Geographic Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Schaefer was in favour of scientific generalization: in his 1953 criticism of Hartshorne's regional approach he argued that geography should be a law-seeking science that formulates general laws about spatial arrangements, not an idiographic study of areal differentiation. Exceptionalism, idiography and areal differentiation are the ideas he attacked, so the answer is Scientific generalization.

Answer: C

Principle of causation, behaviourism and functionalism are among the principles linked with logical positivism, the school that stresses verification, causation and law-like explanation. Structuralism, which looks for underlying structures, is a different approach and is the item that does not belong, so the answer, as the key gives it, is B.

Answer: B

The key marks the second pair, David Harvey with Social Well being: A Spatial Perspective, as the incorrect match. The other pairs are correct: William Bunge wrote Theoretical Geography, David Smith wrote Human Geography: A Welfare Approach and Richard Peet wrote Modern Geographical Thought. The answer is B. The other three pairs name well-known works in the history of quantitative and radical geography and welfare geography, so they cannot be the incorrect match.

Answer: B

The statement that Egypt is the gift of the river Nile is attributed to Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century B.C. who travelled in Egypt and described how the annual flood of the Nile made the land fertile. Aristotle, Strabo and Seneca wrote on other matters, and the phrase is credited to Herodotus. The answer is B. Herodotus noted that the delta of the Nile was built of silt from the river, and he called Egypt a gift of the river in the sense that the land owed its soil and crops to the annual flood.

Answer: D

The key credits Herodotus with the plea that history be treated geographically and geography historically. Herodotus joined the account of events with the description of the lands and peoples where they took place, so his Histories mix both. Homer and Thales belong to earlier periods, and Hecataeus, who wrote an early geography, is not the name the key gives. The answer is D.

Answer: B

Al-Idrisi, the twelfth-century Arab geographer who worked at the court of Roger II of Sicily, made corrections to Ptolemy's work and drew a world map and a book of geography. Al-Masudi is known as the Herodotus of the Arabs, Ibn Khaldun for the study of history and society and Ibn Batuta for his travels. So the answer is Al-Idrisi. Al-Idrisi's book is called the Book of Roger and the map he drew for the Norman king was a notable improvement upon the earlier Greek maps.

Answer: D

The philosophical basis of the quantitative revolution in geography was positivism, which holds that knowledge comes from observation and measurement and so favours the use of statistical methods and the testing of hypotheses. Existentialism, idealism and phenomenology are the philosophies of humanistic geography, which opposed it. The answer is Positivism.

Answer: C

The concept of paradigm was propounded by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), where it means a framework of beliefs and methods shared by a scientific community, replaced in a revolution when it fails. Kant was a philosopher, Peet a geographer who wrote on radical geography and Haggett a geographer of spatial analysis, so Kuhn is the answer.

Answer: A

Humboldt wanted to develop a universal science that combined all aspects of knowledge: in his book Cosmos he tried to present a unified description of nature and man. Ritter worked on the comparative geography of the earth and its man, Reclus on a universal geography, and Guyot was a pupil of Ritter who went to America. The key credits the 'Universal Science' to Humboldt, option A.

Answer: B

The key gives Jefferson as the geographer who focussed on man-centred geography, among the four. W. H. Davis is known for the geographical cycle, Semple for environmental determinism and Huntington for his work on climate and civilisation, and these are not described as man-centred in the usual account. The answer follows the key, B. A human-centred approach puts man at the centre of the geographic study, and this is why the key gives Jefferson and not those who stressed the physical environment.