Additional AP Human Geography Unit 1. Tries to minimize area, direction, and distance distortion. Line of latitude are slightly curved, nonparallel lines. Severe shape distortion of the polar regions near the east and west edges of the map.

ADVERTISEMENTS: There are no necessities, but everywhere possibilities. The natural data (factors) are much more the material than the cause of human development. The ‘essential cause’ is less nature, with its resources and its obstacles, than man himself and his own nature.” The possibility saw in the physical environment a series of possi­bilities for human development, but argued that the actual ways in which development took place were related to the culture of the people concerned, except perhaps in regions of extremes like deserts, tundra, equatorial and high mountains. There are distinct zones which are distributed symmetrically on each side of the equator, great climate-botanic frames, unequally rich in possi­bilities, unequally favourable to the different human races, and unequally fitted for human development; but the impossibility is never absolute even for the races least ‘adapted’ to them and all probabilities are often found to be upset by the persistent and supple will of man. ADVERTISEMENTS: The ‘determinist’ thesis has it that these frames constitute “a group of forces which act directly on man with sovereign and decisive power,” and which govern “every manifestation of his activity from the simplest to the most important and most complicated”.

What really happens in all these frames, especially in those which are the richest in possibilities, is that these possibilities are awakened one after the other, then lie dormant, to reawaken suddenly according to the nature and initiative of the occupier. “These possibilities of action do not constitute any sort of connected system; they do not represent in each region an inseparable whole; if they are graspable, they are not grasped by men all at once, with the same force, and at the same time.” The same regions, through the changes in value of their elements, have the most varied destinies. And it is human activity which “governs the game”. ADVERTISEMENTS: There are no doubts among human group’s similarities—or, at least, analogies—of life which are the result of the exploitation of similar possi­bilities. But there is nothing fixed or rigid about them.

We must avoid confusing once more necessity with possibility. The possibility show with great precision that society interposes practices, beliefs, and rule of life between nature and man; that man’s utili­zation of possibilities and his exploitation of his environment are thereby hampered, so as, for example, to render his food singularly monotonous. Nowhere is food eaten by savages without care in the choice. There are prohibitions, restrictions, taboos on sides. But this social constraint was, no doubt, not exercised at first in its full vigour.

There was great homoge­neity in primitive human groups, but there were necessarily differences (age and sex) and individual contingencies, however slight. In small societies the organization was not rigid enough at the beginning to stifle initiative. It is thanks to differentiation, to the individual alone, that life has been ameliorated and that society itself has been organized. Solidthinking inspire crack.