Title overview
About the Book
Keep Students Actively Engaged with the Most Recent Happenings
- NEW! Geographers @ Work short sidebar features look at how geography is practiced in the real world, profiling active geographers working around the globe in a variety of careers using the tools and methods of geography. These features emphasize the diverse issues and places that geographers explore, emphasizing the diverse career and research opportunities of geography, and the interesting and relevant real-world problems that contemporary geography addresses.
- NEW! Everyday Globalization short sidebar features explore everyday products and commodities that people commonly use and consume, tracing their global links and the implications of consumption, including tensions between global and local communities, and pose questions that ask students to reflect on their experience and interaction with these products and commodities.
- NEW! 2-page Review end-of-chapter features provide highly visual reviews of each regional chapter, organized around learning outcomes and incorporating satellite-based maps and photos as well as some GIS-built images. This active-review section emphasizes the impacts of globalization on the region and shows multiple spatial scales, asks students to perform critical visual analysis and includes a new higher-level capstone activity, as well as QR links to author blogs.
- UPDATED! Exploring Global Connections features explore the often surprising connection between places and regions around the world, leveraging recent events and more coverage of cultural and environmental topics. All features are integrated with QR links to Google Earth Virtual Tour Videos.
- UPDATED! Working Toward Sustainability features explore how the theme of sustainability plays out across world regions, looking at initiatives and positive outcomes of environmental and cultural sustainability. All features are integrated with QR links to Google Earth Virtual Tour Videos.
- NEW! Brief Chapter Opening Vignettes work directly with chapter opening images to give an engaging introduction to the region, with focus on local lives.
- UPDATED! Expanded coverage of Climate Change, Sustainability Successes, Gender Issues, Food, Art, Music, Film, and Sport in each regional chapter.
- UPDATED! New and Updated Cartography as per new data, cartography best practices, and the latest world events.
- UPDATED! Current Data from the 2010 Census, the 2015 PRB Population Data, and the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report are included. The two regional data tables from each chapter have been ported to the back of the book to reduce text density within chapters.
Solid Pedagogical Features
- The structure within each chapter is thematic, while the overarching chapter structure of the book is regional and organized around the generally accepted major world regions.
- Each regional chapter is organized into five thematic sections: Environmental Geography, Population and Settlement, Cultural Coherence and Diversity, Geopolitical Framework, and Economic and Social Development.
- This approach fosters a structured and penetrating treatment of geographic themes and concepts, facilitates comparisons of specific topics between regions, and allows the authors to more effectively highlight concepts important to today's globalized world.
- NEW! Visual Questions within each chapter section give students more opportunity to stop and practice visual analysis and critical thinking.
- UPDATED! Region-specific Learning Outcomes in each chapter’s opening pages connect to the end-of-chapter Review section and to MasteringGeography.
- UPDATED! Two Review Questions at the end of each section help students check their comprehension as they read, and are followed by a listing of the key terms from each section, reinforcing the key concepts from each chapter section.
- UPDATED! A Focus on Fundamentals section now includes the most up-to-date information on energy,map interpretation and modern geospatial tools (Chapter 1), and plate tectonics (Chapter 2).
- Chapter openers include a panoramic photo linked to major topics within the chapter. Each regional chapter opens with thematic highlights that summarize the major issues under each of the chapter’s five themes.
- A highly graphical presentation of the material includes a large-format map or photo on almost every page.
- A superior, pedagogically-oriented cartography program features standardized maps for all regional chapters. Regional chapters contain approximately 12 maps, with almost all regional chapters containing maps on the same themes to enable cross-regional comparisons. Most regional chapters contain the following maps:
- A chapter-opening political/physical map, showing political boundaries, landforms, hydrology, and tectonic boundaries.
- A climate map, with climographs displaying temperature and precipitation data for specific cities.
- An environmental issues map with callouts to environmental problems and solutions within the region.
- A population map for the region leveraging the latest world population data.
- A map of regional languages.
- A map of religions.
- A geopolitical map of current issues and tensions.
This system allows students to compare and contrast concepts and data both within and between regions. Additionally, this system reinforces the book's emphasis on the global effect on local issues.
- UPDATED! Tone, Consistency, Continuity, and Connections have been updated with contemporary applications that appeal to today’s students.
Support Instructors
- The Test Bank includes Bloom’s Taxonomy and correlations to global and text-specific student learning outcomes to give instructors more options for assessing their students with a higher order of learning and efficacy standards.
