Geographic Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: B

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

• Plato reasoned from general ideas to particulars: the deductive approach.
• Hipparchus (spelt 'Hipparcus') devised map projections and a grid of latitude and longitude.
• Alfred Hettner defined geography as chorology, the study of areas.
• Peter Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid (1902), arguing that cooperation is a factor of evolution.

The other codes misassign at least two of these.

Answer: D

The correct matching is a-2, b-3, c-1, d-4.

• Man-environment relationship: understanding human impacts on the environment.
• Spatial analysis: quantitative methods to analyse spatial patterns.
• Earth science: the study of natural and geological processes.
• Area studies: in-depth examination of specific regions.

These are Pattison's four traditions of geography. Option A swaps the first two, and B and C misplace area studies.

Answer: B

Carl O. Sauer is associated with the Berkeley school.

Sauer taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1923 and founded the Berkeley school of cultural geography. It studied the cultural landscape, how human groups transform the natural landscape over time, set out in his essay The Morphology of Landscape (1925).

The Chicago school is known for urban ecology, and the Los Angeles school for later postmodern urban studies. The Montana school is not a recognised school of geography.

Answer: A

The debate shifted the emphasis from areal integration to spatial integration.

Richard Hartshorne had defined geography as the study of areal differentiation: the unique integration of features within each area, an idiographic approach. Fred Schaefer's paper Exceptionalism in Geography (1953) attacked this and called for a nomothetic, law-seeking geography concerned with spatial relationships. The debate opened the way to the quantitative revolution and spatial science.

The shift was not from physical to human geography, nor between determinism and possibilism or humanism and radicalism, which belong to other debates.

Answer: B

It is humanistic geography.

Humanistic geography, drawing on phenomenology, seeks to describe the world as people experience it, reconstructing faithfully the meanings that places and environments hold for individuals, without imposing outside theories. Its method is description and interpretation of lived experience.

Behavioural geography models decision-making and perception, often quantitatively. Structuralism looks for hidden underlying structures, and positivism seeks general laws through the scientific method. None aims at literal reconstruction of self-evident meaning.

Answer: A

The correct matching is a-(iii), b-(iv), c-(ii), d-(i).

• Eratosthenes (3rd century BCE) calculated the Earth's circumference from the angle of the sun's rays at Syene and Alexandria (iii).
• Carl Sauer wrote The Morphology of Landscape (1925) (iv).
• Georg Gerland argued that geography should be the study of the Earth as a physical body, geography as geophysics, excluding man (ii).
• Fred Schaefer called for a law-seeking, normative (nomothetic) geography (i).

The other codes give Sauer's landscape essay or Eratosthenes' measurement to the wrong person.

Answer: C

The civilisation is the Arab civilisation.

Between the 8th and 14th centuries Arab and Islamic scholars preserved and extended Greek geography. Al-Idrisi made his world map for Roger II of Sicily, al-Biruni measured the Earth's radius and wrote on India, Ibn Battuta and al-Masudi described vast regions from their travels, and astronomers refined the astrolabe and tables used for navigation.

Indian and Chinese scholars made notable advances in astronomy, and the Romans in road surveys and itineraries, but the combination of mapmaking, navigation and astronomy that carried geography through the medieval period is associated above all with Arab scholars.

Answer: C

(A) is true but (R) is false.

Darwin's theory of evolution did change geographical thought, by encouraging an evolutionary view of landscapes: W.M. Davis's cycle of erosion, with landforms passing through youth, maturity and old age, is the classic example (A).

But neo-determinism was not introduced by Darwinian theory. It is the 'stop-and-go determinism' of Griffith Taylor, put forward in the 1920s and later as a middle way between environmental determinism and possibilism. So (R) is false.

Answer: B

Both (A) and (R) are true but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

Vidal de la Blache rejected a split between physical and human geography, treating nature and culture together in the genre de vie (way of life) of each region (A).

He was also drawn to Ratzel's anthropogeography, especially its interest in the distribution of people and the role of migration in human adjustment to nature (R). That influence is true but does not explain his opposition to the natural-cultural dichotomy, which came from his own regional, possibilist method.

Answer: D

The behavioural perspective draws on psychological theories.

Behavioural geography, which grew in the 1960s, studies how people perceive their environment, form mental maps, and make decisions about where to live, shop or migrate. It borrows heavily from psychology, especially cognitive and environmental psychology, on perception, learning and decision-making.

Economic theories assume a rational 'economic man', which behavioural geography set out to replace. Political and environmental theories are not its main source.