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APHG Review
Unit 3: Cultural
Geography
KEY TERMS
Acculturation
• The adoption of cultural traits, such as language,
by one group under the influence of another.
Animism
• Most prevalent in Africa and the Americas,
doctrine in which the world is seen as being
infused with spiritual and even supernatural
powers.
Artifact
• Any item that represents a material aspect of
culture.
Buddhism
• System of belief that seeks to explain ultimate
realities for all people such as the nature of
suffering and the path toward self-realization.
Caste System
• System in India that gives every Indian a
particular place in the social hierarchy from
birth.
Christianity
• The world’s most widespread religion. This is a
monotheistic, universal religion that uses
missionaries to expand its members worldwide.
The three major categories are Roman Catholic,
Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox.
Creole
• A pidgin language that evolves to the point at
which it becomes the primary language of the
people who speak it.
Cultural Complex
• The group of traits that define a particular
culture.
Cultural Extinction
• Obliteration of an entire culture by war, disease,
acculturation, or a combination of the three.
Cultural Geography
• The subfield of human geography that looks at
how cultures vary over space.
Cultural Hearth
• Locations on earth’s surface where specific
cultures first arose.
Cultural Imperialism
• The dominance of one culture over another.
Cultural Trait
• The specific customs that are part of the
everyday life of a particular culture, such as
language, religion, ethnicity, social institutions,
and aspects of popular culture.
Culture
• A total way of life held in common by a group of
people, including learned features such as
language, ideology, behavior, technology, and
government.
Custom
• Practices followed by the people of a particular
cultural group.
Denomination
• A particular religious group, usually associated
with differing Protestant belief systems.
Dialect
• Geographically distinct versions of a single
language that vary somewhat from the parent
form.
Diaspora
• People who come from a common ethnic
background but who live in different regions
outside of the home of their ethnicity.
Ecumene
• The proportion of the earth inhabited by
humans.
Environmental Determinism
• A doctrine that claims that cultural traits are
formed and controlled by environmental
conditions.
Esperanto
• A constructed international auxiliary language
incorporating aspects of numerous linguistic
traditions to create a universal means of
communication.
Ethnic Cleansing
• The systematic attempt to remove all people of a
particular ethnicity from a country or region
either by forced migration or genocide.
Ethnic Neighborhood
• An area within a city containing members of the
same ethnic background.
Ethnic Religion
• Religion that is identified with a particular ethnic
or tribal group and that does not seek new
converts.
Ethnicity
• Refers to a group of people who share a
common identity.
Evangelical Religions
• Religion in which an effort is made to spread a
particular belief system.
Folk Culture
• Refers to constellation of cultural practices that
form the sights, smells, sounds, and rituals of
everyday existence in the traditional societies in
which they developed.
Fundamentalism
• The strict adherence to a particular doctrine.
Gender Inequality Index (GII)
• A United Nations index, introduced in 2010,
which measures a country’s loss of achievement
due to its sexual inequality, based on
reproductive health, employment, and general
empowerment.
Genocide
• A premeditated effort to kill everyone from a
particular ethnic group.
Ghetto
• A segregated ethnic area within a city.
Global Religion
• Religion in which members are numerous and
widespread and their doctrines might appeal to
different people from any region of the globe.
Hinduism
• A cohesive and unique society, most prevalent in
India, that integrates spiritual beliefs with daily
practices and official institutions such as the
caste system.
Indo-European family
• Language family including the Germanic and
Romance languages that is spoken by about 50%
of the world’s people.
Islam
• A monotheistic religion based on the belief that
there is one God, Allah, and that Muhammad
was Allah’s prophet. It is based in the ancient city
of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of
Muhammad.
Isogloss
• Geographical boundary lines where different
linguistic features meet.
Judaism
• The first major monotheistic religion. It is based
on a sense of ethnic identity, and its adherents
tend to form tight-knit communities wherever
they live.
