Degrees

ES 103 Introduction to Geography Course Objectives

1. To provide an overview of geography emphasizing physical, cultural, locational, and regional themes.
2. To develop an understanding of how the physical, environmental, cultural, political, and economic factors of various world regions are interrelated.
3. To develop a sense of the scientific process and the critical thinking skills involved in scientific inquiry.
4. To encourage scientific literacy by emphasizing the interrelationships between geography and the life and physical sciences.
5. To enable students to realize that science (yes, this is a science) is fun!
6. To introduce the discipline of geography as both science and history by emphasizing the major geographic themes.
7. To review the properties of maps, such as direction, coordinate system, projection, and scale.
8. To present aspects of physical geography, emphasizing geologic determinants of global landforms and global climate.
9. To review the spatial distribution of human populations and qualitatively and quantitatively examine the controls on human population growth.
10. To present aspects of cultural geography, emphasizing language and religion.
11. To present the properties of language review the major languages with particular emphasis on the Indo-European language family.
12. To present the major aspects of the global religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) from a historical and geographic perspective.
13. To describe the political geography of the continents in terms of boundary shape, nations, states, and capitals.
14. To describe the location and shape of the states of the United States, their capitals, and their postal abbreviations.
15. To describe the location and shape of the countries of South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and their national capitals.
16. The present concepts of economic geography and the geography of natural resources, with an emphasis on nonrenewable energy sources.