World Geography

GEOGRAPHY
Map Skills

*What is geography? It is not just knowing where every country or mountain is (although those are part of it). There are many aspects to geography.

*Location is one important part of geography, of course. To a geographer, location refers to precisely where something can be found in the world (or on a map).

*There are two ways to describe the location of something. One way is absolute location—locating something using known, fixed reference points. For local geography, a street address could give an absolute location (Science Hill is at 1509 John Exum Parkway), but for most things, absolute location is determined by the intersection of lines of latitude and longitude. Once you know the coordinates of something, you can find its location.

*Much of the time, people will locate things through relative location—after all, most of us do not carry GPS devices to let us find our latitude and longitude all the time. Instead, we think of where things are in relation to other things. Relative location ought to employ a direction and a distance—for example, the Mall is about one mile north of Science Hill, or Knoxville is about 100 miles west of Johnson City.

*Geography can also be considered in terms of place. For geographers, ‘place’ refers to the physical and human meaning of a location: Johnson City has coordinates on a map, but it also has a population, economic activity, and other things that make it a specific place rather than just a set of coordinates.

*Places that are related to one another in some way are often grouped into regions. A region is a group of places that have some common characteristic or connecting element. A formal (or uniform) region has some specific characteristic in common (such as an agricultural product—Iowa and Illinois are both part of the Corn Belt). A functional region has a central place (such as a major city) with dependent places (such as suburbs or smaller cities) surrounding it and depending on it economically. A perceptual region is a place where everyone feels that they are in the same region, even if there actually are economic or physical differences within the region—New Mexico is farther south than Virginia, and California produces more cotton than Mississippi, but neither one is thought of as being a ‘Southern’ state.

*Another theme in geography is Human/Environment Interaction, or how humans and the physical environment affect one another. If location is ‘where stuff is’ and place is ‘what is the stuff like,’ Human/Environment Interaction is ‘what do people do there?’ Why do people choose to be there? What do they do there? How does the place affect what they do, and how do they affect it. For example, farmers don’t grow oranges in Alaska, and they don’t raise sheep in Florida. In Minneapolis, people wear warm coats in the winter, while in California some people wear shorts all year round. Once upon a time, a lot of Texas was too dry to farm, but now people have carried water there, changing the land so that farming is possible.

*Thus the study of geography helps us not only describe the Earth, but to understand the people who live on it.

*The world is most clearly described visually through maps and globes, both of which have advantages and disadvantages. A globe can offer the most accurate depiction of the earth, but it is difficult to transport, and generally cannot show small areas in great detail.

*Maps are easier to store and transport, and can show different parts of the world at different scales. However, because they are trying to show a curved surface on a flat one, they have to distort the picture somehow.

*Every map works from some central point, which will accurately show the shapes and distances it depicts, but as it works outward from that point, shapes become more distorted. Some examples are on page 4. Most maps work from the equator, which means that shapes near the poles appear much larger than they should—although Greenland looks bigger than Australia (or sometimes even South America) on some maps, it is really about the size of Mexico: it is large for an island, but it is not a continent.

*There are several Great Circles on globes that divide the earth. The Equator divides the Earth into northern and southern hemispheres, and the Prime Meridian divides it into eastern and western hemispheres. Using these two lines as reference points, the rest of the world has been defined by lines of latitude and longitude.

*Lines of latitude are measured as degrees north or south of the Equator. Each degree of latitude can also be divided into 60 minutes, each one nautical mile across (a nautical mile is slightly longer than a regular mile—about 1.15 miles). Each minute can be divided into 60 seconds of about 101 feet, 3 inches. Thus a complete latitudinal notation could read as 35° 58′ 22" N (the latitude of Knoxville). Such precise measurements are mostly used for shipping charts, and for navigation in the ocean where there are no natural landmarks.

*Lines of longitude are measured east and west of the Prime Meridian, and stretch from the North to the South Pole. They are numbered from 0° to 180° (both east and west) at the International Date Line. They are called degrees because, with 180 degrees east and 180 degrees west, they add up to 360 degrees, and if you measure the equator, one degree of longitude falls along every degree of the circle. Degrees of longitude are also subdivided into minutes and seconds for precise notation. Knoxville lies at 83° 56′ 32″ W.

*Lines of latitude and longitude form a grid covering the entire globe, and their intersections can be used as coordinates to determine absolute locations of nearly anything in the world. Knoxville’s coordinates are 35° 58′ 22" N, 83° 56′ 32″ W.

*Look at pages 10 and 11.

*There are many types of maps. Among the most common are physical maps, which show physical features, such as mountains, lakes, and the depth of the ocean. They often indicate such things through colour schemes, although many topographic maps simply draw a series of lines to mark off changes in elevation at regular intervals.

*Political maps exist to show countries, states, cities, roads, railways, and other elements of human geography, although they often show rivers and sometimes mountains or other physical features that help define borders and boundaries.

*Special purpose maps are almost all other maps. They can be used like the one on page 11 to show economic activity (such as important products) or like those on RA34-RA39 to show land use, economic production, or population. Still others show climatic regions, vegetation, language distribution, and almost any other thing that can be described in terms of location.

*Often a map will have features of two or three of these types. Even the physical map on page 10 has some political designations and the political map on the same page shows some mountains.

*On page 8, you can see things that almost any map will have. The most important parts, in some ways, are the key, the scale, and the compass rose.

*A key, or a legend, tells what the symbols on the map stand for—in this case, national boundaries and cities.

*A scale allows you to convert measurements on the map into real-world measurements. A scale bar like this one is a visual scale; you can measure things on the map, and compare them to the scale to work out the distance represented. Scales are sometimes also given as a ratio. In that case, everything on the map can be converted using that ratio. For example, a scale of 1:100,000 means that one unit on the map should be multiplied by 100,000, so that one inch would mean 100,000 inches, or about 1.58 miles.

*The compass rose simply indicates which direction is north, but this, combined with the scale, allows you to determine relative location, while lines of latitude and longitude (if present) let you find absolute locations.

*Distribute atlases, do latitude and longitude worksheet.