GED and HiSET social studies — geography and the world

There is not a single map in this set, and that is deliberate. On the day, the test hands you the map; what it then tests is whether you can reason about a place from what you are told about it. So every question here describes its situation in words — a confluence, a latitude, two clock readings, a coal seam — and asks what follows.

Some of them are about why people live where they do. A settlement at the meeting of the Mississippi and the Missouri sits there because two river systems join and goods can move in four directions. A region with a population of five thousand to the square mile and one with five people to the square mile do not differ only in crowding; they differ in whether daily life runs on shared water, transit and utilities or on doing it yourself.

Others are about what a physical feature does to human beings over time. A border drawn straight across flat desert and a border following a mountain crest look similar on paper and behave nothing alike: the crest records a separation that already existed, while the straight line creates one, often through the middle of a single people. A range like the Himalayas is not best measured in miles — a hundred miles of it is a journey of days through a few passes that shut with the weather, which is why the languages, scripts and diets differ on the two sides.

And two of them are about industry and time. The Ruhr became a furnace of Europe because the coal was there and nineteenth-century coal was heavy, bulky and cheap: it was less costly to bring ore and workers to the coal than to move the coal to them, which is the same reason northern England, Belgium and Pennsylvania look alike. A city whose clock reads 4 p.m. when London's reads noon is east of the meridian, roughly sixty degrees, because the earth turns fifteen degrees an hour — with the honest caveat, given in the explanation, that real zone boundaries are political and a few of them sit on the half hour.

Every place named is real and every fact about it was checked before the question was written. A wrong river is worse than a dull question.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with GED Testing Service, which owns the GED test, or with the HiSET program, and it is not a test centre.

• Explain why settlements cluster where rivers meet and along coasts
• Say how climate at a given latitude limits what a region grows and what its people do for work
• Distinguish a natural border from a drawn one, and say what each does to the people near it
• Tell a push factor from a pull factor in a case where the two are easy to confuse
• Read population density as a statement about daily life, not just about crowding
• Work out direction and rough longitude from a difference in clock time
• Explain why heavy, low-value resources pull industry to themselves
• Describe what drought forces on a community, what a mountain range does to language and trade, and what industrialization does to where people live

Written for this exercise; no maps anywhere, by design. From the bank: "It is 12 noon in London, which sits on the prime meridian, and at that same moment the clock in another city reads 4 p.m." The candidate has to supply the reasoning the map would otherwise give — the earth turns fifteen degrees an hour, eastern clocks run ahead, so the city lies about sixty degrees east.