| So, welcome to your introductory geography lecture. |
| We'll begin with some basics. |
| Firstly, what do we learn by studying geography? |
| Well, we learn a great deal about all the processes |
| that have affected and that continue to affect the earth's surface. |
| But we learn far more than that, |
| because studying geography also informs us about the different kinds of relationships |
| that develop between a particular environment and the people that live there. |
| Okay. |
| We like to think of geography as having two main branches. |
| There's the study of the nature of our planet - |
| its physical features, what it actually looks like - |
| and then there's the study of the ways in which we choose to live |
| and of the impact of those on our planet. |
| Our current use of carbon fuels is a good example of that. |
| But there are more specific study areas to consider too, |
| and we'll be looking at each of these in turn throughout this semester. |
| These include bio-physical geography, |
| by which I mean the study of the natural environment and all its living things. |
| Then there's topography - |
| that looks at the shapes of the land and oceans. |
| There's the study of political geography and social geography too, of course, |
| which is the study of communities of people. |
| We have economic geography - |
| in which we examine all kinds of resource and their use - agriculture, for example. |
| Next comes historical geography - |
| the understanding of how people and their environments |
| and the ways they interact have changed over a period of time - |
| and urban geography, |
| an aspect I'm particularly interested in, |
| which takes as its focus: the location of cities, |
| the services that those cities provide. |
| and migration of people to and from such cities. |
| And lastly, we have cartography. |
| That's the art and science of map-making. |
| You'll be doing a lot of that! |
| So, to summarise before we continue, |
| we now have our key answer... |
| studying this subject is important |
| because without geographical knowledge, we would know very little about our surroundings |
| and we wouldn't be able to identify all the problems that relate to them. |
| So, by definition, we wouldn't be in an informed position to work out how to solve any of them. |
| Okay, now for some practicalities. |
| What do geographers actually do? |
| Well, we collect data to begin with! |
| You'll be doing a lot of that on your first field trip! |
| How do we do this? |
| There are several means. |
| We might, for example, conduct a census - |
| count a population in a given area perhaps. |
| We also need images of the earth's surface |
| which we can produce by means of computer-generation technology |
| or with the help of satellite relays. |
| We've come a very long way from the early exploration of the world by sailing ships |
| when geographers only had pens and paper at their disposal. |
| After we've gathered our information, we must analyse it! |
| We need to look for patterns, most commonly those of causes and consequences. |
| This kind of information helps us to predict and resolve problems that could affect the world we live in. |
| But we don't keep all this information confidential. |
| We then need to publish our findings so that other people can access it and be informed by it. |
| And one way which this information can be published is in the form of maps. |
| You'll all have used one at some stage of your life already. |
| Let's consider the benefits of maps from a geographer's perspective. |
| Maps can be folded and put in a pocket |
| and can provide a great store of reference when they're collected into an atlas. |
| They can depict the physical features of the entire planet if necessary, |
| or just a small part of it in much greater detail. |
| But there is a drawback. |
| You can't exactly replicate something that is three-dimensional, like our planet, on a flat piece of paper, |
| because paper has only two dimensions, |
| and that means there'll always be a certain degree of distortion on a map. |
| It can't be avoided. |
| We can also use aerial photographs... |
| pictures taken by cameras at high altitude above the earth. |
| These are great for showing all kinds of geographical features that are not easy to see from the ground. |
| You can easily illustrate areas of diseased trees or how much traffic is on the road at a given time |
| or information about deep sea beds, for example. |
| Then there are Landsats. |
| These are satellites that circle the earth |
| and transmit visual information to computers at receiving stations. |
| They circle the earth several times a day |
| and can provide a mass of information - |
| you'll all be familiar with the information they give us about the weather, for example. |
| So, what we're going to do now is look at a short presentation... |