- Assess student progress with MasteringGeography™. Powerful tracking tools in MasteringGeography allow instructors to see how an individual student is progressing through the course compared to the class and the national average. Instructors can tackle areas where students are struggling right away, ensuring that every student has a chance to succeed.
- Instructor Resource DVD provides instructors with everything they need to prepare for lecture, including PowerPoints with embedded media, electronic Test Bank, images from the text and much more to support their course electronically.
Also Available with MasteringGeography
This title is also available with MasteringGeography—an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Interactive, self-paced tutorials provide individualized coaching to help students stay on track. With a wide range of activities available, students can actively learn, understand, and retain even the most difficult concepts.
Specific digital features include:
- NEW! eText 2.0
- Full eReader functionality includes page navigation, search, glossary, highlighting, note-taking, annotations, and more.
- A responsive design allows the eText to reflow/resize to a device or screen. eText 2.0 will now work on supported smartphones, tablets, and laptop/desktop computers.
- In-context glossary offers students instant access to definitions by simply hovering over key terms.
- Seamlessly integrated videos and activities allow students to watch and practice key concepts within the eText learning experience.
- Accessible (screen-reader ready).
- Configurable reading settings, including resizable type and night reading mode.
- NEW! MapMaster NextGen Interactive Map Activities are inspired by GIS, allowing students to layer various thematic maps to analyze spatial patterns and data at regional and global scales. Now fully mobile, with enhanced analysis tools, the ability for students to geolocate themselves in the data, and the ability for students to upload their own data for advanced map making, this tool includes zoom and annotation functionality, with hundreds of map layers leveraging recent data from sources such as the PRB, the World Bank, NOAA, NASA, USGS, United Nations, and the CIA.
- NEW! Video Activities from sources such as the BBC, Financial Times, and Television for the Environment’s Life and Earth Report series are included in MasteringGeography. These videos provide students with applied real-world examples of physical geography in action, a sense of place, and allow students to explore a range of locations and topics.
- NEW! Google Earth Virtual Tour Videos, accessible via QR links in the text, are short, narrated clips that feature aerial imagery from Google Earth, helping give students a broad sense of place and the geographies discussed in each chapter’s Exploring Global Connections and Working Toward Sustainability special features. Teachers can assign the clips with short assessments in MasteringGeography.
- NEW! Mobile Field Trip videos for geography from Michael Collier give students another avenue for exploring U.S. landscapes and the major themes of physical geoscience concepts.
- Select Animations are QR-linked from the introductory (non-regional) chapters 1 and 2, helping students visualize difficult processes like seasons and intro concepts like Map Projections.
- Author Blogs link from the In Review end-of-chapter sections and MasteringGeography Study Area, where each blog works to dynamically update the print book and eText with new data, case studies, and analyses by the authors as events unfold around the globe.
- UPDATED! GeoTutor Activities help students master the toughest geography concepts with highly visual, kinesthetic activities focused on critical thinking and the application of core geography concepts.
- NEW! Dynamic Study Modules help students study effectively on their own by continuously assessing their activity and performance in real time. Here's how it works: students complete a set of questions with a unique answer format that also asks them to indicate their confidence level. Questions repeat until the student can answer them all correctly and confidently. Once completed, Dynamic Study Modules explain the concept using materials from the text. These are available as graded assignments prior to class, and accessible on smartphones, tablets, and computers.
- NEW! Learning Catalytics™ is an interactive, student response tool that uses students’ smartphones, tablets, or laptops to engage them in more sophisticated tasks and thinking. Now included with MasteringGeography with eText, Learning Catalytics enables you to generate classroom discussion, guide your lecture, and promote peer-to-peer learning with real-time analytics. Instructors, you can:
- Pose a variety of open-ended questions that help your students develop critical thinking skills
- Monitor responses to find out where students are struggling
- Use real-time data to adjust your instructional strategy and try other ways of engaging your students during class
- Manage student interactions by automatically grouping students for discussion, teamwork, and peer-to-peer learning
- Pre-Lecture Reading Quizzes ensure that students complete the assigned reading before class and stay on track with reading assignments. Reading Quizzes are 100% mobile-ready and can be completed by students on mobile devices.
- Encounter World Regional Geography Google Earth Activities provide rich, interactive Google Earth explorations of world regional geography concepts, helping students visualize and explore world regions. Available with multiple-choice and short answer questions. All Explorations include corresponding Google Earth KMZ media files, and questions include hints and specific wrong-answer feedback to help coach students toward mastery of the concepts.
