1. The 5 Themes of Geography
Ch. 1-5

2. The 5 Themes of Geography help geographers answer two basic questions:
Where are things located?
Why are they there?
Geographers use the 5 themes to answer these questions
Why does it matter where things are or why they are there?
What if you could move anywhere,-- but you hate winter and snakes, and you really want to be near a big city but close to a lake so you can go swimming and lets say, you don’t have a car, and you want to be somewhere where everyone speaks latin. How would you know were to look?
When you think of all these factors your using the five themes without even realizing it.

3. 5 Themes Place Location Human and Environment Interaction Movement
Regions

4. 1. Place
What is it like?
Physical Characteristics: landforms, bodies of water, plants, animals, soil, climate
Physical characteristics are naturally occurring
Human Characteristics: culture, bridges, roads, buildings
Human characteristics are man-made
Describe the city of rochester using physical characteristics
describe your back yard using physical characteristics
“ “ using human characteristics. Reuther??

5. 2. Location Where is it? Why is it located there?
Absolute Location: latitude and longitude, or an address
Relative Location: where are place is with respect to other places
What does ‘with respect to other places’ mean?

6. 3. Human and Environment Interaction
How do people and the environment interact with each other?
Adapt (change)
Modify
Depend (resources)
Depend – blackout
Adapt – seasons
Modify – changing times

7. Adaptation
How do humans or the environment adapt in order to interact with each other? 1. 2. 3.
Surviving with little water (cactus, or people in the desert)
Weather temperature
What about deer and raccons in the city? Were they meant to live in cities?

8. Modification
How do we modify ourselves or the environment in order to interact with it? 1. 2.
Cutting roads through mountains
Building damns and canals

9. Depend How do we depend on our environment or resources? 1. 2.
The black out?
What about natural resources?

10. 4. Movement
How do people, goods and ideas get from one place to another?
Movement of materials and products
Movement of people and living things
Movement of ideas and information

11. 5. Regions Regions can be defined by a unifying characteristic
When describing a region, a characteristic is shared
Physical characteristic, culture, location…
Purposes or functions
Why is the Middle East a region?
Remember with PLACE we had physical and human characteristics. How might we use these types of characteristics to define regions?

12. What are some ways geographers use regions to describe our earth?
Plains regions
What are some unifying features?
The South (U.S.)
What are some shared features?
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula region
Oil producing region
What are other regions you can think of?
Regions defined by language
Regions defined by religion

13. What is the difference between PLACE and REGION??
Deserts are areas that receive very little rainfall.
Michigan is made up of two peninsulas, the upper and lower.
The economy of southeast Michigan depends heavily on the auto industry.
Sky scrapers and busy streets are two ways we can describe New York City.