Prepare for AP Human Geography FRQs with these free response practice questions and answers. This guide covers all FRQ types, scoring guidelines, and answer strategies.
Q: Hierarchical Diffusion
Answer: The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of authority or power to other persons or places.
Q: Stimulus and Migrant Diffusion
Answer: A form of diffusion in which a cultural adaptation is created as a result of the introduction of a cultural trait from another place.
Q: Relocation Diffusion
Answer: The spread of a feature or trend through bodily movement of people from one place to another.
Q: Spatial Perspective
Answer: The act of observing variations in geographic phenomena across space, it is how most Geographers look at things.
Q: Chain Migration
Answer: Migration of people to a specific location because relatives or members of the same nationality previously migrated there.
Q: Step Migration
Answer: Migration to a distant destination that occurs in stages, for example, from farm to nearby village and later to a town and city
Q: Net Migration
Answer: The difference between the level of immigration and the level of emigration.
Q: Cultural Landscape
Answer: The visible imprint of human activity and culture on the landscape
Q: time-space compression
Answer: The increasing sense of connectivity, that seems to be bringing people closer together even though their distances are the same.
Q: remote sensing
Answer: The acquisition of data about Earth’s surface from a satellite orbiting the planet or other long-distance methods.
Q: Large Scale Map
Answer: shows a small area with much detail; used to see relative location within a region
Q: Robinson Projection
Answer: Projection that attempts to balance several possible projection errors. It does not maintain completely accurate area, shape, distance, or direction, but it minimizes errors in each.
Q: Field Studies
Answer: A method that involves observing everyday activities as they happen in a natural setting.
Q: GIS (geographic information system)
Answer: A computer system that stores, organizes, analyzes, and displays geographic data.
Q: Pidgin
Answer: A simplified form of speech developed from two or more languages
Q: Esperanto
Answer: A made-up Latin-based language, which its European proponents in the early twentieth century hoped would become a global language
Q: Creole
Answer: A pidgin language that evolves to the point at which it becomes the primary language of the people who speak it.
Q: Creolization
Answer: Occurs when foreign influences integrate with local meanings.
Q: Pinyin
Answer: The internationally accepted language for China using English alphabet for Chinese sounds.
Q: Universalizing Religion
Answer: Religion that seeks to unite people from all over the globe.
Q: Ethic Religion
Answer: 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.
Q: syncretic religion
Answer: Separate religions that combine into a new religion; often borrow from the past and the present.
Q: Religious Fundamentalism
Answer: The demand for a strict and extreme adherence to a certain religious or moral doctrine.
Q: Agribuisness
Answer: Commercial agriculture characterized by integration of different steps in the food-processing industry, usually through ownership by large corporations.
Q: Vertical Integration
Answer: The combination in one company of two or more stages of production normally operated by separate companies. I.E. Dole having it’s own trucking company.
Q: GMO
Answer: [genetically modified organism] an organism that has acquired one or more genes by artificial genes.
Q: Superpests
Answer: pests resistant to pesticides
Q: Algae Blooms
Answer: A rapid increase in the population and biomass of algae (phytoplankton) in an aquatic system.
Q: nomadic pastoralism
Answer: Farming system where animals (cattle, goats, camels) are taken to different locations in order to find fresh pastures.
Q: Transhumance
Answer: A seasonal periodic movement of pastoralists and their livestock between highland and lowland pastures.
Q: Agriculture density
Answer: The ratio of the number of farmers to the total amount of land suitable for agriculture
Q: Physiological Density
Answer: The number of people per unit of area of arable land, which is land suitable for agriculture.
Q: Population Pyramid
Answer: A bar graph representing the distribution of population by age and sex.
Q: Thomas Malthus’s Theory
Answer: Malthusian growth model, an exponential formula used to project population growth. The theory states that food production will not be able to keep up with growth in the human population, resulting in disease, famine, war, and calamity.
Q: Demographic Transition Model
Answer: A sequence of demographic changes in which a country moves from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates through time.
Q: Epidemiological Transition Model
Answer: The theory that says that there is a distinct cause of death in each stage of the demographic transition model. It can help explain how a country’s population changes so dramatically.
Q: internally displaced person
Answer: Someone who has been forced to migrate for similar political reasons as a refugee but has not migrated across an international border
Q: refugee
Answer: A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster
Q: gravity model
Answer: A model that holds that the potential use of a service at a particular location is directly related to the number of people in a location and inversely related to the distance people must travel to reach the service.
Q: Total Fertility Rate (TFR)
Answer: The average number of children a woman will have throughout her childbearing years.
Q: doubling time
Answer: The number of years needed to double a population, assuming a constant rate of natural increase.
Q: Boserup’s Hypothesis of Population (anti-Malthusian)
Answer: Boserup’s theory stated that intensity of agriculture would be driven by a populations size.
Q: carrying capacity
Answer: Largest number of individuals of a population that a environment can support
Q: Natural Increase Rate (NIR)
Answer: The percentage growth of a population in a year, computed as the crude birth rate minus the crude death rate.
Q: Overpopulation
Answer: The number of people in an area exceeds the capacity of the environment to support life at a decent standard of living.
Q: Ravenstein’s Laws of Migration
Answer: A set of 11 “laws” that can be organized into three groups: the reasons why migrants move, the distance they typically move, and their characteristics.
Q: Federalism
Answer: A system in which power is divided between the national and state governments
Q: unitary system
Answer: A government that gives all key powers to the national or central government
Q: State
Answer: An area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government with control over its internal and foreign affairs.
