Human Geography, AP

This course is part of the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board which makes demands on students equivalent to those of an introductory level college course. AP Human Geography introduces students to the systematic study of patterns and processes that have shaped human understanding, use, and alteration of the Earth’s surface. Students learn to employ spatial concepts and landscape analysis to examine human socioeconomic organization and its environmental consequences. On successful completion of the course, students should have developed skills that enable them to interpret maps and analyze geospatial data, understand, and explain the implications of associations and networks among phenomena in places, recognize and interpret the relationships among patterns and processes at different scales of analysis, define regions and evaluate regionalization process, and characterize and analyze changing interconnections among places. Geographic concepts emphasized through the course are location, space, place, scale, pattern, regionalization, and globalization. Topics covered will include nature and perspectives of geography; population and migration; cultural patterns and processes; political organization of space, agriculture, food production and land use; industrialization and economic development; cities and urban land use. The Advanced Placement syllabus gives a complete course description.