Language Extinction
• This occurs when a language is no longer in use
by any living people. This has happened to
thousands of languages over the eons since
language first developed, but this process has
accelerated greatly during the past 300 years.
Language Family
• A collection of many languages, all of which
came from the same original tongue long ago,
that have since evolved different characteristics.
Language Group
• A set of languages with a relatively recent
common origin and many similar characteristics.
Lingua Franca
• An extremely simple language that combines
aspects of two or more other, more-complex
languages usually used for quick and efficient
communication.
Literacy
• The ability to read and write.
Local Culture
• A set of common experiences or customs that
shapes the identity of a place and the people
who live there. Local cultures are often the
subjects of preservation or economic
development efforts.
Local Religion
• Religions that are spiritually bound to particular
regions.
Minority
• A racial or ethnic group smaller than and
differing from the majority race or ethnicity in a
particular area or region.
Missionary
• A person of a particular faith that travels in
order to recruit new members into the
faith represented.
Monotheism
• The worship of only one god.
Multicultural
• Having to do with many cultures.
Official Language
• Language in which all government business
occurs in a country.
Pidgin
• Language that may develop when two groups of
people with different languages meet, the
resulting language will have some characteristics
of each language.
Pilgrimage
• A journey to a place of religious importance.
Polyglot
• A multilingual state.
Polytheism
• The worship of more than one god.
Popular Culture (Pop Culture)
• Dynamic culture based in large, heterogeneous
societies permitting considerable individualism,
innovation, and change; having a money-based
economy, division of labor into professions,
secular institutions of control, and weak
interpersonal ties, and producing and consuming
machine-made goods.
Race
• A group of human beings distinguished by
physical traits, blood types, genetic code
patterns or genetically inherited characteristics.
Romance Languages
• Any of the languages derived from Latin
including Italian, Spanish, French, and Romanian.
Shaman
• The single person who takes on the roles of
priest, counselor, and physician and acts as a
conduit to the supernatural world in tribal
cultures.
Sino-Tibetan Family
• Language area that spreads through most of
Southeast Asia and China and is comprised of
Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan, Japanese, and
Korean.
Syncretic
• Traditions that borrow from both the past and
present.
Toponym
• Place names given to certain features on the
land such as settlements, terrain features, and
streams.
Tradition
• A cohesive collection of customs with a cultural
group.
Transculturation
• The expansion of cultural traits through
diffusion, adoption, and other related processes.
Universalizing Religion
• Religion that seeks to unite people from all over
the globe.
MULTIPLE CHOICE
QUESTIONS
Section 1: Cultural Basics
1. Cultural Geography is the study of
A. global customs and artifacts.
B. cultural complexes.
C. the spatial distribution of cultural
traits.
D. human-environment relationships.
E. how cultures change through time.
Section 1: Cultural Basics
2. Throughout history, numerous colonial powers have argued
that certain types of people, living in certain areas of the
world, are less able to govern themselves because of the
qualities they have developed due to their interactions with
natural factors, such as climate. This is an example of
A. environmental determinism.
B. cultural ecology.
C. possibilism.
D. ecumenism.
E. positivism.
Section 1: Cultural Basics
3. Cultural traditions, such as Christmas, are ______
since they borrow from the past and are continually
reinvented in the present.
A. erratic
B. inauthentic
C. complex
D. syncretic
E. ecumenical
Section 1: Cultural Basics
4. The cultural hearth of Christianity is in
A. New York.
B. Rome.
C. Israel.
D. South Carolina.
E. Turkey.
Section 1: Cultural Basics
5. Wooden shoes characteristic of the Dutch
culture are an example of a(n)