Q: nation
Answer: a politically organized body of people under a single government
Q: nation-state
Answer: A state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity that has been transformed into a nationality
Q: Devolution
Answer: the transfer of powers and responsibilities from the federal government to the states
Q: dissolution
Answer: the breaking up into parts; termination of a legal bond or contract
Q: political enclave
Answer: A state, or part of a state, that is completely surrounded by another state
Q: political exclave
Answer: A territorial, political extension of another state, often separated from the mainland of the state by another state or territory
Q: ethnic enclave
Answer: a small area occupied by a distinctive minority culture
Q: geometric boundary
Answer: Political boundaries that are defined and delimited by straight lines.
Q: Allocational Boundary Dispute
Answer: A boundary dispute that involves conflicting claims to the natural resources of a border region.
Q: physical-political-boundary
Answer: Political boundaries that correspond with prominent physical features such as mountain ranges or rivers.
Q: Cultural-political boundary
Answer: boundaries that mark breaks in the human landscape based on differences in ethnicity
Q: frontier
Answer: a zone where no state exercises complete political control
Q: Weber’s Least Cost Theory
Answer: theory that described the optimal location of a manufacturing firm in relation to the cost of transportation, labor, and advantages through agglomeration
Q: world systems analysis
Answer: the global economy as an interdependent system of economically and politically unequal nations
Q: Outsourcing
Answer: A decision by a corporation to turn over much of the responsibility for production to independent suppliers.
Q: SEZ
Answer: Special economic zone, designated areas in countries that possess special economic regulations that are different from other areas in the same country. EX. Maquiladora’s on the U.S. Mexican Border
Q: international division of labor
Answer: The process where the assembing procedures for a product are spread out through different parts of the world
Q: Just-in-time delivery
Answer: Shipment of parts and materials to arrive at a factory moments before they are needed
Q: Prorupted State
Answer: an otherwise compact state with a large projecting extension
Q: Elongated State
Answer: A state with a long, narrow shape.
Q: compact state
Answer: A state in which the distance from the center to any boundary does not vary significantly.
Q: Perforated State
Answer: A state whose territory completely surrounds that of another state.
Q: fragmented state
Answer: A state that includes several discontinuous pieces of territory.
Q: Definition boundary process
Answer: Phase in which the exact location of a boundary is legally described and negotiated.
Q: delimination boundary process
Answer: cartographers put the boundary on the map
Q: Demarcation Boundary Process
Answer: Phase in which the boundary is visibly marked on the landscape by a fence, line, sign, wall or other means
Q: EEZ
Answer: Under the law of the sea, an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is a seazone over which a state has special rights over the exploration and use of marine resources.
Q: contiguous zone
Answer: Between 12 and 24 nautical miles from shore, a state may enforce laws concerning pollution, taxation, customs, and immigration
Q: Jurisdiction zone
Answer: 12 nautical miles out, a country has control of anything in this zone.
Q: international waters
Answer: the areas of the sea that are not under the jurisdiction of any country
Q: Agglomeration
Answer: Grouping together of many firms from the same industry in a single area for collective or cooperative use of infrastructure and sharing of labor resources.
Q: Greenbelts
Answer: A ring of land maintained as parks, agriculture, or other types of open space to limit the sprawl of an urban area.
Q: Suburbanization
Answer: The process of population movement from within towns and cities to the rural-urban fringe.
Q: urban sprawl
Answer: The process of urban areas expanding outwards, usually in the form of suburbs, and developing over fertile agricultural land.
Q: red lining
Answer: The refusal to lend money within a specific area for various reasons. This practice is illegal.
Q: block busting
Answer: A process by which real estate agents convince white property owners to sell their houses at low prices because of fear that persons of color will soon move into the neighborhood
Q: Ghettoization
Answer: A process occurring in many inner cities in which they become dilapidated centers of poverty, as affluent whites move out to the suburbs and immigrants and people of color vie for scarce jobs and resources.
Q: Gravity Model
Answer: A model that holds that the potential use of a service at a particular location is directly related to the number of people in a location and inversely related to the distance people must travel to reach the service.
Q: Chrystaller’s Central Place Model
Answer: Attempts to explain the pattern of Settlements and Urban Hierarchy.
Q: range
Answer: The maximum distance people are willing to travel to use a service.
Q: threshold
Answer: The minimum number of people needed to support the service
Q: breaking point
Answer: The outer edge of a city’s sphere of influence, used in the law of retail gravitation to describe the area of a city’s hinterlands that depend on that city for its retail supplies.
Q: Concentric Zone Model
Answer: A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are spatially arranged in a series of rings.
Q: Multiple Nuclei Model
Answer: A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a collection of nodes of activities.
Q: Sector Model(Hoyt)
Answer: A model of the internal structure of cities in which social groups are arranged around a series of sectors, or wedges, radiating out from the central business district (CBD).
Q: Urban Realms Model
Answer: a simplified description of urban land use, especially descriptive of the modern North American city. it features a number of dispersed, peripheral centers of dynamic commercial and industrial activity linked by sophisticated urban transportation networks.
Q: Latin American City Model
Answer: Griffin-Ford model. Developed by Ernst Griffin and Larry Ford. Blends traditional Latin American culture with the forces of globalization. The CBD is dominant; it is divided into a market sector and a modern high-rise sector. The elite residential sector is on the extension of the CBD in the “spine”. The end of the spine of elite residency is the “mall” with high-priced residencies. The further out, less wealthy it gets. The poorest are on the outer edge.
Q: brown fields
Answer: abandoned industrial sites that are contaminated to the point that new development is curtailed
Q: New Urbanism
Answer: Outlined by a group of architects, urban planners, and developers from over 20 countries, an urban design that calls for development, urban revitalization, and suburban reforms that create walkable neighborhoods with a diversity of housing and jobs.