Quite simply, “Geography” broken down means “to study the earth” and throughout your studies in the book, we are going to expand on this definition. If you were to go home and ask your parents about geography they may have studied in school, they might say when they were students they memorized the states and capitals, or major countries in the world. This is only one part of what geography really is however. To study geography is to study where we are in the world; what the world around us is like. It is the study of who lives there and why.

The landmass of North America lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic to the north, the continent of South America and the Caribbean Sea to the south, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. The land is rich in resources like coal, natural gas, oil, timber products, freshwater, and an abundance of plant and animal species. Renewable resources such as wind, water, biomass, geothermal and solar are widely used as well.

The area known as Latin America is made up of the region south of the United States, beginning at the river that separates the U.S. from Mexico, the Rio Grande’, and extending to the southern tip of South America, an area known as Cape Horn.

The region of North Africa and the Middle East lies at the continental crossroads of Asia, Africa and Europe. At this intersection of the world, all three continents meet here at the Mediterranean Sea. The region extends from the eastern border of Pakistan to the Atlantic coast of Morocco in the west. The region includes many diverse landscapes. It contains rugged mountains, vast deserts, spacious plains and is surrounded by numerous seas. In this unit, you will learn how geography impacts the way people live. You will also discover how culture impacts a person’s perspective.

In the introduction to this book you learned briefly about the five themes of geography, and previous chapters have covered the geographic themes of Movement (North America), Human/ Environment Interaction (Latin America), and Location (North Africa and the Middle East). This chapter will help you begin to think more about the theme of “place.” Geographers define the study of place as the conditions at a location, or more simply, a study of what it’s like there. If you look back at the chapters on North America, Latin America, and North Africa and the Middle East you’ll notice in the sections on physical geography that this question has really been answered.

Over seven billion (7,000,000,000) people live on planet Earth. South Asia has over 1,000,000,000 people alone. Geographers determine regions of the world differently, usually based on characteristics that an area shares, such as language, climate, religion or economic similarities. For our purposes, South Asia includes: India, Nepal,

Russia, with over 6.6 million square miles of varied climate and landscape, is the largest country in the world. It is nearly twice the size of the United States or Canada. Covering almost one-eighth of the Earth’s surface, it ranges from the Arctic Circle in the north, to the borders of China in the south, from Europe in the west to the Pacific Ocean to the east. It spreads through two continents and 11 time zones. The Ural Mountains, some of the oldest mountain ranges, stretch from the north to the south. Russia borders more countries than any other and has 12 major seas.

Oceania is an area of the world that has some very unique characteristics. More than one third of the earth’s surface is comprised of the Pacific Ocean and Oceania . In addition to all those islands, Oceania also includes the smallest continent in terms of land size: Australia. You can look anywhere in Oceania and find strong cultural traditions, rich history, and strong geographic features that vary widely depending on where you go.

In the first six chapters of this book you studied a theme of geography and how it related to the region under study. In the last two chapters of this book you studied multiple themes and how they related to the regions. In this final chapter of the book you will put all five themes into practice by studying the most populous of the continents - Asia. More specifically, you will study the themes in practice in East Asia, which includes large countries in terms of land mass and population such as China and Mongolia, as well as smaller nations such as North and South Korea and Japan.