- Map Projections media help reinforce and remediate students on basic but challenging early map projection concepts.
About the Book
Keep Students Actively Engaged with the Most Recent Happenings
- Geographers @ Work short sidebar features look at how geography is practiced in the real world, profiling active geographers working around the globe in a variety of careers using the tools and methods of geography. These features emphasize the diverse issues and places that geographers explore, emphasizing the diverse career and research opportunities of geography, and the interesting and relevant real-world problems that contemporary geography addresses.
- Everyday Globalization short sidebar features explore everyday products and commodities that people commonly use and consume, tracing their global links and the implications of consumption, including tensions between global and local communities, and pose questions that ask students to reflect on their experience and interaction with these products and commodities.
- 2-page Review end-of-chapter features provide highly visual reviews of each regional chapter, organized around learning outcomes and incorporating satellite-based maps and photos as well as some GIS-built images. This active-review section emphasizes the impacts of globalization on the region and shows multiple spatial scales, asks students to perform critical visual analysis and includes a new higher-level capstone activity, as well as QR links to author blogs.
- UPDATED! Exploring Global Connections features explore the often surprising connection between places and regions around the world, leveraging recent events and more coverage of cultural and environmental topics. All features are integrated with QR links to Google Earth Virtual Tour Videos.
- UPDATED! Working Toward Sustainability features explore how the theme of sustainability plays out across world regions, looking at initiatives and positive outcomes of environmental and cultural sustainability. All features are integrated with QR links to Google Earth Virtual Tour Videos.
- Brief Chapter Opening Vignettes work directly with chapter opening images to give an engaging introduction to the region, with focus on local lives.
- UPDATED! Expanded coverage of Climate Change, Sustainability Successes, Gender Issues, Food, Art, Music, Film, and Sport in each regional chapter.
- UPDATED! New and Updated Cartography as per new data, cartography best practices, and the latest world events.
- UPDATED! Current Data from the 2010 Census, the 2015 PRB Population Data, and the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report are included. The two regional data tables from each chapter have been ported to the back of the book to reduce text density within chapters.
Solid Pedagogical Features
- Visual Questions within each chapter section give students more opportunity to stop and practice visual analysis and critical thinking.
- UPDATED! Region-specific Learning Outcomes in each chapter’s opening pages connect to the end-of-chapter Review section and to MasteringGeography.
- UPDATED! Two Review Questions at the end of each section help students check their comprehension as they read, and are followed by a listing of the key terms from each section, reinforcing the key concepts from each chapter section.
- UPDATED! A Focus on Fundamentals section now includes the most up-to-date information on energy,map interpretation and modern geospatial tools (Chapter 1), and plate tectonics (Chapter 2).
- UPDATED! Tone, Consistency, Continuity, and Connections have been updated with contemporary applications that appeal to today’s students.
Also Available with MasteringGeographyTM
This title is also available with MasteringGeography–an online homework, tutorial, and assessment program designed to work with this text to engage students and improve results. Interactive, self-paced tutorials provide individualized coaching to help students stay on track. With a wide range of activities available, students can actively learn, understand, and retain even the most difficult concepts.
Specific digital features include:
- eText 2.0
- Full eReader functionality includes page navigation, search, glossary, highlighting, note-taking, annotations, and more.
- A responsive design allows the eText to reflow/resize to a device or screen. eText 2.0 will now work on supported smartphones, tablets, and laptop/desktop computers.
- In-context glossary offers students instant access to definitions by simply hovering over key terms.
- Seamlessly integrated videos and activities allow students to watch and practice key concepts within the eText learning experience.
- Accessible (screen-reader ready).
- Configurable reading settings, including resizable type and night reading mode.
- MapMaster NextGen Interactive Map Activities are inspired by GIS, allowing students to layer various thematic maps to analyze spatial patterns and data at regional and global scales. Now fully mobile, with enhanced analysis tools, the ability for students to geolocate themselves in the data, and the ability for students to upload their own data for advanced map making, this tool includes zoom and annotation functionality, with hundreds of map layers leveraging recent data from sources such as the PRB, the World Bank, NOAA, NASA, USGS, United Nations, and the CIA.
- Video Activities from sources such as the BBC, Financial Times, and Television for the Environment’s Life and Earth Report series are included in MasteringGeography. These videos provide students with applied real-world examples of physical geography in action, a sense of place, and allow students to explore a range of locations and topics.
