Worksheets › Class 12 › Human Geography: Nature and Scope › Cheat sheet
Class 12 Human Geography: Nature and Scope: cheat sheet
CBSE Social Science. What human geography studies, how people and nature act on each other (determinism, possibilism, neo-determinism), the approaches over time, and its fields.
Key ideas
- Human geography studies the relationship between people and their physical environment, and how human activities are spread over the earth.
- With little technology, people adapted to what nature dictated (environmental determinism, “naturalised humans”).
- As technology grew, people used nature’s opportunities to create possibilities, leaving a cultural landscape of farms, ports and cities (possibilism, “humanised nature”).
- Griffith Taylor’s neo-determinism, or stop and go determinism, is a middle path: develop when nature permits, stop where it sets limits, like traffic lights.
- Approaches changed over time: exploration and description, regional analysis, areal differentiation, spatial organisation (the quantitative revolution), humanistic and behavioural schools, and post-modernism.
- Each field links to a sister discipline, so human geography is closely tied to the other social sciences.
Remember
| Definitions | Ratzel: synthesis of societies and the earth’s surface; Ellen C. Semple: the ever-changing relationship |
| Approaches in order | exploration (early colonial) → regional analysis → areal differentiation (1930s) → quantitative revolution (late 1950s–60s) → humanistic and behavioural (1970s) → post-modernism (1990s) |
| Field and sister discipline | behavioural – psychology; population – demography; medical – epidemiology; cultural – anthropology; historical – history |
| Warmer by heating | inside temperature − outside temperature, e.g. 23 − (−18) = 41 °C |
| Time saved | days × 24 × 60 = minutes; times faster = old time ÷ new time |
Watch out
- Mixing up possibilism (people create possibilities) and determinism (nature controls people).
- Linking neo-determinism to Ratzel instead of Griffith Taylor.
- Subtracting a negative temperature wrongly: 23 − (−18) is 41, not 5.
Worked example
Suppose a letter once took 8 days to arrive and a message now takes 15 minutes by internet. How many minutes are 8 days, and how many times faster is the message?
Working: 8 × 24 × 60 = 11,520; ÷ 15
Answer: 11,520 minutes; 768 times faster
Practise Human Geography: Nature and Scope
Revise with this page, then practise: every Human Geography: Nature and Scope sheet in the app is new, with an answer key and working.
Coming soon for Android and iPhone.