Midterm and Final Discussion Questions Unit I Discussion Questions 1. Cartography is not simply a technical exercise in penmanship and coloring, nor are decision confined to scale and projection. Mapping is a politically sensitive undertaking. Look at how maps in different books distinguish between the territories of Israel and its neighbors, the locations of borders in South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, and the relationship of China and Taiwan. Are there other logical ways to draw boundaries and distinguish among territories in these regions? What might they be? 2. What are the common characteristics of regions? How are formal and functional regions different in concept and definition? What is a perceptual region? 3. Imagine that a transportation device (like in Star Trek) would enable all humans to travel instantaneously to any location on Earth’s surface. What would be the impact of that invention on the distribution of peoples and activities across Earth? 4. Describe the site and situation of Tallahassee, Tampa, Orlando, and Lake City. 5. When earthquakes, hurricanes, or other environmental disasters strike, humans tend to “blame” nature and see themselves as innocent victims of a harsh and cruel nature. To what extent do environmental hazards stem from unpredictable nature, and to what extent do they originate from human actions? Should victims blame nature, other humans, or themselves for the disaster? Why? Unit II Discussion Questions 1. What is meant by spatial interaction? a. According to Edward Ullman (19121976), spatial interaction is effectively controlled by three flow determining factors – explain (with a realworld example) each of these factors. i. Complementarity ii. Transferability iii. Intervening opportunity 2. What variations in distance decay curves might you expect if you were to plot shipments of readymix concrete, potato chips, and computer parts? What do these respective curves tell us about transferability? 3. How do crude birth rate and fertility rate differ? Determine and explain which measure is the more accurate statement of the amount of reproduction occurring in a population. 4. Which demographic characteristics (such as rates of natural increase, crude birth, and crude death) prevail in the three regions with the largest numbers of refugees – the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East? Is largescale forced migration alleviating or exacerbating population growth in these regions? Explain. 5. Paul and Anne Ehrlich argue in The Population Explosion (1990) that a baby born in an MDC such as the United States poses a graver threat to global overpopulation than a baby born in an LDC. The reason is that people in MDCs place much higher demands on the world’s supply of energy, food, and other limited resources. Discuss your opinion regarding this view. 6. What policies should governments in MDCs pursue to reduce global population growth? If an MDC provides funds and advice to promote family planning, does it gain the right to tell developing countries how to spend the funds and how to use the expertise? Explain your answer with examples 7. Should preference for immigrating to the US and Canada be given to individuals with special job skills, or should priority be given to reunification of family members?
a. Should quotas be raised to meet increasing demand for both types of immigrants? Why or why not? 8. What is the impact of largescale emigration on the places from which migrants depart? On balance, do these places suffer because of the loss of young, upwardly mobile workers, or do these places benefit from the draining away of surplus labor? In the communities from which migrants depart, is the quality of life improved overall through reduced pressures on local resources or is it damaged overall through the deterioration of social structures and institutions? Explain thoroughly. At the same time that some people are migrating from less developed countries to more developed countries in search of employment, transnational corporations have relocated some lowskilled jobs to less developed countries to take advantage of low wage rates. Should less developed countries care whether their surplus workers emigrate or remain as employees of foreign companies? Explain in detail. Unit III Discussion Questions 1. What is a culture hearth? What new traits of culture characterized the early hearths? Identify and locate some of the major culture hearths that emerged at the close of the Neolithic period. 2. What are the components or subsystems of the threepart system of culture? Make sure you describe and explain the characteristics of each subsystem. 3. Should geographers regard culture and social customs as meaningful generalizations about a group of people, or should they concentrate instead on understanding how specific individuals interact with the physical environment? Explain your answer. 4. In what ways might gender affect the distribution of social customs in a community? 5. Cite examples that indicate the significance of religion as a cultural dominant in the internal and foreign relations of nations. 6. How does the classification of religions as universalizing, ethnic, or tribal help us to understand their patterns of distribution and spatial diffusion? 7. Why might one consider language the dominant differentiating element of culture separating societies? 8. Twenty US states have passed laws mandating English as the language of all government functions. In 1990, Arizona’s law making English the official language was ruled an unconstitutional violation of free speech. Should the use of English be encouraged in the US to foster cultural integration, or should bilingualism be encouraged to foster cultural diversity? Explain your answer. 9. Does the province of Quebec possess the resources, economy, political institutions, and social structures to be a viable, healthy country? What would be the impact of Quebec’s independence on the remainder of Canada, on the United States, and on France? 10. How does ethnocentrism contribute to preservation of group identity? In what ways might an ethnic group sustain and support new immigrants? 11. What have been some of the principal time patterns of immigration flows into the United States? Into Canada? How are those patterns important to an understanding of present day social conflicts in either or both countries? 12. The 2000 U.S. Census permitted people to identity themselves as being of more than one
