AP Human Geography — agriculture, cities and development

The last three units of AP Human Geography carry nearly half the multiple-choice paper between them, and this bank of eleven questions takes one idea from each of their major strands. Agriculture comes first. The Green Revolution is asked so that both halves have to be held together — yields per hectare rose substantially, and farming came to depend on seed, fertilizer and water that must be bought every season, which is why the distribution of the gains is argued about as much as their size. The intensive-against-extensive and subsistence-against-commercial distinctions are then asked as the two separate axes they are, since a system can be extensive and commercial at once.

Von Thunen's model gets a question about what would actually break it, and this one repays attention. The rings follow from transport costing the same per mile in every direction, so what disturbs them is anything that makes movement cheaper along one line — a navigable river, and for the same reason a railway or a road. Uniform soil and uniform climate are offered against that, and they are not disturbances at all but two of the model's own assumptions, which catches a candidate who has read the question as asking what the model needs. Survey systems and the site-and-situation distinction follow, the latter through a fishing village whose importance changes when a canal is cut nearby — its own physical characteristics are untouched, and its position relative to everywhere else is transformed.

The urban questions run from the rank-size rule, asked with figures a candidate can check in their head, to central place theory, where the bakery in every town and the surgical unit in three cities are explained by threshold and range together rather than by either alone. The three models of internal city structure are asked with a second point built in: each was drawn from the cities its author could observe, in one country at one date, so none of them describes every city and the most recent has not superseded the rest. Gentrification is presented as geographers present it, with investment reaching a district that had seen little and the same rising rents displacing the people and businesses already there, and with the two one-sided readings offered against it — the question does not tell the reader which half weighs more, because that depends on the case.

Development closes the bank across two questions. One separates what income per person measures from what a composite index adds by counting health and schooling alongside it. The last sets Rostow's five stages against dependency and world-systems accounts as rival explanations of the same evidence: one placing the causes of development inside a national economy and treating the path as open to any country that follows it, the other placing them in the relations between countries. Neither is presented as the answer, because the argument between them is not closed.

Every region, city and country here is invented and the questions say so; no real place is the subject of a claim about poverty, decline or failure, and the descriptive vocabulary of the discipline is used throughout. Nothing is drawn from any College Board publication, released examination, course and exam description, scoring guideline or stimulus. There are no maps, and every situation is described in words, but the von Thunen and concentric zone models are drawn as a real exam shows them — it is worth picturing each model first and then checking it against the drawing.

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the College Board, which owns the AP Human Geography exam, and it is not an test center.

• State both halves of what the Green Revolution did: the rise in yields and the new dependence on purchased inputs
• Classify a farming system on the intensive-extensive and subsistence-commercial axes separately
• Identify what actually breaks von Thunen's rings, and tell a disturbance from one of the model's own assumptions
• Recognize the long lot, metes and bounds, and township and range survey systems from a description
• Distinguish a place's site from its situation, and say which has changed in a described case
• Test a set of city populations against the rank-size rule, and say what a primate distribution looks like instead
• Explain why a high-order service is found in few places, using threshold and range together
• State what the multiple nuclei model proposes, and treat all three city models as generalizations from particular cities
• Describe gentrification with both its investment and its displacement, without resolving which matters more
• Say what income per person measures and what a composite development index adds to it
• Set Rostow's stages against dependency and world-systems accounts as rival explanations rather than successive ones

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the published AP Human Geography course framework (Units 5 to 7: agriculture, cities and development).