AP Human Geography — models and processes

AP Human Geography runs on named models: the demographic transition, von Thünen's rings, Christaller's central places, Rostow's stages, Wallerstein's world-systems. Most of the exam is a test of whether you know what each of them actually claims — and, just as often, what it assumes and where it fits the world badly.

Ten questions, covering all seven units. From thinking geographically, what the Mercator projection gives up and why a navigator would accept the trade anyway. From population, reading a stage of the demographic transition off a pair of rates, and reading a country's near future off the age structure of its population — that second one gives real percentages, so the dependency ratio is something you work out rather than something you are told. From migration, the difference between a factor that makes someone leave and a barrier they meet on the way. From cultural patterns, what makes diffusion relocation rather than expansion. From political geography, what the word nation-state actually requires. From agriculture, what orders von Thünen's rings. From cities, what central place theory claims, and what the process of gentrification consists of and whom it moves.

The development question sets Rostow against Wallerstein and does not pick a winner. The difference it turns on is where each account locates the cause: one inside the country, in savings and investment and a leading sector; the other between countries, in a division of labor where a peripheral position exists because a core one does. Geographers argue about which is more useful. The exam asks what each claims.

The same discipline runs through the migration and urban questions. They ask what a process consists of and whom it affects, never which outcome anyone should prefer. Where a model's limits matter, the explanation says so — and where a number cannot answer a question, as with whether a large young cohort becomes an economic advantage, it says that too.

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• Say what a named map projection preserves and what it sacrifices, and why a cartographer would still choose it for a particular purpose
• Place a country in a stage of the demographic transition model from its birth and death rates, and explain what the population is doing
• Compute a dependency ratio from an age structure and say what the same cohorts imply for the workforce twenty years later
• Distinguish push and pull factors from intervening obstacles, and relocation diffusion from the kinds of expansion diffusion
• State what von Thunen's rings are ordered by and what Christaller's central place theory claims about the size and spacing of settlements
• Set out the difference between Rostow's stages and Wallerstein's world-systems approach in terms of where each locates the cause, without treating either as correct
• Describe what gentrification consists of and whom it affects, separating description of a process from judgment of it

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the published AP Human Geography course framework (all seven units).