Geographic Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Quantification was responsible for the radical transformation of the spirit and purpose of geography. The quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s moved geography from description of regions to hypothesis testing, statistics and spatial laws.

Humanism, structuralism and post-modernism came later as reactions against that approach, so they did not bring the first radical change in method.

The quantitative revolution brought statistical tests, models and the idea of spatial laws into geography, and geographers began to speak of geography as a spatial science. The spirit of regional description gave way to a search for general theory, which is the radical change the question points to.

Answer: B

Herbertson proposed a grand scheme of natural regions on a global scale in 1905, combining physical determinants of plants and animal life such as relief, climate and vegetation.

Unstead, Whittlesey and Dickinson are also known in regional geography, but Unstead worked with Herbertson's regions, Whittlesey is known for the classification of agricultural regions and Dickinson for city regions, so they are wrong.

Herbertson combined relief, climate and vegetation, and divided the world into natural regions, such as the polar, the cool temperate and the tropical, which provided the base of later regional classification. His map of 1905 was meant to bring the factors of plant and animal life into one scheme.

Answer: D

The fact not mentioned by Brunhes as an essential fact of human geography is the facts of manufacturing. Brunhes classed the essential facts into three groups: facts of unproductive occupation of the soil (houses and roads), facts of plant and animal conquest (agriculture and animal rearing) and facts of destructive exploitation (mining and fishing).

Options A, B and C are all in this list, so each is wrong.

Facts of manufacturing do not figure in this scheme: Brunhes was concerned with the way human beings occupy and use the soil, so his three groups cover buildings and roads, the conquest of plants and animals, and the destructive use of resources such as minerals and wild animals.

Answer: B

A functional region is delineated on the basis of the field of interactions, that is, the flow of people, goods and information centred on a node such as a city.

Administrative boundaries define a formal political region, isolines are lines joining equal values on a map, and physical divisions mark formal natural regions, so none of these marks out a functional region.

A functional region is held together by connection, such as the area around a city whose market, bus services, newspapers and telephone calls bind the surrounding villages to it. This differs from a formal region, which is marked by uniformity in some character such as climate or language.

Answer: C

The pair that does not match is G. P. Marsh : Explanation in Geography.

Explanation in Geography (1969) was written by David Harvey. George Perkins Marsh wrote Man and Nature (1864), a pioneering work on human impact on the environment. The other pairs are correct: Haggett wrote Geography: A Modern Synthesis, P. E. James wrote All Possible Worlds, and Abler, Adams and Gould wrote Spatial Organization.

Answer: B

The statement that is not correct is that areal differentiation is related with the nomothetic approach.

Areal differentiation, the study of how places differ from one another, was advanced by Richard Hartshorne in The Nature of Geography. It is chorological and ideographic, concerned with the unique characteristics of areas, and it is the opposite of the nomothetic approach, which seeks general laws. Statements A, C and D are therefore true, and option B is the false one.

Answer: D

The statement is related to possibilism.

Possibilism holds that the environment offers a range of possibilities, and that people choose among them according to their culture, technology and way of living, so the same environment has different meanings for different groups. Determinism, in which the environment controls human activity, and stop-and-go determinism, a middle position, give nature a stronger role, and probabilism is a statistical version that speaks of likelihood rather than cultural meaning.

Answer: C

The emphasis on the behavioural environment in geography is linked with Kirk.

William Kirk distinguished the phenomenal environment (the world as it exists) from the behavioural environment, the part that people perceive and act on, using ideas from Gestalt psychology. Burton is best known for the quantitative revolution and Johnston for writing on the history and philosophy of the discipline, and neither is credited with the behavioural-environment distinction, which is why Kirk is the keyed name over the other three.

Answer: D

The person who defined geography as human ecology is Barrows.

Harlan H. Barrows, in his 1923 presidential address to the Association of American Geographers, urged that geography be seen as the study of the relationship between people and their natural environment, that is, as human ecology. Schaefer is known for his attack on exceptionalism, Hartshorne for the areal differentiation view, and Richthofen for chorology and regional geography.

Answer: D

The formal region among the options is the Assam Valley.

A formal (uniform) region is one that is homogeneous in one or more physical or cultural characteristics, such as a river valley. The Delhi metropolitan region, the Hyderabad-Secunderabad region and the Delhi-Jaipur-Agra triangle are functional or nodal regions, defined by flows and links to a centre.