics. Physical characteristics include landforms, climate, soil & animal life of a place. Human characteristics include the people’s way of life—their activities, means of transportation, religion, & languages.
Every place in the world had its own physical & human characteristics. Think of Albany, the capitol of New York State. Albany’s physical characteristics include its position on the Hudson River, its weather, its landforms, and its plant and animal life. Among Albany’s human characteristics are state office buildings, stores, houses, & roads.
Albany’s physical & human characteristics are connected. Albany’s position on the Hudson River drew settlers there in the 1600s. Today, the city is still a busy river port. As you read about different places, notice their physical & human characteristics.
Interaction Between People and Their Environment
Wherever people live, they change the world around them. They may clear forests, blast tunnels through mountains, or plow fields. Indeed, throughout history, much of what we call progress has involved people changing the environment.
Hidden costs. Today, we are learning that this kind of progress can have hidden costs. Some of our actions have polluted the air, water and land. People have built highways to ease travel from place to place. Cars & trucks, however, are a major cause of air pollution. Farmers have used pesticides to kill insects that destroy crops, yet pesticides in our water & in food can harm us.
A key issue is how we interact with the environment. As you will read, people in all parts of the world face hard choices. They must decide how to develop their economies without destroying the environment.
People adapt. People’s effort to change the environment is only one form of interaction. As you have read, sometimes people adapt to their environment instead. In the frozen lands of the Arctic north, for example, the Eskimos build homes out of ice. In parts of China where there are few trees, people chop vegetables, fish, and meat into bite-sized pieces. They “stir-fry” the food quickly, using little fuel. Many Americans enjoy stir-fried foods. However, probably few people realize that this style of cooking resulted from Chinese cooks adapting to their environment.
Movement
Another theme of geography is the movement of people, goods, and ideas. These movements often occur together.
Migration. Even before recorded history, people traveled from one place to another. Early peoples often moved in order to find food. In more recent times, millions of people came to the United States to find freedom or a better life. Sometimes, people leave their homelands because of natural disasters or wars. Still others are moved against their will. Over a period of 400 years, slave traders took millions of Africans by force. From the 1500’s to the 1800’s, they shipped them across the Atlantic Ocean to plantations in the Americas.
Trade. Trade is the movement of goods between areas. It occurs because areas of the world have different resources and different levels of economic development. Trade involves exports, or goods sent to markets outside a country, and imports, or goods brought into a country. Some countries export natural resources such as copper, or farm products such as coffee beans. Other countries export manufactured goods such as computers, tanks, and cars.
Ideas spread. The movement of ideas occurs with the movement of people and goods. More than 2,000 years ago, missionaries and merchants from India spread the religious teachings of Buddhism to the people of China and Southeast Asia. Today, advanced communication and transportation help to spread ideas faster. Television viewers in Angola in Africa, for example, can watch the latest movies from Brazil in South America.
Interdependence. The rapid movement of people, goods, and ideas adds to global interdependence. Interdependence is the dependence of countries on goods, resources, and knowledge from other parts of the world. For example, Americans get their coffee from South America, tea from India, and oil from the Middle East. For our economy to prosper, we must sell American-made products to people around the globe. In this book, you will read about how interdependence is affecting our world.
Region
A region is an area with its own unifying characteristics. Geographers define regions in several ways. Regions can be identified by physical characteristics, such as land forms or climate. The world’s continents are examples of physical regions. The Rocky Mountain area of the United States and the rain forests of Brazil are also physical regions.
A region can also be identified by cultural political or economic features. The Muslim world, for example, is the cultural region influenced by the religion of Islam. It includes parts of Africa and Asia, including the Middle East. Nations are examples of political regions.
Because regions can be defined in different ways, a country can belong to several different regions. Pakistan, for example, is part of the physical region of South Asia. Because most Pakistanis are Muslims, Pakistan is also part of the Muslim world, a cultural region. Pakistan also belongs to the economic region known as the Third World. The Third World refers to countries that are working to develop modern industrial economies.
In this book, you will read about many regions. They include Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Latin America, Canada, the Middle East, and Europe. The location, history, resources, and people of each region help it create its own identity. As you will discover, each region also has great variety.
Reading Guide
Directions: Answer the following questions in COMPLETE SENTENCES in your notebook.
1. Define geography.
2. What are the five themes of geography identified by geographers?
3. What is the difference between relative and absolute location?
4. What is the relative location of your home?
5. When geographers describe a place, to what characteristics do they refer?
6. Imagine you are in a helicopter flying over the San Francisco Bay Area. Provide a geographic description of the place called the San Francisco Bay Area (see question #5).
7. Provide two examples of ways people interact with their environment that are not mentioned in the reading.
8. What is meant by the author when he states that there are hidden costs to our interaction with the environment?
9. Define exports, imports, and interdependence.
10. Write a brief paragraph – or draw a picture – that explains, or shows, how the theme of movement has affected your life. Include at least two specific examples in your paragraph or picture.
11. What are the three different ways a region can be identified?
12. Describe the region of California according to one of these ways.