geography - National Geographic Society - 1 views
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Geography is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments.
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They also examine how human culture interacts with the natural environment, and the way that locations and places can have an impact on people.
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what their own and other places were like, and how people and environments were distributed. These concerns have been central to geography ever since.
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Throughout human history, most societies have sought to understand something about their place in the world, and the people and environments around them.
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More importantly, they also raised questions about how and why different human and natural patterns came into being on Earth’s surface, and why variations existed from place to place. The effort to answer these questions about patterns and distribution led them to figure out that the world was round, to calculate Earth’s circumference, and to develop explanations of everything from the seasonal flooding of the Nile River to differences in population densities from place to place.
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Advances in geography were chiefly made by scientists of the Muslim world, based around the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Geographers of this Islamic Golden Age created the world’s first rectangular map based on a grid, a map system that is still familiar today. Islamic scholars also applied their study of people and places to agriculture, determining which crops and livestock were most suited to specific habitats or environments.