The Basics

(associations among phenomena in an area)

1) Culture – people’s lifestyles, values, beliefs, and traits

a) What people care about: language, religion, ethnicity

b) What people take care of: 1) daily necessities of survival (food, clothing, shelter) and 2) leisure activities (artistic expressions, recreation)

c) Cultural institutions: political institutions (a country, its laws and rights)

2) Components of culture:

a) Culture region – the area within which a particular culture system prevails (dress, building styles, farms and fields, material manifestations,…)

b) Culture trait – a single attribute of culture

c) Culture complex – a discrete combination of traits

d) Culture system – grouping of certain complexes, may be based on ethnicity, language, religion,…

e) Culture realm – an assemblage of culture (or geographic) regions, the most highly generalized regionalization of culture and geography (e.g. sub-Saharan Africa)

3) Physical Processes – environmental processes, which explain the distribution of human activities

a) Climate – long-term average weather condition at a particular location. Vladimir Koppen’s five main climate regions (expresses humans’ limited tolerance for extreme temperature and precipitation levels)

b) Vegetation – plant life.

c) Soil – the material that forms Earth’s surface, in the thin interface between the air and the rocks. Erosion and the depletion of nutrients are two basic problems concerning the destruction of the soil.

d) Landforms – Earth’s surface features (geomorphology), limited population near poles and at high altitudes