Practice question · Multiple choice
A geographical explanation and a determinist one can cite exactly the same evidence. What separates them?
Hints
- Ask what each account predicts about two societies in identical environments.
- One claim can be tested against variation. Which?
Show the answer
A. Whether societies in the same environment could have differed
Why
Identical environments producing different histories is fatal to determinism and expected under a cost-structure account, which is what makes the distinction testable rather than rhetorical. Comparative cases are therefore the decisive evidence, and it is why 'geography made this inevitable' is a much bigger claim than it usually intends.
Practise Geography and History
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Geography and History
- Why should Diamond’s continental-axis argument be held more loosely than the strength of its mechanism…
- Ratzel’s Lebensraum feeding into Geopolitik is guilt by association.
- Why is "geography is contingent on technology" a serious constraint on the field?
- Complete the formulation.
- Sort each claim: determinism or the defensible position?
- Why does possibilism, pushed hard enough, stop being informative?
- What characterizes the defensible modern position?