A. mentifact.
B. artifact.
C. custom.
D. syncretism.
E. complex.
Section 2: Language
1. The most widespread language family on earth
is the
A. Sino-Tibetan.
B. Romance.
C. Germanic.
D. Indo-European.
E. Mandarin Chinese.
Section 2: Language
2. People in London, Melbourne, Vancouver, and
Mumbai all speak
A. a pidgin language.
B. lingua francas.
C. different dialects.
D. official languages.
E. different creoles.
Section 2: Language
3. Acculturation is a common cause of
A. illiteracy.
B. language extinction.
C. assimilation.
D. creolization.
E. cultural diffusion.
Section 2: Language
4. A simple trade language is called a
A. lingua franca.
B. pidgin.
C. dialect.
D. creole.
E. syncretic.
Section 2: Language
5. Literacy rates vary by
A. sex.
B. location.
C. education.
D. economic development.
E. all of the above
Section 3: Religion
1. All evangelical religions are also
A. local religions.
B. universal religions.
C. animist religions.
D. ethnic religions.
E. polytheistic religions.
Section 3: Religion
2. Local Native American and African religions that
teach a belief in a natural world full of spiritual
beings and supernatural powers are often referred to
as
A. animist.
B. shamanistic.
C. missionary.
D. denominational.
E. local religions.
Section 3: Religion
3. The world’s most widespread religion is
A. Islam.
B. Animism.
C. Christianity.
D. Hinduism.
E. Buddhism.
Section 3: Religion
4. The hearth and spiritual center of Islam is at
A. Baghdad.
B. Cairo.
C. Jakarta.
D. Mecca.
E. Jerusalem.
Section 3: Religion
5. _____ is an excellent example of a
nonevangelical, universalizing religion.
A. Christianity
B. Buddhism
C. Protestantism
D. Polytheism
E. Hinduism
Section 3: Religion
6. In _____ religions, community, common history,
and social relations are inextricably intertwined with
spiritual beliefs.
A. monotheistic
B. local
C. evangelical
D. ethnic
E. universal
Sections 4 & 5: Ethnicity and
Popular Culture
1. An ethnicity is defined as
A. a group of people with a common history.
B. a group of people with similar physical
characteristics.
C. a group of people who share a common
identity.
D. a group of people united against a
common enemy.
E. a group of people with a similar religion.
Sections 4 & 5: Ethnicity and
Popular Culture
2. In the 1990’s the United States
A. became less ethnically diverse.
B. decreased in overall population.
C. saw few changes in its ethnic
composition.
D. saw dramatic changes in its ethnic
composition.
E. remained relatively homogeneous in its
ethnic makeup.
Sections 4 & 5: Ethnicity and
Popular Culture
3. A group of people, all of the same ethnicity, live in
the same area of a city near a nuclear waste facility.
This is an example of a(n)
A. diaspora.
B. ghetto.
C. cultural landscape.
D. ethnic neighborhood.
E. gentrified neighborhood.
Sections 4 & 5: Ethnicity and
Popular Culture
4. Which is the most characteristic statement of a folk culture?
A. They look virtually the same anywhere on
the globe.
B. Individuals within the culture specialize in
producing specific goods for the community.
C. They quickly adopt new technologies useful for
their community.
D. They have a subsistence economy.
E. They have weak ties to friends and family.
Free Response
Questions
Section 1: Cultural Basics
1. Consider the impacts of colonialism on
the world’s cultural geography. Explain how
colonialism affected global patterns of
language and religion, using specific
examples to support your argument.
Section 2: Language
1. Language extinction, both currently and throughout history,
has been a major concern for cultural geographers, linguists,
anthropologists, and other academics.
A. What are some of the cause of language extinction?
B. What kind of repercussions exist as a result of the loss of
linguistic diversity?
C. Discuss some current trends to revive endangered or extinct
languages around the world.
Section 3: Religions
1. Religions exhibit several different patterns for diffusing across
the globe.
A. Describe the major diffusion mechanisms for two dominant
world religions: Buddhism and Christianity.
B. How has the difference between how these two religions are
spread affected the current distribution of these two religions
traditions?
Section 4: Ethnicity and Popular
Culture
1. Geographers use the term “cultural imperialism” to describe a
trend especially dominant in our current global society.
A. What is cultural imperialism?
B. Describe three global effects of the spread of Western popular
culture to the rest of the world.