What is geography? Put simply, geography is the study of the evolving character and organization of the Earth ’s surface. It is about how, why, and where human and natural activities occur and how these activities are interconnected.
To get a better understanding of geography, think of it as having two sides. One side, which we can term regional geography , is concerned with how the Earth’s surface is differentiated into unique places.Take Chennai,Tamil nadu, India for example.What makes Chennai unique? Automobile area,considered as Detroit of India.world second largest beach. Chennai was also named as the best cosmopolitan city in the world by lonely planet.
Although places are unique, the physical, economic, and social processes that form them are not.Thus, geographers are concerned with discovering, understanding, and modeling the processes that differentiate the Earth’s surface into places. This is the other side of geography, which we can term systematic geography.
Why fisheries are cheap in Chennai and expensive in Delhi? sandalwood items cheap in Mysore and expensive in Madurai? Food items(Idly) cheap in Madurai and expensive in Mathura? These are examples of simple principle of economic geography that prices include transportation costs and that when goods travel a longer distance, they are usually more expensive.
Discovering such principles and extend-ing them to model and predict spatial phenomena is the domain of systematic geography. To summarize, geographers study both the “vertical” integration of characteristics that define a place and the “horizontal” connections between places.
What makes geography different from other discipline? Geography adopts a unique set of perspectives to analyze the world and its human and natural phenomena. These perspectives include the spatial viewpoint of geographers, the interest of geographers in the synthesis of ideas across the boundaries of conventional studies, and geographers ’ usage of tools to represent and manipulate spatial information and spatial phenomena.
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Musing :Smkubendran 