- Google Earth Virtual Tour Videos, accessible via QR links in the text, are short, narrated clips that feature aerial imagery from Google Earth, helping give students a broad sense of place and the geographies discussed in each chapter’s Exploring Global Connections and Working Toward Sustainability special features. Teachers can assign the clips with short assessments in MasteringGeography.
- Mobile Field Trip videos for geography from Michael Collier give students another avenue for exploring U.S. landscapes and the major themes of physical geoscience concepts.
- UPDATED! GeoTutor Activities help students master the toughest geography concepts with highly visual, kinesthetic activities focused on critical thinking and the application of core geography concepts.
- Dynamic Study Modules help students study effectively on their own by continuously assessing their activity and performance in real time. Here's how it works: students complete a set of questions with a unique answer format that also asks them to indicate their confidence level. Questions repeat until the student can answer them all correctly and confidently. Once completed, Dynamic Study Modules explain the concept using materials from the text. These are available as graded assignments prior to class, and accessible on smartphones, tablets, and computers.
- Learning Catalytics™ is an interactive, student response tool that uses students’ smartphones, tablets, or laptops to engage them in more sophisticated tasks and thinking. Now included with MasteringGeography with eText, Learning Catalytics enables you to generate classroom discussion, guide your lecture, and promote peer-to-peer learning with real-time analytics. Instructors, you can:
- Pose a variety of open-ended questions that help your students develop critical thinking skills
- Monitor responses to find out where students are struggling
- Use real-time data to adjust your instructional strategy and try other ways of engaging your students during class
- Manage student interactions by automatically grouping students for discussion, teamwork, and peer-to-peer learning
Table of contents
1. Concepts of World Geography
2. Physical Geography and the Environment
3. North America
4. Latin America
5. The Caribbean
6. Sub-Saharan Africa
7. Southwest Asia and North Africa
8. Europe
9. The Russian Domain
10. Central Asia
11. East Asia
12. South Asia
13. Southeast Asia
14. Australia and Oceania
Author bios
Les Rowntree is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he researches and writes about environmental issues. This career change comes after three decades of teaching both Geography and Environmental Studies at San Jose State University in California. As an environmental geographer, Dr. Rowntree’s interests focus on international environmental issues, biodiversity conservation, and human-caused global change. He sees world regional geography as a way to engage and inform students by giving them the conceptual tools needed to critically assess global issues. Dr. Rowntree has done research in Iceland, Alaska, Morocco, Mexico, Australia, and Europe, as well as in his native California. Current writing projects include a book on the natural history of California’s coast, as well as textbooks in geography and environmental science.
Martin Lewis is a Senior Lecturer in History at Stanford University. He has conducted extensive research on environmental geography in the Philippines and on the intellectual history of global geography. His publications include Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital, and Environmental Degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, 1900—1986 (1992), and, with Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997). Dr. Lewis has traveled extensively in East, South, and Southeast Asia. His current research focuses on the geographical dimensions of globalization. In April 2009, Dr. Lewis was recognized by Time Magazine, as a favorite lecturer.
Marie Price is a Professor of Geography and International Affairs at George Washington University. A Latin American specialist, Marie has conducted research in Belize, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia. She has also traveled widely throughout Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her studies have explored human migration, natural resource use, environmental conservation, and regional development. She is a non-resident fellow of the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank that focuses on immigration. Dr. Price brings to Globalization and Diversity a special interest in regions as dynamic spatial constructs that are shaped over time through both global and local forces. Her publications include the co-edited book, Migrants to the Metropolis: The Rise of Immigrant Gateway Cities (2008, Syracuse University Press) and numerous academic articles and book chapters.
Bill Wyckoff is a geographer in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University specializing in the cultural and historical geography of North America. He has written and co-edited several books on North American settlement geography, including The Developer’s Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (1988), The Mountainous West: Explorations in Historical Geography (1995) (with Lary M. Dilsaver), Creating Colorado: The Making of a Western American Landscape 1860—1940 (1999), and On the Road Again: Montana’s Changing Landscape (2006), and How to Read The American West (2014). In 2003, he received Montana State’s Cox Family Fund for Excellence Faculty Award for Teaching and Scholarship. A World Regional Geography instructor for 27 years, Dr. Wyckoff emphasizes the connections between the everyday lives of his students and the larger global geographies that surround them and increasingly shape their future.
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