Understanding Culture
Mr. Brown
Today’s Agenda
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Warm-Up Activity
Pass in Syllabus signed sheet
Discuss Current Events
Take notes on Culture
Watch Video on Culture
Notebooks
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3.
Current Events
Notes in Class Edited Notes
Daily Warm-Ups
Warm-Up Day 2
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Warm up 2 – Write a paragraph about how
school has changed since leaving
elementary school.
Did You Know
Culture is what makes you a stranger when
you are away from home. For example, you
might not know that Ukrainians enjoy
chocolate-coated pork fat at Christmas time
and that the Chinese have a special holiday,
called Ching Ming, when they spend the day
honoring deceased family members.
I. What Is Culture?
A. Culture is the way of life of a group of people who share similar
beliefs and customs.
B. When studying culture, geographers look at eight traits—social
groups, language, religion, daily life, history, arts, government,
and the economy.
C. Among social groups, geographers study rich, poor, and middle
class people.
They may look at age or gender. They may study different
ethnic groups, or people who share a common language,
history, religion, and some physical characteristics.
I. What Is Culture?
D. Among people who speak the same language, one
may hear a local form of a language, or dialect, that
differs from the main language.
E. In many cultures, religion helps people answer basic
questions about life’s meaning. Religious beliefs vary
greatly around the world and have resulted in
conflicts and struggles based on religious
differences.
F. Daily life varies in different cultures. For example, the
types of foods that people eat and the way they build
their homes may vary.
I. What Is Culture?
G. History shapes how people view the world. Many
cultures celebrate holidays that honor their heroes
and heroines. A culture is influenced by how it
remembers its successes and how it remembers its
disasters and defeats.
H. Culture is expressed through art, including painting,
sculpture, architecture, dance, music, theater, and
literature. Insight into a culture can be gained by
studying what its people think is beautiful and
important.
I. What Is Culture?
I. Types of government can reflect a country’s culture. A
democracy is a form of limited government in which
power rests with the people of a nation. In a
representative democracy, such as the United
States, citizens elect representatives.
Some governments are led by individuals. In a
dictatorship, dictators control and rule as they wish.
In a monarchy, kings and queens inherit the power
to rule.
I. What Is Culture?
J. In studying how the people of a culture earn
a living, geographers study the
culture’s economic system. This “system” sets
rules for how people decide what
goods and services to produce and how they
are exchanged.
How do the three main types of
governments differ?
In a democracy, power rests with the nation’s
people. In a dictatorship, dictators rule as
they wish with the help of the military. In a
monarchy, the power to rule is inherited.
II. Cultural Change
A.The process of spreading new knowledge and skills
to other cultures is called cultural diffusion. This
happens as a result of trade, the movement of
people, war, television, the Internet, and so on.
B. As people learned to grow food, they tended to stay
in one place and build settlements. This produced
highly developed cultures, or civilizations.
C. In the 1700s and 1800s, some countries began to
industrialize and built factories to make goods,
leading to the Industrial Revolution.
D. More recently, the widespread use of
computer technology has led to the
Information Revolution. People around the
world can instantaneously send and receive
information.
E. Geographers group the world’s countries
into culture regions that have traits, or
cultural characteristics, in common.
What was the Information Revolution?
Computers and the Internet made it possible
to store and share huge amounts of
information. This revolution connects the
cultures of the world more closely than ever
before.
Agenda for August 20, 2010
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Complete Warm-up Activity in notebook
Take –up Current Event Notebooks
Take notes on Population
Take notes on population video
Warm-Up
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Warm up 3 – Write a paragraph about what
you remember about Hurricane Katrina?
Did You Know
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During October 1999, world population
reached 6 billion people, doubling in size in
under 40 years. World population is still
growing at a rate of 1.3 percent per year, with
an average annual addition of 78 million
people from 1999 to 2000.
Population Growth
A. The world’s population continues to grow. The death
rate, or the number of people out of every 1,000 who
die in a year, has gone down because of better
health care and living conditions. Meanwhile, the
birthrate, or the number of children born each year
for every 1,000 people, is very high in some regions.
B. Challenges from population growth include the rapid
use of resources, a strain on a country’s economy,
and the lack of food, or famine.
What are reasons some experts are
optimistic despite the high population
growth?
The levels of technology and creativity are
increasing so that the growth can be
managed.
II. Where People Live
A. The world’s population can only exist on a small
fraction of the earth. This is due to the fact that only
30 percent of the earth is covered by land. Of that
portion, half is uninhabitable because of ice, deserts,
or high mountains.
B. The world’s population is not distributed evenly.
People prefer to live in places with plentiful water,
good land, and a favorable climate.
C. Population density is the average number of
people living in a square mile or square kilometer.
How do you calculate population
density?
Population density is the average number
of people living in a square mile or square
kilometer. To arrive at this figure, the total
population is divided by the total land area.
III. Population Movement
A. Throughout the world, the population shifts as people move
from place to place.
B. Many people are leaving villages and farms and moving to
cities. This movement is called urbanization.
C. Nearly half the world’s people live in cities. The boundaries of
cities and their suburbs keep expanding outward, a situation
called urban sprawl.
D. Some people emigrate, or leave the country in which they were
born and move to another country.
E. Some people flee to another country to escape persecution or
disaster. These people are known as refugees.
Why do some people emigrate?
People emigrate to find jobs in the richer
nations or to flee their country because of
wars, food shortages, or other problems.