Definitions written for use in an exam answer: short enough to deploy, precise enough to earn the mark. Command terms live on the Exams page.
32 terms
| Place | The character and meaning of a specific location, produced by physical and human processes over time. |
| Process | A sequence of actions producing geographic change, physical or human. |
| Power | The capacity of people, institutions or states to shape places and outcomes, held very unevenly. |
| Possibility | Alternative futures, and the choices and constraints that make some more likely than others. |
| Scale | The level at which a phenomenon is examined: local, national, regional, global. |
| Spatial interaction | Flows and connections between places — people, goods, capital, water, information. |
| Demographic transition | The shift from high birth and death rates to low ones as a society develops. |
| Natural increase | Births minus deaths, excluding migration. Usually expressed per thousand or as a percentage. |
| Population momentum | Continued growth after fertility falls, because a large cohort is still of childbearing age. |
| Dependency ratio | The non-working-age population relative to the working-age population. |
| Push and pull factors | Conditions driving migrants from an origin and attracting them to a destination. |
| Anti-natalist policy | Government measures intended to reduce the birth rate. |
| Pro-natalist policy | Government measures intended to raise the birth rate. |
| Mitigation | Action to reduce the causes of climate change, principally emissions. |
| Adaptation | Action to reduce harm from changes that are already happening or now unavoidable. |
| Resilience | The capacity of a place or system to absorb a shock and continue functioning. |
| Vulnerability | Exposure to harm combined with limited capacity to cope with it. |
| Ecological footprint | The land and water area required to sustain a population's consumption and absorb its waste. |
| Water-food-energy nexus | The interdependence of the three: pressure on one reliably shifts pressure onto the others. |
| Circular economy | A system designed to keep materials in use rather than discarding them after one cycle. |
| Carrying capacity | The level of use a site can absorb before the environment or the visitor experience degrades. |
| Leakage | Tourism revenue that leaves the destination economy instead of staying in it. |
| Multiplier effect | Initial spending circulating through an economy and generating further income. |
| Sphere of influence | The area from which a facility or destination draws its visitors. |
| Ecotourism | Tourism intended to be low-impact and to benefit the host environment and community. |
| Hypothesis | A testable statement predicting a relationship, which your data can support or contradict. |
| Systematic sampling | Selecting at fixed intervals — every tenth person, every 50 metres. |
| Stratified sampling | Sampling proportionally from identified subgroups so each is represented. |
| Reliability | Whether repeating the method would produce the same result. |
| Validity | Whether the method actually measures the thing the question is about. |
| Choropleth map | A map shading areas by value, so the pattern is visible at a glance. |
| Anomaly | A data point that breaks the pattern. Naming one is usually worth a mark. |
A definition on its own rarely scores. A definition followed by a named example, with a date, usually does.