race, in recognition that several million American children have parents of two races. Discuss the merits and difficulties of permitting people to choose more than one race. 13. Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, once contained concentrations of many ethnic groups. In retaliation for ethnic cleansing by the Serbs and Croats, the Bosnian Muslims now in control of Sarajevo have been forcing other ethnic groups to leave the city, and Sarajevo is now inhabited overwhelmingly by Bosnian Muslims. Discuss the merits and obstacles in restoring Sarajevo as a multiethnic city. 14. With the removal of the apartheid laws, South Africa now offers legal equality to all races in principle. Discuss obstacles that South Africa’s blacks face in achieving cultural and economic equality. 15. What contrasts can you draw between folk culture and popular culture? What different sorts of material and nonmaterial elements identify them? 16. If, as some have observed, there is a close relationship between the natural environment and the artifacts of folk culture, is there likely to be a similar causal connection between the environment and expressions of popular culture? Explain why or why not. Unit IV Discussion Questions 1. What are the differences between a state, a nation, and a nationstate? Why is a colony not a state? How can one account fro the rapid increase in the number of states since World War II? 2. Distinguish between centripetal and centrifugal political forces. What are some of the ways national cohesion and identity are achieved? 3. In the Winter 1992/93 issue of Foreign Policy, Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner identified countries that they called “failed nationstates,” including Cambodia, Liberia, Somalia, and Sudan, and others they predicted would fail. Helman and Ratner argue that the governments of these countries were maintained in power during the Cold War era through massive military and economic aid from the US or the USSR. With the end of the Cold War, these failed nationstates have sunk into civil wars, fought among groups who share language, religion, and other cultural characteristics. What obligations do other countries have to restore order in failed nationstates? Explain your answer and use a presentday model. 4. How did Mackinder and Spykman (look in Fellmann) differ in their assessments of Eurasia as a likely base for world conquest? What post1945 developments suggest that there may be no enduring correlation between location and national power? (think about how flat the world has become!) 5. Given the movement toward increased local government autonomy on the one hand and increased authority for international organizations on the other, what is the future of the nationstate? Have political and economic trends since the 1990s strengthened the concept of nationstate or weakened it? 6. The world has been divided into a collection of countries on the basis of the principle that ethnicities have the right of selfdetermination. National identity, however, derives from economic interests as well as from such cultural characteristics. as language and religion. To what extent should a country’s ability to provide its citizens with food, jobs, economic security, and material wealth, rather than the principle of selfdetermination, become the basis for dividing the world into independent countries? Unit V Discussion Questions 1. What are the distinguishing characteristics of the economic systems labeled subsistence, commercial, and planned?
a. Are they mutually exclusive, or can they coexist within a single political unit? 2. What are the ecological consequences of the different forms of extensive subsistence land use? a. In what world regions are such systems found? b. What, in your opinion, are the prospects for these land uses and for the way of life they embody? 3. What are some of the reasons that have been given to explain why some countries are developed and others are underdeveloped? 4. Why should any country of society concern itself wit technology transfer or with the technology gap? a. What do these concepts have to do with either development or societal well being? 5. Have both males and females shared equally in the benefits of economic development in its early stages? a. Explain the principal contrasts in the status of women between the developed and developing worlds? 6. How does the coreperiphery model help us understand observed contrasts between developed and developing countries? a. In what way is circular and cumulative causation linked either to the perpetuation or the reduction of those contrasts? 7. China has relied on selfsufficiency to promote development, whereas Hong Kong ahs been a prominent practitioner of international trade. Explain how these two approaches have been reconciled since Hong Kong became part of China in 1997. 8. What obstacles do Eastern European countries face as they dismantle 40 years of communism and convert to market economies? 9. Review the concept of overpopulation (the number of people in an area exceeds the capacity of the environment to support life at a decent standard of living). What agricultural regions have relatively limited capacities to support intensive food production? What of these regions face rapid population growth? 10. How might the loss of farmland on the edge of rapidly growing cities alter the choice of crops that other farmers make in a commercial agricultural society? Discussion Questions VI 1. What were Weber’s controlling assumptions in his theory of plant location? A. What “distortions” did he recognize that might alter the locational decision? 2. What is the difference between fixed and variable costs? A. Which of the two is of interest in the plant locational decision? B. What kinds of variable costs are generally reckoned as most important in locational theory? 3. Raw materials, power, labor, market, and transportation are “factors of location” usually considered important in industrial placement decisions. Summarize the role of each, and cite examples of where each could be decisive in a firm’s location. 4. What have been the benefits and costs to Canada of its free trade agreement with the US? A. How are the benefits and costs to Canada likely to change with the implementation of NAFTA?
