Читать книгу Geography For Dummies - Jerry T. Mitchell - Страница 18

Geography is a widely misunderstood subject. Many people believe it’s only about making maps, studying maps, and memorizing locations. One reason is that polls and pundits occasionally decry the “geographic ignorance” of Americans, which usually means the average person doesn’t know where important things are located. Presumably, therefore, if you memorize the world map, then you “know geography.” Another reason is that on many TV quiz shows, contestants are occasionally asked “geography questions.” Almost always, the answer is a fact that can be understood by studying a map and/or memorizing the locations of things or events.

Knowledge of the location of things is important and useful. Everything happens somewhere; and if you know the where, then the event has meaning that it otherwise would not. So map memorization is cool, but you need to keep it in perspective. Memorizing locations is to geography what memorizing dates is to history, or what memorizing the multiplication table is to mathematics. Namely, it’s a foundation — a base — upon which you can build and develop deeper understandings.

Have you ever asked an English professor if they know the 26 letters of the alphabet? Of course not! It’s silly. But care to guess how many times I have been asked to rattle off a list of state or country capitals? It’s equally as silly. Just as letters build words, and then words build sentences, and then those sentences become ideas to share, so too are places. For a geographer, places are like our alphabet, a starting point to explain the complexity of Earth. The bottom line is: There is more to geographic awareness than where something is. As other geographers have stated, we need to think about where, why there, and why we should care.