Geography | Definition, Types, History, & Facts (2024)

FAQs

Geography | Definition, Types, History, & Facts? ›

Geography is the study of Earth's landscapes, peoples, places, and environments. Eratosthenes is considered the father of geography. Geography is usually broken down into two main categories: physical and cultural. Physical geography studies the natural world.

Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. Geographers explore both the physical properties of Earth's surface and the human societies spread across it.

This sub-branch of human geography is closely related to history, environmental history, and historical ecology. Historical geography seeks to determine how cultural features of various societies across the planet emerged and evolved by understanding their interaction with their local environment and surroundings.

While serving as the head librarian and scholar at the Library of Alexandria, Eratosthenes wrote a comprehensive treatise about the world, which he called "Geography." This was the first use of the word, which in Greek means "writing about the world." Eratosthenes' work introduced the concepts of torrid, temperate, and ...

Geography is the study of places, people, and the natural and built environments they occupy.

The five themes of geography are location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region. These were defined in 1984 by the National Council for Geographic Education and the Association of American Geographers to facilitate and organize the teaching of geography in the K-12 classroom.

Geography itself has three types: physical geography, human geography, environmental geography, and Geoinformation Science. Here is a complete explanation of each: Physical geography. This branch of geography focuses on geography as the science of the Earth and the natural world around us.

Eratosthenes, the ancient Greek scholar is called the 'father of geography. He was the first one to use the word geography and he also had a small-scale notion of the planet that helped him to determine the circumference of the earth. About Eratosthenes: Eratosthenes was multi-talented.

This illustration shows how Eratosthenes actually calculated the circumference of the Earth. At noon on the summer solstice, Eratosthenes measured the length of the shadow cast by a column of known height at Alexandria.

More than 2,000 years ago Eratosthenes compared the position of the Sun's rays in two locations to calculate the spherical size of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.

Why is it called geography? ›

'Geography' derives from the Greek γεωγραφία – geographia, literally "Earth-writing", that is, description or writing about the Earth. The first person to use the word geography was Eratosthenes (276–194 BC).

The six essential elements are The World in Spatial Terms, Places and Regions, Physical Systems, Human Systems, Environment and Society, and The Uses of Geography. On the chart, they are shown in purple.

Geography is a science that deals with Earth's surface. People who study geography are called geographers. Geographers are interested in Earth's physical features, such as mountains, deserts, rivers, and oceans. They are also interested in the ways that people affect and are affected by the natural world.

Geography is the study of Earth's landscapes, peoples, places, and environments. Eratosthenes is considered the father of geography. Geography is usually broken down into two main categories: physical and cultural. Physical geography studies the natural world.

These themes can be used to help answer the first two questions of geography: Where is it? and Why is it there? With a sense of physical and human place, we can read the landscape around us and make observations about what we see.

Seventh and eighth grade geography focuses on Europe, China, Africa, and Asia, including the history of these regions. Map-making skills become more sophisticated, with emphasis on political and topographical maps.

Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography which studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment, examples of which include urban sprawl and urban redevelopment.