AP Human Geography — cultural patterns and processes

Unit 3 is where the course's vocabulary is thickest and where the distinctions are finest, so these ten questions are built around the pairs and triples that are actually hard to keep apart. It opens with a described city — a street plan following a river, an old quarter of local grey stone, a mill chimney and a bank tower as the two tallest things in it, a cemetery inscribed in a language nobody there now speaks — and asks what a visitor is reading. The answer is the cultural landscape, and a toponym is offered against it with its own correct definition, because the two are related and a place name is only one element of the whole visible record.

The diffusion question gives a case where an idea crosses a distance while the form does not, and asks which of the four kinds that is; contagious, hierarchical and relocation diffusion are each ruled out for a stated reason rather than dismissed. A language family is asked so that the three things people reach for first — present similarity, mutual intelligibility and shared geography — are all the wrong test, since a family is a claim about descent from one earlier language and says nothing about what has happened since. Pidgin, creole and lingua franca are separated by the one thing that distinguishes them, which is whether children grow up speaking it. Folk and popular culture are separated by scale and transmission, with the ranking reading — that popular culture is a later and more developed stage — set out as the trap it is.

Two questions are handled with particular care. The classification of religions as universalising or ethnic turns on whether a religion seeks adherents beyond one people, and that is what produces the difference in distribution; age, a named founder and the presence of written scripture are each offered as the wrong test, because each sorts nothing, and the explanation states plainly that this is an account of how religions spread and where they are found rather than anything about their content. The question on cultural relativism turns on the misreading that matters most: relativism is a method for explaining a practice in the terms of the people who hold it, not a verdict that every practice is equally good, and describing another community is not by itself ethnocentric.

The last three ask what contact produces — assimilation, acculturation and syncretism are three different outcomes, not three words for one — and close on the live disagreement about globalisation, between the view that global flows converge local difference away and the view that communities adapt what reaches them. That is presented as an argument still being had rather than as a settled finding.

Every place, community and practice here is invented and the questions say so. No belief is called true or false, no culture is ranked against another, and no stereotype about any people, nationality or religion appears as a wrong answer. Nothing is drawn from any College Board publication, released examination, course and exam description, scoring guideline or stimulus. There are no maps or photographs — every place is described in words, so the map and image interpretation a real Unit 3 exam requires is not practised here.

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• Read a described place as a cultural landscape, and tell that whole record from a toponym or a cultural hearth
• Separate folk from popular culture by scale and transmission, without reading the distinction as a ranking
• Classify a described case as relocation, contagious, hierarchical or stimulus diffusion, and say what moved in each
• State what membership of a language family claims, and why present similarity and geography are the wrong tests
• Distinguish a lingua franca, a pidgin and a creole, on whether the language has native speakers
• Explain what the universalising and ethnic classification turns on, and what follows for a religion's distribution
• Tell assimilation, acculturation and syncretism apart by how much of the original survives and what is produced
• Describe cultural relativism as a method rather than as approval, and name ethnocentrism as its alternative
• Explain how successive occupants leave layers in a landscape, and what sequent occupance names
• Set the cultural convergence argument against the local adaptation argument as a live disagreement

In the invented city of Lindholm the street plan follows the bend of the river, the oldest quarter is built from a grey stone quarried in the hills nearby, the two tallest structures are a nineteenth-century mill chimney and a recent bank tower, and the cemetery on the hill carries inscriptions in a language nobody in the city now speaks. Taken together, what is a visitor reading here?