AP Human Geography Master Glossary & Key Terms

Success on the AP Human Geography exam depends heavily on mastering the course vocabulary. The exam frequently tests your ability to define, apply, and analyze specific terms, demographic models, and spatial theories.

Use this master glossary as a quick reference study tool.

Unit 1: Thinking Geographically

Spatial Perspective: An intellectual framework that allows geographers to look at the earth in terms of the relationships between various places.
Scale: The relationship between the portion of Earth being studied and Earth as a whole (e.g., local, regional, national, global scales).
GIS (Geographic Information System): A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data in layers.
GPS (Global Positioning System): A system that determines the precise position of something on Earth through a series of satellites, tracking stations, and receivers.
Remote Sensing: The acquisition of data about Earth’s surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or from other long-distance methods (drones, planes).
Formal (Uniform) Region: An area in which everyone shares in common one or more distinctive characteristics (e.g., a state, country, or linguistic region).
Functional (Nodal) Region: An area organized around a node or focal point (e.g., a subway network, television station broadcast area, or pizza delivery zone).
Vernacular (Perceptual) Region: An area that people believe exists as part of their cultural identity (e.g., “The American South” or “The Middle East”).
Distance Decay: The diminishing in importance and eventual disappearance of a phenomenon with increasing distance from its origin.
Space-Time Compression: The reduction in the time it takes to diffuse something to a distant place as a result of improved communications and transportation systems.
Environmental Determinism: A nineteenth- and early twentieth-century approach to the study of geography which argued that the general laws of human patterns could be found in physical science; geography was the study of how the physical environment caused human activities.
Possibilism: The theory that the physical environment may set limits on human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives.

Unit 2: Population & Migration

Arithmetic Density: The total number of people divided by the total land area.
Physiological Density: The number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture.
Agricultural Density: The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture (arable land).
Crude Birth Rate (CBR): The total number of live births in a year for every 1,000 people alive in the society.
Crude Death Rate (CDR): The total number of deaths in a year for every 1,000 people alive in the society.
Rate of Natural Increase (RNI): The percentage growth of a population in a year, computed as the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate divided by 10.
Total Fertility Rate (TFR): The average number of children a woman will have throughout her childbearing years (approximately ages 15 through 49).
Replacement Rate: The TFR required to offset the average number of deaths in a population to keep its size stable (typically 2.1 in developed nations).
Demographic Transition Model (DTM): A model of population change that showcases a shift from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates over five stages.
Epidemiological Transition Model (ETM): A model showing the primary causes of death in each stage of the Demographic Transition Model.
Thomas Malthus: English economist who argued that population growth (exponential) would outpace food production (arithmetic), leading to famine.
Pro-natalist Policies: Government policies designed to encourage citizens to have children (common in DTM Stage 5 countries).
Anti-natalist Policies: Government policies designed to decrease fertility rates and slow population growth (e.g., China’s One-Child Policy).
Push Factors: Negative factors that induce people to leave their present location (e.g., war, poverty, natural disasters).
Pull Factors: Positive factors that induce people to move to a new location (e.g., jobs, safety, political freedom).
Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration: A set of 11 migration principles developed by Ernst Ravenstein detailing distance, gender, and destination patterns of migrants.
Intervening Obstacle: An environmental, political, or economic feature of the landscape that hinders migration.
Intervening Opportunity: An environmental, economic, or cultural feature of the landscape that helps transition a migrant to settle before their final destination.
Refugee: Someone who is forced to migrate from their home country and cannot return for fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion.
Internally Displaced Person (IDP): Someone who has been forced to migrate for similar political or environmental reasons as a refugee but has not migrated across an international border.
Chain Migration: Migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously established themselves there.
Step Migration: A migration process that occurs in stages or steps, typically from rural areas to small towns, then to larger cities.

Unit 3: Cultural Patterns & Processes

Folk Culture: Culture traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation.
Popular Culture: Culture found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics.
Cultural Landscape: The visible imprint of human activity and culture on the physical landscape (coined by Carl Sauer).
Sequent Occupance: The notion that successful societies leave their cultural imprints on a place, contributing to the cumulative cultural landscape.
Cultural Hearth: A center where cultures developed and from which ideas and innovations diffused.
Expansion Diffusion: The spread of a feature or trend among people from one area to another in an additive process (includes hierarchical, contagious, and stimulus).
Relocation Diffusion: The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another.
Hierarchical Diffusion: The spread of a feature or trend from one key person or node of authority or power to other persons or places.
Contagious Diffusion: The rapid, widespread diffusion of a feature or trend throughout a population.
Stimulus Diffusion: The spread of an underlying principle, even though a specific characteristic is rejected.
Acculturation: The process of adjustment to the dominant culture while retaining original cultural traits.
Assimilation: The process by which a group’s cultural features are altered to resemble those of another group (usually resulting in the loss of original identity).
Syncretism: The blending of elements of two or more different cultures to form a completely new cultural trait.
Language Family: A collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history (e.g., Indo-European).
Lingua Franca: A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages (e.g., English).
Pidgin Language: A simplified, makeshift language developed for communication between speakers of different languages, having no native speakers.
Creole Language: A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer’s language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated, becoming a native language.
Universalizing Religion: A religion that attempts to appeal to all people, not just those living in a particular location (e.g., Christianity, Islam, Buddhism).
Ethnic Religion: A religion with a relatively concentrated spatial distribution whose principles are likely to be based on the physical characteristics of the particular location in which its adherents are concentrated (e.g., Hinduism, Judaism).

Unit 4: Political Patterns & Processes

State: An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its internal and foreign affairs (a country).
Nation: A large group of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular territory.
Nation-State: A state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity.
Multinational State: A state that contains two or more ethnic groups with traditions of self-determination.
Stateless Nation: A cultural group of people that shares a common identity and attachment to a homeland but does not possess a sovereign state.
Sovereignty: Ability of a state to govern its territory free from control of its internal affairs by other states.
Unitary State: An internal organization of a state that places most power in the hands of central government officials.
Federal State: An internal organization of a state that allocates strong power to units of local government.
Devolution: The transfer of power from a central government to regional or local administrations within a state.
Gerrymandering: The process of redrawing legislative boundaries for the purpose of benefiting the political party in power.
Superimposed Boundary: A boundary drawn by an outside power that ignores pre-existing cultural, ethnic, or linguistic distributions.
Subsequent Boundary: A boundary drawn after a cultural landscape has already been established, adjusted to fit ethnic or cultural divisions.
Relic Boundary: A boundary that no longer functions politically but is still visible on the cultural landscape.
Antecedent Boundary: A boundary drawn before a large population settles in an area.
Heartland Theory: Halford Mackinder’s theory that Eurasian interior control is the key to global dominance.
Rimland Theory: Nicholas Spykman’s theory that Eurasian coastal fringe control is the key to global power.
Supranational Organization: An alliance of three or more sovereign states to achieve shared political, economic, or military goals (e.g., UN, EU, NATO).
Centripetal Force: An attitude or cultural trait that tends to unify people and enhance support for a state.
Centrifugal Force: An attitude or cultural trait that tends to divide people and decrease support for a state.

Need to practice applying these terms to real-world geographies? Visit the homepage and play our educational map games: Border Run for political boundaries, or Hidele for demographic and cultural clues!