1.6单元 — 地图、地图投影与地理空间技术

(a) Place refers to the physical and human characteristics that give a location its identity and distinguish it from other locations. A physical characteristic of the town might be its position within a hilly, limestone-based landscape with seasonal streams; a human characteristic might be its historic downtown square or its small-town street grid built around a central courthouse.

(b) Absolute location is the fixed, precise position of the town described using a coordinate system such as latitude and longitude. Relative location describes the town's position in relation to other places, such as its distance and travel time from a nearby metropolitan area. The town's absolute location never changes, but its relative location can become more or less significant as connections to other places (highways, broadband, commuter patterns) develop.

(c) The label illustrates a perceptual (vernacular) region, because "hill country" is not defined by a single measurable government boundary (as a formal region would be) or by a shared functional link to a central node (as a functional region would be). Instead, it reflects a shared mental image or cultural perception of an area's identity held by the people who live in or near it, and its boundaries are fuzzy and vary from person to person.

(d) At the town scale, the growth might appear as a dramatic, highly visible surge because the town's population base is small, so even a modest number of new residents produces a large percentage change. At the state scale, however, that same number of new residents would represent a negligible fraction of the state's total population, and the growth might not appear significant at all when averaged across many other counties and cities. Changing scale therefore changes which patterns are visible and how significant a given trend appears.

(e) Relocation diffusion is the spread of an idea, practice, or in this case a population, that occurs when the people carrying the trait physically move from one location to a new one, leaving the origin location behind. It applies to the remote workers because they are not simply visiting or communicating remotely; they are permanently uprooting their households from the metropolitan area of origin and re-establishing residence in the town, carrying their habits, spending patterns, and cultural preferences with them to the new location.

(f) One relevant theme is human-environment interaction, which examines how people modify, adapt to, and depend on their physical surroundings. As new residents settle in the hill country, they interact with the landscape by building new housing developments, drilling wells or extending water infrastructure, and altering natural drainage patterns, all of which reflect the reciprocal relationship between people and their environment.

(g) The growing population is likely to increase demand for groundwater and surface water, potentially straining the town's aquifer and seasonal streams, and to accelerate the conversion of open rangeland or wooded hillsides into residential lots, which increases impervious surface area, alters natural drainage, and raises the risk of local flooding after heavy rainfall.

(a) The data illustrate expansion diffusion, specifically a pattern consistent with contagious (or hierarchical-contagious) expansion diffusion, because the trait (the coffee chain) spreads outward from its origin in City A while remaining present there, and it reaches nearer towns first (Town B, 15 miles, 2018) before reaching farther towns later (Town D, 90 miles, 2023), showing a continuous outward wave rather than a sudden jump to a distant, unconnected location.

(b) Distance decay is the principle that the interaction, influence, or likelihood of adoption between two places decreases as the distance between them increases. The table illustrates this because the towns closest to City A (Town B at 15 miles) received the chain earliest, while towns farther away (Town D at 90 miles) received it later, and the farthest town (Town E at 150 miles) has not received it at all, showing that the chain's influence weakens as distance from the origin grows.

(c) A physical barrier could be a mountain range, river, or lack of a direct highway connection that increases the effective travel time and cost between City A and Town E, discouraging expansion. A human barrier could be a difference in local zoning regulations, a lack of sufficient population density or disposable income in Town E to support the chain, or the presence of an established local competitor that reduces the profitability of entering that market.

(d) A geographer could use GIS to plot each town as a point layer with its distance from City A and year of arrival stored as attribute data, then create a choropleth or graduated-symbol map layer to visually display how arrival year changes with distance, overlay additional layers (roads, population density, income) to test for correlated factors, and use spatial analysis tools to model or predict where and when the chain might expand next.

(e) GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is software used to store, analyze, and visually display spatial data in layers, while GPS (Global Positioning System) is a satellite-based technology used to determine a precise real-time location on Earth's surface. GPS would be more useful for recording the exact location of each new coffee shop as it opens, because that task requires capturing a precise coordinate in the field, whereas GIS is the tool used afterward to store, analyze, and map that coordinate data alongside other layers.

(f) At the local, town-by-town scale, the spread might appear somewhat irregular, since specific site factors, such as an individual town's road access or local competition, cause year-to-year variation in when each town received the chain. At the regional scale, however, those local irregularities average out and the broader, more regular pattern of outward, distance-based diffusion becomes clearer, since the overall trend of increasing distance corresponding to later arrival years is more visible when many towns are considered together.

(g) A geographer could conduct field interviews or surveys with residents and business owners in Town E and the surrounding area to ask directly whether they are aware of the chain, whether they have expressed interest in it, or whether they perceive specific obstacles to its arrival, and could supplement this with direct on-site observation of local infrastructure, competing businesses, and consumer traffic patterns to test whether the barriers identified in part

(c) are actually present.

(a) South County has the lowest population density, at 45 people per square mile.

(b) When the two sources are compared, a clear positive spatial relationship emerges between population density and broadband access: the two counties with the highest population density, West County (900) and North County (850), also have the highest broadband access rates (89% and 92%), while the two counties with the lowest population density, South County (45) and East County (120), also have the lowest broadband access rates (38% and 61%). This suggests that more densely populated counties are more likely to have widespread broadband infrastructure, while sparsely populated, rural counties lag behind.

(c) A geographer would most likely use a choropleth map to display the data in Source 2, because choropleth maps use graduated shading or color to represent a data value (such as percentage of broadband access) aggregated by enumeration unit, in this case counties, making it easy to visually compare the intensity of a variable across a set of defined areas.

(d) A Mercator projection preserves angles and shapes for navigation but severely distorts area, especially at higher latitudes, meaning that if the four counties differ in latitude, the Mercator projection could make a county's true land area look larger or smaller than it actually is relative to the others, misleading a geographer's visual comparison. An equal-area projection, by contrast, sacrifices some shape accuracy in order to preserve the true relative size of each county, so a geographer comparing the counties' land areas would get an accurate visual comparison only from an equal-area projection.

(e) One human factor is that internet service providers often prioritize infrastructure investment, such as running fiber-optic or cable lines, in areas with higher population density because the cost of building that infrastructure can be spread across more paying customers per mile of line, making it more profitable. Since South County has the lowest population density of the four counties, it likely represents a less profitable market for providers, resulting in less infrastructure investment and, consequently, lower broadband access.

(f) Remote sensing, the collection of data about Earth's surface from satellites or aircraft without direct physical contact, could be used to identify existing physical infrastructure such as cell towers, cable lines, or newly cleared land for construction, to measure land cover and terrain that might make infrastructure installation more difficult or costly in a county like South County, and to track changes in infrastructure development over time by comparing images from different years.

(g) One policy recommendation would be for the state or federal government to offer targeted subsidies or grants to internet service providers to offset the cost of extending broadband infrastructure into low-density, low-access counties such as South County and East County, since the data in both sources show that low population density correlates with low broadband access, indicating that market forces alone are unlikely to close the gap without outside financial incentive.