Geographic Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The four are Friedrich Ratzel, Ferdinand Von Richthofen, Alfred Hettner and Vidal-de-la-Blache.

In the late nineteenth century, after the deaths of Humboldt and Ritter in 1859, geography risked splitting into separate sciences. Ratzel founded modern human geography (anthropogeography), Richthofen gave physical geography and regional study a scientific basis, Hettner defined geography as the chorological study of areas, and Vidal de la Blache founded the French school of regional geography and possibilism. Together they re-established it as an integrated discipline.

The other options swap one of the four for Elisee Reclus, Arnold Guyot or Otto Schluter, so they do not give the standard group.

Answer: C

In order of their periods the thinkers run (ii) (iv) (iii) (i).

1. Thales of Miletus: about 624-546 BCE.
2. Herodotus: about 484-425 BCE.
3. Aristotle: 384-322 BCE.
4. Eratosthenes: about 276-194 BCE.

Thales is the earliest of the Greek natural philosophers and Eratosthenes, who measured the earth's circumference, the latest, which rules out every option that does not start with (ii) and end with (i). The option (ii) (i) (iv) (iii) puts Eratosthenes second and is wrong.

Answer: D

The belief is exceptionalism.

The view that geography and history differ from the systematic sciences because they study the unique and the particular, places and periods, rather than seeking general laws, goes back to Kant and runs through Hettner and Hartshorne. Fred K. Schaefer named and attacked it as exceptionalism in his 1953 paper 'Exceptionalism in Geography', calling for geography to seek laws like other sciences.

Positivism is the law-seeking approach Schaefer wanted, the opposite of exceptionalism. Humanism stresses human experience and meaning, and radicalism applies Marxist and critical analysis to social inequality.

Answer: D

Hartshorne was reacting to the work of Schaefer.

In 1953 Fred K. Schaefer published 'Exceptionalism in Geography: A Methodological Examination', a sharp attack on the regional, idiographic geography defended in Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography (1939). Hartshorne replied in several articles and then in the book Perspective on the Nature of Geography (1959).

Edward Ackerman and Peter Haggett were part of the quantitative and spatial movement that followed, and Carl Sauer led the Berkeley school of cultural landscape study. None of them provoked Hartshorne's Perspective.

Answer: B

The pair that is not a dichotomy in geography is Political and Historical.

The recognised dichotomies are pairs of opposed approaches debated in the history of the subject: physical versus human geography, regional versus systematic geography, and quantitative versus qualitative methods (along with determinism versus possibilism, and nomothetic versus idiographic).

Political geography and historical geography are simply two branches of human geography. They are not set against each other as rival approaches, so they do not form a dichotomy.

Answer: A

The theory Humboldt disproved was proposed by Werner.

Abraham Gottlob Werner, Humboldt's own teacher at the Freiberg mining academy, held the Neptunist theory that all rocks, including basalt, had been precipitated from a primeval ocean, that is, were sedimentary in origin. Studying the volcanic rocks of the Andes, Humboldt saw that they were of igneous origin, which undermined the Neptunist view.

Philippe Buache is known for his ideas on watersheds and river basins, Anton Busching for his descriptive geography of Europe, and W.M. Davis, born long after, for the cycle of erosion.

Answer: B

The geographer is Hettner, the second option.

Alfred Hettner, a pupil of Ferdinand von Richthofen, set out his case for geography as a chorological science, the study of areas of the earth's surface, in an essay in the Geographische Zeitschrift in 1905 (his full methodological book followed in 1927). The date in the question is what identifies him.

Richthofen's own statement of the chorological idea was his Leipzig inaugural address of 1883, not 1905. Carl Ritter belongs to the first half of the nineteenth century, the age of the Erdkunde. Carl Sauer wrote on the morphology of landscape in the 1920s.

The wording 'the place of the Earth's body' is unusual and could not be matched to a published sentence, so this explanation rests on the 1905 essay being Hettner's.

Answer: B

The answer given is Ratzel, the second option.

The stem sets William Morris Davis, who treated geography as the study of the relation between man and land, against someone whose subject was human distributions. Friedrich Ratzel founded anthropogeography (Anthropogeographie, 1882): the study of how people are spread over the earth's surface and how that spread goes with, and is explained by, the physical environment. A study of the distribution of mankind together with the conditions that vary alongside it fits that description best.

Hettner and Richthofen are the chorologists, who defined geography as the description of areas and their differences rather than of human distributions as such. Schlüter (printed 'Schulter') is known for the morphology of the cultural landscape, the visible forms that people give an area.

I could not find a published source with the exact word 'covariants', so the choice rests on the match with Ratzel's anthropogeography and the elimination of the other three.

Answer: B

The correct match is a-ii, b-iii, c-iv, d-i.

• Atoll formation: Charles Darwin, whose subsidence theory (1842) explained atolls as fringing reefs that grew upwards around sinking volcanic islands.
• Gradualism: James Hutton, who argued that slow processes acting over immense time shape the Earth.
• Glacial theory: Louis Agassiz, who proposed in 1837 a former Ice Age over Europe.
• Base level: W.M. Davis, who built the base level of erosion (a concept introduced by Powell) into his cycle of erosion.

The first code gives atolls to Davis, and the other two misassign Hutton and Agassiz.

Answer: A

Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Richard Hartshorne, following Hettner, defined geography as a chorological science, the study of areal differentiation, comparable to history as a chronological science. This defined geography by its way of looking at things, the spatial point of view, rather than by a distinctive subject matter of its own.

Many geographers, Fred Schaefer the best known, were uneasy with this because a discipline defined only by its method seemed to have no body of phenomena or laws of its own. The reason therefore explains the assertion.