Western Civilization

Today we received our tests back. There were many scores above the ninetieth percentile warranting an A. I was one of them with a ninety four percent on the test. Mr. Schick said that the test was too easy if the average was an eighty six percent, and in the future he will be making them harder. This is not good. The class was also advised to keep this test as we would see many of these question on the semester one exam. As we went around the room discussing the answers, Mr. Schick said that the hardest question on the test was the one asking which of the following cities was seventy eight degrees West and zero degrees North/South. I knew there was only one city on the list which was West of the Prime Meridian and it was Quito, Ecuador. After we finished checking the tests, we went back to the Slides and we talked about the push and pull forces/factors of why people leave their countries and enter new ones.

Today we continued with the Slides presentation. We had left off on the slide that talked about the highest and lowest life expectancy in the world and where the United States falls. Branching off of what I had mentioned last post, people in Monaco has the highest life expectancy rate in the world. The women have the highest rate in the world with 93.58. Crude birth rate is the number of births person per one thousand people and the crude death rate is, well, the number of deaths per one thousand people. We went on to discuss why the life expectancy in almost every country in the world, for women, is higher than that for men. We came to the reason that men, for the most part do more dangerous tasks than women do. For example, Mr. Collins mentioned his father's co-worker who works with people who collapse skyscrapers. This is a dangerous job. To be successful, you must put explosives in the correct place inside the building and make it collapse within itself. Mr. Schick recommended

For the first lesson into the new chapter Mr. Schick presented to us a Slides presentation. This covered population numbers, rate of change or growth, and other interesting details about the number of people on this planet. There are 7.5 billion people on Earth. The population increases by 73 million  people per year. This is equal to 200 thousand per day, 8,377 per hour, 149 per minute and 2.5 per second. Ninety percent of this population growth takes place in the developing countries of Africa, South and East Asia, and Latin America. The population, approximately, reached one billion people in the year 1804, two billion in 1927, and three billion in 1960. Since then the population has been steadily increasing by around a dozen years per billion. Mr. Schick said that the population has well more than doubled in his lifetime which seems like a lot when you think about it. The final slide we dealt with had numbers on the life expectancy rate of three countries. Monaco has the highest li

Today was test day. After about ten to fifteen minutes into class Mr. Schick gave us the test then silence fell. The next 30 minutes were all very serious minutes in which everybody got down to business. The test was twenty five multiple choice questions with a choice from two prompts for one long answer question. Some questions included "True or false: English is the official language of the United States." and my answer was false because there is no official language. Another question was "Sir Sanford Fleming suggested all but..." and there were five options to choose from. I chose the obvious answer which was b. Daylight Savings Time, because I know that Benjamin Franklin was the one who suggested Daylight Savings Time and it was not put into effect until after WWII. Towards the end of the class, as I was going up to hand in my test, I asked Mr. Schick if there were supposed to be five answers all 'C' in a row. he said he normally doesn't do that, whi

Today Mr. Schick gave everybody a chance to create a few test questions which Mr. Schick will either approve or disapprove of. A few of mine were the following: Who is the current President of The United States Barack Obama Donald Trump Bill Clinton George W. Bush Name a state that voted Republican in 2004 but Democratic in 2008. Texas Connecticut Nevada Maryland Which state is also, mostly, its own region?-from the map on the blog Texas Massachusetts Maryland Nevada When did the United States gain its independence and from whom? 1776, Great Britain 1777, Great Britain 1776, France 1177, France The one I chose to share was number two but Mr. Schick thought it was too difficult so he instead modified it to "Which state voted Republican in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 election?" with the one answer being Texas. Some important notes for the test are: -There are twenty seven time zones. -Sir Sanford Flemin

For today's class Mr. Schick went over some test material with us for the upcoming one next week. First he told us that true or false questions do not really teach us anything so Mr. Schick will only have two on there. Some ways the statements may be made false is by saying that something is 'always' or 'never' this. One importune note we took today was "Geographers use maps as their primary tool for not only identifying points on Earth's surface but also as a means to compare phenomena between different places." This is one possible question which could be turned into a true/false. The art and science of making maps mis cartography. A few other important facts for the test are that there are twenty four time zones, every place occupies a unique position on Earth's surface. Two important lines which we talked about today were the Prime Meridian and the International Date Line. The Prime Meridian is zero degrees longitude and the International Date

Climate Change IS REAL. There are people who will tell you that is not real. Climate change is scientific fact. There are proven facts that have been tested over the past fifty years which all lead to climate change. Over the past 150 years We the People have been using more oil and gasoline than we should be and it needs to be cut down. Over the past sixty years when we have really advanced our use of oil in cars, which leads to the gases building up in our atmosphere. These gases trap in solar radiation which then in turn leads to the heating of our planet. Climate change was a focal point of today's debate. Mr. Schick also brought up the reason for his absence yesterday which was very disappointing to hear. Mr. Schick's dog passed away and his wife left him in charge to lay him to rest. Mr. Schick's wife referred to him as the 'Angel of Death' which helped lighten the mood. Mr. Schick had to take his dog to the vet and then bury him. This is a part of life which

