Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
What locations are like: Places and regions
What'll it be for your next vacation? The mountains? The shore? Chances are you have mulled over
questions like these that concern different areas with different characteristics. If so, then you are
already familiar with places and regions.
Place: What a location looks like
Place responds to another important geographical question: “What is it like?”
Place
refers to the hu-
man and physical features that characterize different parts of Earth and that are responsible for mak-
ing one location look different from the next. The terminology may puzzle you, because in everyday
speech, people commonly use location and place interchangeably. In geography, however, these two
terms have separate and distinct meanings.
Location
tells you
where. Place
tells you
what it's like
.
Region: A bunch of locations with something in common
A
region
is an area of Earth, large or small, that has one or more things in common. So when you say
“I'm going to the mountains” or “I'm heading for the shore,” you refer to an area — a region — that
has a certain set of characteristics over a broad area. Figure 1-2 shows a sandy region.
Figure 1-2:
This
sandy place is
character-istic of
the region known
as the Sahara
Desert.
Regions make it easier to comprehend our Earthly home. After all, Earth consists of gazillions of loc-
ations, each of which has its own particular and peculiar characteristics. Knowing every last one of
them would be impossible. But we can simplify the challenge by grouping together contiguous loc-
ations that have one or more things in common — Gobi Desert, Islamic realm, tropical rainforest,
Chinatown, the Great Lakes, suburbia — Each of these is a region. Some are big and some are small.
Some refer to physical characteristics. Some refer to human characteristics. Some do both. But each
facilitates the task of understanding the world.
