Chapter 1 introduces Geography and ways that geographers study the world. A key part of studying places is comparing places to one another. Why are some places safe and others more dangerous? Why are some places ethnically diverse and some more homogenous? Why are some languages spoken widely while others cover a small space? Why are some countries powerful and others weak? Why are some economies successful and others fail? These are all questions that geographers look at, paying close attention to spatial relationships, environmental contexts, historical processes, and forces of globalization.
To introduce you to some of these ideas, you will compare the United States to four other countries using the website If It Were My Home
(Links to an external site.)
https://www.ifitweremyhome.com/.On this website, you can compare the U.S. to nearly any other country (on selected indicators). Here are the results from a comparison of the United States and Russia.
Your task in this assignment is to describe and brainstorm some of the reasons we might find such drastic spatial inequality. You can look at the United Nations Country Reports from the Human Development Index
(Links to an external site.)
http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries help think of reasons why you might find such differences. The important thing here is not necessarily that you are right, but that you start to think about differences and reasons behind these differences. Try to pick countries of various regions of the world.
Pick 3 countries to compare and write one paragraph comparing the U.S. to each country, and brainstorm why some of these differences may exist. Write a final paragraph about what you thought about this assignment and you learned about global differences.
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