Understanding Geography Book 2 Pdf Free Download
Sharmaine Kass
A committee awards the annual prize for a book that conveys most powerfully the nature and importance of geography to the non-academic world. An award of $1,000 will be made to the author(s). In any given cycle, the Globe Book Award Committee may also select a second title from the pool of nominations to be recognized with an Honorable Mention.
ABCs of Geography (Sourcebooks, 2022) by Adam Mathews (Western Michigan University) and Chris Ferrie (Centre for Quantum Software and Information) is a fun, accessible, and informative book about the fundamentals of geography aimed at children and, by extension, their caregivers.
Of course, the Greeks were not the only people interested in geography, nor were they the first. Throughout human history, most societies have sought to understand something about their place in the world, and the people and environments around them. Mesopotamian societies inscribed maps on clay tablets, some of which survive to this day. The earliest known attempt at mapping the world is a Babylonian clay tablet known as the Imago Mundi. This map, created in the sixth century B.C.E., is more of a metaphorical and spiritual representation of Babylonian society rather than an accurate depiction of geography. Other Mesopotamian maps were more practical, marking irrigation networks and landholdings.
During the Middle Ages, geography ceased to be a major academic pursuit in Europe. Advances in geography were chiefly made by scientists of the Muslim world, based around the Middle East and North Africa. Geographers of this Islamic Golden Age created an early example of a rectangular map based on a grid, a map system that is still familiar today. Islamic scholars also applied their study of people and places to agriculture, determining which crops and livestock were most suited to specific habitats or environments.
With the dawn of the Age of Discovery, the study of geography regained popularity in Europe. The invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s helped spread geographic knowledge by making maps and charts widely available. Improvements in shipbuilding and navigation facilitated more exploring, greatly improving the accuracy of maps and geographic information.
Greater geographic understanding allowed European powers to extend their global influence. During the Age of Discovery, European nations established colonies around the world. Improved transportation, communication, and navigational technology allowed countries such as the United Kingdom to establish colonies as far away as the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Africa. This was lucrative for European powers, but the Age of Discovery brought about nightmarish change for the people already living in the territories they colonized. When Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, millions of Indigenous peoples already lived there. By the 1600s, 90 percent of the Indigenous population of the Americas had been wiped out by violence and diseases brought over by European explorers.
Geography was not just a subject that enabled colonialism, however. It also helped people understand the planet on which they lived. Not surprisingly, geography became an important focus of study in schools and universities.
Because the study of geography is so broad, the discipline is typically divided into specialties. At the broadest level, geography is divided into physical geography, human geography, geographic techniques, and regional geography.
The main divisions within human geography reflect a concern with different types of human activities or ways of living. Some examples of human geography include urban geography, economic geography, cultural geography, political geography, social geography, and population geography. Human geographers who study geographic patterns and processes in past times are part of the subdiscipline of historical geography. Those who study how people understand maps and geographic space belong to a subdiscipline known as behavioral geography.
Some human geographers focus on the connection between human health and geography. For example, health geographers create maps that track the location and spread of specific diseases. They analyze the geographic disparities of health-care access. They are very interested in the impact of the environment on human health, especially the effects of environmental hazards such as radiation, lead poisoning, or water pollution.
Specialists in geographic techniques study the ways in which geographic processes can be analyzed and represented using different methods and technologies. Mapmaking, or cartography, is perhaps the most basic of these. Cartography has been instrumental to geography throughout the ages.
Computerized systems that allow for precise calculations of how things are distributed and relate to one another have made the study of geographic information systems (GIS) an increasingly important specialty within geography. Geographic information systems are powerful databases that collect all types of information (maps, reports, statistics, satellite images, surveys, demographic data, and more) and link each piece of data to a geographic reference point, such as geographic coordinates. This data, called geospatial information, can be stored, analyzed, modeled, and manipulated in ways not possible before GIS computer technology existed.
The enormous possibilities for producing computerized maps and diagrams that can help us understand environmental and social problems have made geographic visualization an increasingly important specialty within geography. This geospatial information is in high demand by just about every institution, from government agencies monitoring water quality to entrepreneurs deciding where to locate new businesses.
Regional geographers take a somewhat different approach to specialization, directing their attention to the general geographic characteristics of a region. A regional geographer might specialize in African studies, observing and documenting the people, nations, rivers, mountains, deserts, weather, trade, and other attributes of the continent. There are different ways you can define a region. You can look at climate zones, cultural regions, or political regions. Often regional geographers have a physical or human geography specialty as well as a regional specialty.
The problem of high and rising rural child poverty has been widespread but not pandemic across rural areas. Child poverty rates varied considerably across nonmetropolitan (rural) counties according to 2009 to 2013 county averages (county data on poverty are only available from the ACS for 5-year averages). One in five rural counties had child poverty rates of over 33 percent in 2009/13, but another one in five had child poverty rates of less than 16 percent. Overall, county average rates of child poverty rose from 20 percent to 25 percent over 1999-2009/13, with the proportion of counties with child poverty rates of over 33 percent doubling in this period. Meanwhile, estimated child poverty rates declined in one in five counties. To better understand this diversity of experience, we examine three factors shaping the geography of the change in rural child poverty over this period: changing economic conditions, young adult education, and family structure (see box, Measuring poverty).
With respect to the third factor, family structure, single parents have difficulty simultaneously raising a family and earning enough to support the family. According to the 2013 ACS, the poverty rate for rural children in single-parent families was 50 percent, compared with 13 percent for children in rural married-couple families. The rise in poverty has been somewhat greater for children in single-parent families, for whom the child poverty rate was 43 percent in 1999, than it has been for children in married-couple families, for whom the rate was 10 percent in in 1999. This measure also shows considerable variation across rural counties, with one quarter of the counties having 25 percent or fewer children in single-parent households and a quarter having 38 percent or more children in this situation. The following analysis examines the role of these three factors in the geography of growth in child poverty over the study period.
Full coverage of geography concepts, world regions, and nations supports core social studies curriculum, including explorations of landforms and climate; natural resources; customs and culture; political and economic systems; national histories; and contemporary issues.
Since environmental criminological research on rape series is an understudied field due largely to deficiencies in official and publicly available data and little is known about the spatial patterns of rapists with a large number of stranger rapes,. a unique integration and application of spatial, temporal, behavioral, forensic, investigative, and personal history data were used, to explore the geography of rape of a prolific, mobile serial stranger rapist identified through initiatives to address thousands of previously untested rape kits in two U.S. urban, neighboring jurisdictions.
Rape kit data provide the opportunity for a more complete and comprehensive understanding of stranger rape series by linking crimes that likely never would have been linked if not for the DNA evidence. This study fills a knowledge gap by exploring the spatial offending patterns of extremely prolific serial stranger rapists. Through the lens of routine activities theory, we explore the motivated offender, the lack of capable guardianship (e.g., built environment), and the targeted victims. The findings have important implications for gaining practical and useful insight into rapists' use of space and behavioral decision-making processes, effective public health interventions and prevention approaches, and urban planning strategies in communities subjected to repeat targeting by violent offenders.
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