The phrase "At the global scale, encompassing the entire world, geographers tend to see broad patterns." can be fully interpreted as meaning that the environment was being harmed by processes such as global warming which were at the global scale but it could be improved by actions, such as consuming less gasoline, which causes global warming, that were in the local scale. Globalization Scale is an increasingly important concept in geography because of globalization. Globalization is when a force or process, like global warming, that involves the entire world and results in making something worldwide in scope. This basically means that the ability of one person alone to do something is shrinking. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines 'Globalization as the following: "The act or process of globalizing :the state of being globalized ; especially :the development of an increasingly integrated global economy marked especially by free trade, free flow of capital, and the

A focal point of today's class was the phrase above: From Local to Global. Our interpretation of this was that what you do at a small scale(local) can affect other people around you(global). This mainly goes for environmentally related things, like what you grow, where you derive energy for your house from, and so on. An important sentence, which was the only sentence we copied down today was; " At the global scale, encompassing the entire world, geographers tend to see broad patterns." Later in the class we went on to talk about sources of energy like solar power, for our homes. Mr. Schick revealed that his house is powered by solar panels and they save him money compared to if he were paying BGE for electricity. We then talked a little bit about oil and the Deepwater Horizon spill which happened in 2010. The most important thing I took away though, was that Buzz Aldrin popped a guy in the face who was following his speeches and shouting conspiracies.

The first thing we did today was pass back our pop quizzes from the previous day. This was a very unfortunate event as the average for our class, if I can recall correctly, was a sixty-six percent and the average for the other class was a fifty-three percent. On the quiz, I missed one question and it was not the one I thought I missed, mentioned in yesterday's post. I believe the question I missed was the one about which state voted Republican and which state voted Democratic in the past elections. This is very unfortunate since it brought my grade down from a perfect one hundred percent to a ninety-nine point three, which is still excellent in my opinion. The next activity for today was to finish the map from yesterday and to choose any country at random and to give one one interesting statistic about that country. I learned a lot during this segment including that the richest country on the world, based on GDP per capita, was one I had never heard of before, Lichtenstein. Their a

Today we were greeted with a ten question pop quiz. Mr. Schick said it himself that the test was insultingly easy. This turned out to be true for the most part of the quiz. The only part I had trouble with was the Republican and Democratic states although I got to the bottom of it eventually and one other question. The question asked which state was not a part of the Deep South and the list consisted of Texas, Alabama, Arkansa and Mississippi. I chose Texas because it seemed to have less in common than the others did. As I write this, I have discovered I answered correctly, by double checkoff the Human geography 2017 blog. For the next part of today's lesson, Mr. Schick introduced us to a fantastic website which will help us for any type of geography class we could take in the future. the website was cia.gov and this is the official cite of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. We went on to do an activity listing the most populated countries in the world and will p

The main focus of today's discussion was latitude and longitude. The two terms almost mean the same thing. The only difference between the two is that latitude runs East to West and longitude runs North and South. These lines divide the earth up into a grid like pattern which helps to identify where a certain place or area on the planet. there are special lines of latitude and longitude which can help to further categorize sections of the planet. Examples of these lines include the Equator, the Prime Meridian, the Tropic of Cancer, and the tropic of Capricorn. The Tropic lines are at 23.5 degrees North and 23.5 degrees South, respectively. There are also the Arctic and Antarctic circles which are very distant from the equator. The 'highest' and 'lowest' points on Earth are the North and South poles. A probate future test question is "What is the difference between meridians and parallels?" The answer is that parallels, obviously, run parallel to each othe

Today Mr. Schick began by asking a shadow what time it is. This simple question spurred on a very long discussion, which took all class. Mr. Schick then asked why we have time zones. Another idea talked about was how long is the present. the present could be measured by the second or fraction of a second or by decades and centuries. There is no definite time frame of present. The present is just a term that people throw around to generalize a time period. The past and future were easily defined as what happens before and after the present...which leaves us with the question what is the present defined as? Then we went into the main lesson of the day which was about time zones. A central question that was discussed was why are there twenty four time zones. There is no real answer other than that is just how the original time zone guys wanted to do it, and now the rest of the world follows this policy.

Before we got into today's lesson, Aidan decided to voice his opinion of Mr. Schik's shirt at the beginning of class. Today we continued the Electoral mapping activity. I and my group had left off half way through the 2008 electoral map. The way I had been doing this activity is I went up and down the columns of states. For example, I went to Washington and then went down to Oregon and then to California, and listed them into their appropriate categories. This tactic worked for me as I am very proficient in recognizing state shapes. By the second time around I could very easily just point to a state and say "Wyoming." There still has not yet been a hidden meaning revealed to this activity but I am sure that there will soon be one. If I had to guess, based on what we are currently learning, I would say that there is something to do with the voting in America and the way the regions are done.

Today we talked about regions and cultural landscape. The sense of place that you feel may apply to a larger area of earth rather than to a specific point. Mr. Schick gave us the definitions of each and they are: Regions-are larger than a point and smaller than a point, several neighboring countries that share important features, or many localities within a country. Cultural landscapes are an area fashioned from nature by a cultural group, or the combination of both physical and human characteristics that uniquely define places and areas. after our note taking lesson we went on to do another activity. This was to take electoral maps from three of the last four elections and to list all the states by weather they voted Republican or Democratic. This activity seemed a bit boring and monotonous but there will probably be a hidden meaning behind it. Luckily, I have a lot of experience with U.S. states and can fairly easily label a blank map of the United States. We will go over our lists o