Practice question · Sort into groups
Sort each claim: determinism or the defensible position?
Groups: Determinism · Defensible position
- Geography shaped which institutions got built
- Terrain makes some things cheap and others expensive
- The tropics are poor because of the tropics
- A state is an organism that requires space to grow
- Geography’s effects change when technology changes the price list
- Climate makes a people industrious or indolent
Hints
- One column acts on people and character.
- The other acts on costs and institutions.
Show the answer
Determinism: Climate makes a people industrious or indolent, The tropics are poor because of the tropics, A state is an organism that requires space to grow
Defensible position: Terrain makes some things cheap and others expensive, Geography shaped which institutions got built, Geography’s effects change when technology changes the price list
Why
The left column acts on people and character; the right column acts on costs and institutions. That distinction is the entire lesson.
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
- A geographical explanation and a determinist one can cite exactly the same evidence. What separates them?
- 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.
- Why does possibilism, pushed hard enough, stop being informative?
- What characterizes the defensible modern position?