Human Geography Models and Key Concepts for Chapters 1-13 Study Guide for May AP College Board Exam
1. Brandt Line
Brandt Line: Named after Willy Brandt, a chancellor of West Germany before the wall came down in 1989 that eventually united Germany. The line separates the Northern from the Southern Hemispheres (exception is Oceania). North of the line are More Developed Countries that benefit from wealth in terms of economic, social, and political stability. The southern hemisphere suffers from economic, social, and political instability or termed as Less Developed Countries.
2. Demographic Transition Model
Stage One: Pre-agricultural societies engaged in subsistence farming and transhumance, the seasonal migration for food and resources or owning livestock. Birth rates and death rates fluctuate due climate, warfare, disease, and environmental factors. There is little population growth. The NIR is generally low because of disease epidemics. Birth rates are high because children were an expression of a family's productivity and status and they were invaluable for helping with the work of gathering, herding, etc. Child mortality and infant mortality are very high due to lack of medical knowledge. Families were lucky if one or two children would make it to adulthood. Death rates are high. Overall population has a very low life expectancy. Limited medicine, sanitation, nutrition, hazards such as famine and war, all caused people to die easily. Hard physical labor and long migrations wore down the bodies and decreased life span.
Stage Two: Stage 2 countries are agricultural-based economies. Birth rates remain high while death rates decline over time. The NIR goes up significantly as birth rates and death rates diverge. As a country advances, population growth explodes. Rapid population growth has been a concern when looking at the quality of life in LDCs. Life is better due to the Industrial Revolution first and the medical revolution second. MDCs like Europe, USA, and Canada experienced the Industrial Revolution first. Then the Medical Revolution came 2nd. LDCs did not move into Stage 2 until MDCs brought medical inventions and medicine to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Once LDCs received medical help, they could start surviving. Then the Industrial Revolution inventions began to spread to LDCs. Death rates began to plunge during Stage 2 due to the Industrial Revolution and medical revolution. During Stage 2, international migration resulted. Urbanization and shift from rural to urban centers for work also increased. Manufacturing is apparent and there is a focus away from agriculture toward the end of Stage 2.
Between Stage 2 and 3, is where birth and death rates are furthest apart, resulting in high NIR.
Stage 3: Stage 3 is where most "industrialized" or manufacturing-based countries were found in the transition. MDCs of Europe and USA shifted their economies to more service-based focus. Birth rates continue to decrease as the effects of urbanization (less space, time, and need factors). Increases in health care, education, and female employment bring about less fertility per woman. Women have a choice and contraceptives are more available. Women's education and employment also results in few children due to time constraints. Women are empowered to gain from their school and job experiences. There is access of health care, nutrition, sanitation, and education so life expectancy is greater. Also, death rates eventually bottom out. Everyone is going to die eventually. Life expectancies can go up even further in stage four, but the death rate stays the same. There is no way to stop people from dying.
Stage 4: Birth and death rages converge and there is a limited population growth -- even a decline. Tertiary service industries like finance, insurance, real estate, health care, and communications are what grow the economy. Manufacturing is dying. Women are not having as many babies -- zero population growth. When birth rates reach the same level of death rates, this is zero population growth. NIR equal 0.0 percent. Birth rates can decline and even be lower than death rates. This results in a negative NIR and a shrinking population. USA services are 80% of the GDP, and manufacturing is only 17% in Stage 4. USA is not ZPG due to the USA being a desirable place for immigration. In Western Europe and Anglo-North America, there is a large, over 65 dependency rate.
New term to remember: demographic momentum: the term that describes the concept that population will continue to grow even after fertility rates decline.