5. Foreign cars account for only ¼ of the sales in the midwestern US, compared to ½ in California and other West Coast states. What factors might account for this regional difference? 6. Imagine a large triangle on a map of Russia – with one point near Moscow, one point in the Ural Mountains, and one point in Central Asia. What are the principal economic assets of these three regions at each side of the triangle? A. How do the distributions of markets, resources, and surplus labor vary within Russia? 7. Rural settlement patterns along the U.S. East Coast were influenced by migration during the Colonial era. To what extent do distinctive rural settlement patterns elsewhere in the United States result from international or internal migration? 8. Compare (write down) the CBDs of Toronto and Detroit. What might account for differences? 9. What evidence can you find in your community of economic ties to world cities located elsewhere in North America, Western Europe, or Japan. Unit VII Discussion Questions 1. Nearly all residents of MDCs lead urban lifestyles even if they live in rural areas. In contrast, many residents in LDCs lead rural lifestyles, even through they live in large cities. They practice subsistence agriculture, raising animals or growing crops. Lacking electricity, they gather wood for fuel. Lacking running water and sewers, they dig latrines. Why do so many urban dwellers in LDCs lead rural lifestyles? 2. Landuse activities in Communist cities were allocated by government rather than made by private market decisions. To what extent would the absence of a privatesector urban land market affect the form and structure of socialist cities? 3. Officials of rapidly growing cities in LDCs discourage the building of houses that do not meet international standards for sanitation and construction methods. Also discouraged are privately owned transportation services, because the vehicles generally lack decent tires, brakes, and other safety features. Yet the residents prefer substandard housing to no housing, and they prefer unsafe transportation to no transportation. What would be the advantages and problems for a city if health and safety standards for housing, transportation, and other services were relaxed? 4. What steps has your community taken to recycle solid waste and to conserve energy? a. Do you feel these steps have been enough? Explain. 5. A recent study compared paper and polystyrene foam drinking cups. Conventional wisdom is that foam cups are bad for the environment, because they are made from petroleum and do not degrade in landfills. However, the manufacture of a paper cup consumes 36 times as much electricity and generates 580 times as much wastewater. Further, as they degrade in landfills, paper cups release methane gas, a contributor to the greenhouse effect. What types of cups should companies like McDonald’s be encouraged to use? Explain your answer. a. Can you think of an alternative product – follow what you believe would be the supply chain from resource to product, to use by consumer, and finally – disposal. 6. Malthus argued 200 years ago that overpopulation was inevitable, because population increased geometrically while food supply increased arithmetically. Was Malthus correct? Why or why not. 7. Pollution is a byproduct of producing almost anything. How can more developed
countries, which historically have been responsible for generating the most pollution, encourage less developed countries to seek to minimize the adverse effects of pollution as they improve their levels of development? 8. Describe the multiplier effect as it relates to the population growth of urban units. 9. In what ways does the Canadian city differ from the pattern of its US counterpart? 10. What are primate cities? a. Why are primate cities so prevalent in the developing world? b. How are some governments attempting to reduce their relative importance in their national systems of cities? 11. What are the significant differences in the generalized pattern of land uses of North American, West European, East European, Asian, and African cities? 12. What effects has the increasing use of fossil fuels over the past 200 years had on the environment? a. What is acid rain, and where is it a problem? b. What factors affect the type and degree of air pollution found at a place? c. What is the relationship of ozone to petrochemical smog? 13. Suggest ways in which your study of human geography has increased your understanding of the relationship between the environments of culture and those of nature.