Geographic Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The key treats the Assertion as true and the Reason as false.

The Assertion is the standard description of behavioural geography: reacting against the abstract 'economic man' of the quantitative models, it studied how individuals perceive, decide and act in space, place and environment, at the level of the individual person.

The Reason misstates why mental maps mattered. Behavioural geographers, such as Gould and White in Mental Maps (1974), used mental maps to understand how people perceive places and how those images shape their spatial preferences and decisions. They were not a discovery about why spatial planning failed in most cases, so the key marks the Reason false, which rules out every option treating both as true.

Answer: C

Only statement (2) is not correct, so the answer is (2) only.

Statement (2) describes radical geography, not humanistic geography. Expeditions to the poorest and most depressed areas, to gather first-hand information about them, were the method of William Bunge's Detroit Geographical Expedition of the late 1960s, a radical project.

Statements (1), (3) and (4) paraphrase the humanistic view, especially Yi-Fu Tuan's: it gives a central and active role to human awareness and experience, seeks the meaning, value and human significance of life events, and offers an expansive (the paper prints 'expensive') view of what the human person is and can do. So options naming (3) or (4) as incorrect are wrong.

Answer: C

The correct matching is (2) (4) (3) (1).

• Ptolemy believed that the Indian Ocean was an enclosed sea, bounded by a southern land joining Africa to Asia.
• Strabo is famous for his seventeen-book Geographica.
• Eratosthenes calculated the Earth's circumference from the Sun's angle at Syene and Alexandria.
• Herodotus described the Nile delta and the way rivers build deltas from their silt; the word delta for such a landform is traced to him.

Option A gives the delta to Ptolemy and the circumference to Strabo, and options B and D misplace Ptolemy as well.

Answer: B

The correct sequence is (1), (4), (3) and (2): possibilism, quantitative analysis, behaviourism, post-modernism.

• Possibilism, from Vidal de la Blache and the French school, at the turn of the twentieth century.
• The quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.
• Behavioural geography, from the 1960s and 1970s, as a reaction to the quantitative models.
• Post-modernism, from the late 1980s.

Option C puts behaviourism before the quantitative revolution it reacted against, and options A and D begin with the most recent movements.

Answer: D

The centre was the University of Lund, Sweden.

At Lund, Torsten Hagerstrand developed the quantitative study of spatial diffusion of innovations, using Monte Carlo simulation, in the early 1950s. Lund became the leading centre of quantitative-theoretical geography outside the United States and strongly influenced the American quantitative revolution.

In Britain the quantitative approach was championed at Cambridge and Bristol, notably by Chorley, Haggett and Harvey, rather than at Oxford. Halle and Nancy have no comparable place in the history of the quantitative revolution.

Answer: D

The language of geography as a spatial science is geometry.

In the quantitative revolution geography was redefined as the science of spatial relations. William Bunge, in Theoretical Geography (1962), argued that geometry is the language of such a spatial science, because location, distance, direction and pattern are geometric properties; Harvey and Haggett took up the same view.

Ecosystem, environment and landscape are concepts that geography studies, belonging to the ecological and regional traditions, not the formal language in which spatial science expresses its laws.

Answer: B

The key gives Oscar Peschel.

What could not be confirmed: general histories of geographical thought credit Bernhard Varenius with the early split between general and special geography and, with Kant, with the dualistic approach to physical and human geography, and none of the sources found names Peschel or George Gerland as the originator. One exam answer site gives Peschel as the answer while also saying that he did not originate the idea, so the attribution is the paper's own convention.

Carl Ritter and Elisee Reclus are not credited with this dualism in any source found. Options A and C are therefore the weakest; the choice between Peschel and Gerland rests on the key, which is kept.

Answer: C

The school is the French school.

Paul Vidal de la Blache and his followers, such as Jean Brunhes and Lucien Febvre, held that nature offers a range of possibilities and that people choose among them according to their way of life. Genre de vie was their term for the way of life of a group, its customs, techniques and traditions, which decides how it uses its environment. Febvre named this approach possibilism.

The German school, led by Friedrich Ratzel and followed in America by Ellen Semple, was the home of environmental determinism, the view that possibilism replaced. The British and Dutch schools are not associated with genre de vie.

Answer: D

The first to clarify this relationship was Varenius.

Bernhardus Varenius, in Geographia Generalis (1650), divided geography into general geography, which studies the Earth as a whole and the laws that apply everywhere, and special geography, which describes particular regions. He stressed that the two depend on each other, laying the basis of the later systematic and regional approaches.

Immanuel Kant lectured on physical geography a century later, and Alexander von Humboldt developed the systematic approach in the nineteenth century, both well after Varenius. The paper's 'Buscheng' (Busching) wrote descriptive regional geography, not this distinction.

Answer: D

The key gives John Ray.

John Ray (1627-1705), the English naturalist, produced one of the first systematic classifications of plants, in his Historia Plantarum, and of animals, grouping organisms by their structure and defining the species as the basic unit. His work came before Linnaeus and is why he is credited with the first scientific classification of plants and animals.

Count Buffon (1707-1788) wrote his Histoire Naturelle later, and George Forster (1754-1794), naturalist on Cook's second voyage, later still. James Rennell was the surveyor and cartographer of Bengal, not a naturalist.