3. Epidemiological Transition Model
Stage 1: Plagues, pestilence, famine, Black Plague
Stage 2: Receding Pandemics (disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects a very high proportion of the population) due to Industrial Revolution (improved sanitation, nutrition, medicine) - Cholera and Dr. John Snow
Stage 3: Stage of degenerative and human created diseases (heart attacks, cancer, cardiovascular)
Stage 4: Delayed degenerative diseases due to operations, medicine, reduce tobacco and alcohol, better info, more education multi-media, exercise
Stage 5: Reemergence of infectious and parasitic diseases. Evolution of microbes that cannot be destroyed by medicine. Poverty causes infectious diseases. Improved travel spreads microbes all over the world. AIDS. Societies could revert back to Stage 1.
4. Heartland-Rimland Theory
Heartland-Rimland Theory: In 1904 British geographer Halford Mackinder proposed what would become the theory above. Mackinder's model was an effort to define the global geo-political landscape and determine areas of potential future conflict. He identified that agricultural land was the primary commodity that states were interested in. Several states with limited land area wanted to expand their territory. However, they also noted each other's European farming areas. The largest of these was the Eastern Europe steppe, a productive area of grain mostly controlled by the Russian Empire at the time. This combined with the mineral and timber-rich region across the Urals into Siberia, was named by Mackinder as the valuable heartland. It was this portion of the earth's surface that bordering Rimland states such as the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania were potential invaders of. The Rimland also contained other landwolves eager to grab at neighboring territory such as France and Italy. This is the main geo-political model in the AP course that covers the two world wars and the Cold War.
5. Shatterbelt Theory: In 1950 American geographer Saul Cohen proposed the above theory. He modified Mackinder's who died in 1947. He modified Mackinder's into the “Pivot Area" and Rimland into the "Inner Crescent." The rest of the world became the "outer Crescent," including the USA. His land-based concept was the Cold War conflicts would likely occur within the Inner Crescent. He pointed out several Inner Crescent Areas of geopolitical weakness that he called Shatterbelts. He accurately identified numerous areas where wars emerged from 1950 and the end of the Cold War in 1991: North and South Korea, Palestinians versus Jews in Israel, North and South Vietnam, Balkan Wars. Also can refer to present-day “troubled spots” of the world: Syria, Somalia, North Korea, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, etc.
6. Containment Theory: U.S. diplomat George Kennan first proposed the strategic policy of containment to the American government in 1947. In this proposal, the USA and its allies would attempt to build a containment wall around the core Communists states. Any time the USSR or China attempted to expand the realm of influence politically or militarily, the forces of NATO and other democratic state allies should be deployed to stop them.
7. Thomas Malthus Theory
Malthus claimed that the population was growing much more rapidly than Earth's food supply because population increased geometrically, whereas food supply increased arithmetically. National Increase Rate (NIR) declines for 2 reasons: lower birth rates 2. higher death rates. Only hope is to reduce birth rates.
OPPOSITE: Ester Boserup: A Danish agriculturist, she provided a hopeful alternative to Malthus. Should population growth out number food supply, humans must upgrade the productivity of the food supply. This is done by human ingenuity and technology. Humans will find ways to provide enough food to handle the population growth. Innovations in soil production, cultivation, and technological advances to enhance food production will save human lives.
10. Gravity Model of Migration
When applied to migration, larger places attract more emigrants than do smaller places. Additionally, destinations that are more distance have a weaker pull (distance decay) than do closer opportunities of the same caliber.
11. Gravity Model of Population
The gravity model takes into account the population size of two places and their distance. Since larger places attract people, ideas, and products more than smaller places and places closer together have a greater attraction, the gravity model incorporates these 2 features.
12. Zelinsky's Migration Transition Model
Stage One: Hunters and gatherers move from one place to another for survival. High CBR and CDR and low NIR. Search for local food rather than permanent migration to a new place.
Stage Two: High NIR because of rapidly declining CDR. Point when international migration becomes especially important. Interregional migration from one's country's rural areas to its cities. Improvement in agricultural practices reduces the number of people needed in rural areas, and jobs in factories attract migrants to the cities in another region of the same country or in another country.
