Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 2
STEP-BY-STEP
Characteristics and
Examples of
Spatial Data
Exercise 2-1 (Mostly Outside)
Appreciating Geographic Space and Spatial Data
For this exercise, you will need a notebook and may need a calculator and a long tape measure. This
exercise is couched in English units (feet). Your instructor may want you to use metric units (meters),
which make a lot more sense but are not as common in the United States.
1. Carefully measure the length of your stride. (A procedure that might help with this is to take several
steps across a floor with fixed-width tiles or under a ceiling with uniform length panels.) To the nearest
tenth of a foot , your stride is _____ feet. 1 How many of your paces would constitute 100 feet? _____.
2. Find an area of landscape that is a square, roughly 210 feet on each side, and walk its
perimeter, examining its interior as you go. Aside from giving you an idea of what an acre 2 is,
this activity will probably let you view the complexity that can be contained in a small bit of
ground—perhaps the land use, soil, rocks, pavement, vegetation, crops, buildings, fire hydrants,
parking meters, street lights, pipes, wires, and other features.
3. How many acres constitute a square mile? (Use the exact definition of an acre in the earlier footnote;
the area in square feet of a square mile is 5280 times 5280.) __________. The land area of the
United States is about 3,500,000 square miles. How many acres would that be? ________________.
An average-sized state would be about one-fiftieth of that. You can see that recording the data for a
state for just one simple theme could use up a lot of computer storage.
_______________________________________________________
Open your Fast Facts File.
Open the Color Figures file for this chapter, so you can see the illustrations in more detail.
1 To convert inches to feet (with tenths), divide by 12; for example, 30 inches is 2.5 feet.
2 Defined approximately as the area enclosed by a square that measures 208.7 feet on a side, or defined exactly by a
rectangle 1 foot wide by 43,560 feet (about 8 miles) long. In other words, an area of 43,560 square feet.
 
 
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