Stage Three and Stage Four: Internal migration is more important. Moderating NIR because of rapidly declining CBR. The principal destinations of the international migrants leaving the stage 2 countries in search of economic opportunities. The principal form of internal migration within countries in stages 3 and 3 is intraregional, from cities to surrounding suburbs.
13. Lee's Push and Pull Model
Push Factors Pull Factors
*Political (wars, persecution) *Political (lure of freedom, democracy)
*Economic (lack of jobs) *Economic (perceived opportunities for jobs)
*Physical (flooding, drought, *Physical (lure of attractive climate, land
natural disasters) form regions)
14. Language Families
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 Family: A collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded history.
Language Branch: 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 branches derived from the same family.
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.
English: Language family is Indo-European; Language branches: West Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian. Language Group: West Germanic: German, English, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Afrikaans, Danish. Romance: Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Italian, Venetian, Haitian Creole, Catalan, Sicicilian, Neapolitan. Balto-Slavic: Belarusan, Russian, Czech, Polish, Slovak Slavic, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, Czech. Indo-Iranian: Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Sinhalis, Nepali, Kurdish, Farsi, Bengali, Punjabi, Balochi, Kashmiri
Indo-European language family includes major languages of Europe and those dominant in Russia, Northern India, Iran, and Eastern and Southern Australia.
15. Universalizing Religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism)
Ethnic Religions (Hindu, Judaism, Animism)
17. World's Dependencies: not a separate country but depends on an MDC to protect and trade with it. These are mostly islands, Most are relatively isolated. Most have extremely small populations. Most are remnants of empires.
Dependency theory is the notion that resources flow from a "periphery" of poor and underdeveloped states to a "core" of wealthy states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former.
World-Systems Theory: (Immanuel Wallerstein's core-periphery model) three-tier structured theory (core, semi-periphery, periphery) proposing that social change in the developing world is linked to the economic activities of the developed world.
18. Global Positioning System versus Geographic Information System
GPS stands for Global Positioning System. GPS uses satellites that orbit Earth to send information to GPS receivers that are on the ground. The information helps people determine their location.
GIS stands for Geographical Information System. GIS is a software program that helps people use the information that is collected from the GPS satellites.
19. Forward capital: Forward capital: a symbolically relocated capital city usually because of either economic or strategic reasons; sometimes used to integrate outlying parts of a country into the state (e.g., from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, New York to Washington D.C.).
20. Robinson Projection: useful for displaying information across the oceans. Due to allocating space to the oceans, the land areas are much smaller.
21. Mercator projection; shape is distorted very little, direction is consistent, and the map is rectangular. Its greatest disadvantage is that area is grossly distorted toward the poles, making high latitude places look much larger than they actually are.
22. E.G. Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration
a. The majority of migrants travel short distances
b. Migrants who are traveling a long way tend to move to larger cities than smaller cities.
c. Rural residents are more likely to migrate than are urban residents.
d. Every migration stream creates a counterstream. Therefore, net migration is the number of people in the original flow minus the number of people in the opposite flow (or counterstream).
e. Families are less likely to make international moves than young adults
23. Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces
What is a centripetal force?
A centripetal force is a force or attitude that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state (p.239). They provide stability, strengthen the state, help bind people together, and create solidarity.
There are several examples of what a centripetal force in a state can be. Religion is a centripetal force in many states. For example, Hinduism in Nepal and India brings people together as they feel a sense of unity. Islam in Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Buddhism in Bhutan, is another example of religion as a centripetal force.
The term centripetal force comes from the Latin words centrum, meaning "center", and petere, meaning "tend towards" or "aim at". They are forces that unite and bind a country together - such as a strong national culture, shared ideological objectives, and a common faith.
Examples of centripetal force:
Cultural homogeneity, national culture: / France used to be a classic case of this, but immigration over the last 3 decades has changed this formerly white, Roman catholic, Francophone country, and produced serious centrifugal forces