The influence of Geography on Culture

- Learn how geography influences culture

What geographical features (ocean, mountains, etc.) are in these pictures? What other geographical features can you think of?
Describe the climate and main geographical features of the area you grew up in.

+ Geography helps explain the success of Silicon Valley:
- Silicon Valley is commonly used nickname for the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
- Silicon Valley is a specific geographic area - the northern part of Santa Clare Valley and surrounding (v-bao vây, bao quannh) communities on the San Francisco Peninsula and in the East Bay.
- Its name comes from the word of technology. This area has a high concentration of computer-related companies that make and use silicon chips.

How did this small area become the center of such an innovative and successful industry?
- Many people point to geographical reasons to explain Silicon Valley's high-tech success. Pleasant climate and available space are two geographical features that attract people and companies to Silicon valley. These features hold them there after they arrive also.
In a survey of Silicon Valley companies, more than two-thirds rated the location and climate as outstanding.
- Other factors (another reason) have helped Silicon Valley's success as well. Although the area exists in a valley, but it is not isolated. There are major universities (a key factor in the spread of new ideas and training workers). It is also close to San Francisco,a major city and financial center. This means investment money is available.

About market:
Some of the biggest markets for Silicon Valley's product are the countries across the Pacific Ocean: Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
And the bay city of Oakland is one of the few major ports on the West Coast of the United States, making it easier to exchange goods.

These geographical advantages have helped Silicon Valley overcome some of the barriers (n-chứng ngại vật, hàng rào) to trade that exist in other regions. They encourage rather than inhibit (v-ngăn chặn, hạn chế) business relationships.

When you consider geography, access to new technology and technicians, availability of investment money, and ease of transport, there isn't much to prevent Silicon Valley's growth and success.
Silicon Valley is the heart of the high-tech industry in the United States.

Questions:
Where and what is Silicon Valley?
What are three geographical features that help explain the success of Silicon Valley?
Silicon Valley is close to an ocean and a port city on a bay. what influence do these two geographical features have on business in the area?

Think about the main geographical features of the city that you live in or grew up in. What influences do they have on the area?
What geographical features might have a negative influence on the success of an area? Why?

Imagine that you are going to hear a lecture on how waterways (rives, oceans, canals) affect the development of an area. Which aspect of the lecture will help the class best understand how waterways affect development? Why?
- an example of a waterway that has influenced development.
- an explanation of how a waterway influences development.
- a detailed definition of a waterway.

So, let me show why waterways have been so important: In the time before rail-roads, and before road systems and trucks and airplanes ... waterways were the main way, it is the least expensive way to exchange products. So you can see that, when a city was close to a waterway, it could have more exchange of products, and as a result, more economic development. (water that is deep and wide enough for ships to travel on, ... to transport ... move product back and forth)

- Waterways allowed exchange of ideas and products.
- In the past people learned about the world through contact with other people.
- Isolation from waterways meant slow development.

A lecture comparing waterways in Western Europe to waterways in Africa:
Discuss how two different areas of the world, ... two continents, ... Europe and Africa, ... have developed differently, and how waterways have played a role in this development.
Let me start by explaining the physical features and climates of these two areas and how they vary from each other. (v-khác nhau mỗi vùng)
- First, physical features. Rivers in Western Europe flow gently (adv-nhẹ nhàng, dịu dàng) through a large flat areas of land. They connect wide geographical areas. In Africa, rivers don't flow through flat land. In fact, they fall a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea. There are also many waterfalls that make it difficult for ships to pass.
- Their climates vary also. In Western Europe, rivers stay about the same all year because of regular rainfall and melting snow ['melting]. But Africa's rainfall is not consistent [adj-ko nhất quán]. Rivers rise and fall dramatically with the seasons.

What main georaphical feature is compared in the chart? How does the student indicate this?
What two aspect of Western Europe and Africa are compared?

The list of the six things that affect a culture. On your own, put them in order of the strongest (1) to the weakest (6) influence. Be prepared to explain and defend your list:
- Geography: the geographical features of a place
- Religion: the beliefs and opinions about a higher power.
- Language: the language that is spoken
- Media: the many forms of media that we are exposed to (newspapers, film, radio, TV, etc.)
- Family: the people that love us
- Climate: the weather

Imagine that you live in a country surrounded by physical barriers. How do you think this would affect the culture? Would isolation bring people closer together? Would it make people more tolerant of each other or would the rules become more strict?

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Why?
"Geography creates limits but people determine what they will do within those limits."

Practice Lecture: how waterways allow the exchange of ideas
Let's look at the positive way that waterways influence the growth of cities and cultures. We've talked about how waterways allow the exchange of products, but they also allow the exchange of ideas. That's what I'd like to talk about today.

Question (start with a question): How do we learn about the world that exists beyond (prep-ở xa) our own culture?
Answer: Well, there are many ways that we learn about the world. Let me show you what I mean.
- In the past before travel and communication were/became so easy (there were no computers and no airplanes), people learned about the world through contact (actual contact) with other people and other ideas.
- It was geographical [dgiơ'] features like waterways that made contact between people and ideas possible.

Let's look at how this worked: In the past, the closer to waterways that people lived, the more opportunity they had to exchange ideas about the world, and this exchange of ideas helped cultures growing and develop.
- We know that this is true because, when we study cultures that live in isolation from waterways, we see some things that are similar. (explain: Ships travelling on rivers, lakes, and oceans carried people, but they also carried people's ideas and experiences.) Cultures that were not near waterways usually developed more slowly than others, than cultures near waterways, because they couldn't easily talk to people from other places and exchange ideas with them.

Argument: Some people argue that access to waterways was one of the most important influences on how a culture learned about the world.
(access to something -n- cơ hội/quyền sử dụng cái gì: example: students must have access to a good library)

Lecture:
Today we're going to talk about an aspect of geography called cultural geography. (to discuss the ways that the geographical features of the Earth affect the spread of cultures.)

- First, what is cultural geography?: It's the study of the way that the physical environment of the Earth interacts (v- ảnh hưởng lẫn nhau) [intơ 'ackt] with  the people and cultures of the Earth.
(Let me explain more so it's clear: Cultural geography studies the location of cultures. A cultural geographer sees differences in cultures and wants to know what effect the geography of the culture in the spread, or lack of spread, of cultural elements, like beliefs and customs.

Some experts say that there are 15,000 different cultures in the world. I mean groups of people who share similar ways of going about life. They have a common set of learned beliefs, values and behaviors.

Culture regions (vùng, miền) differ greatly in size: Some are very large, like the Islamic culture region that makes up millions of square miles of North Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. Some are very small, like Spanish Harlem, which encompasses (v-bao quanh, vây quanh) about two square miles of Manhattan in New York City.

So, a cultural geographer wants to know, why? Why are there so many cultures on Earth today? If we all started out more or less the same way, how did we end up with 15.000 different cultures?

- Let's look at this idea, at how geographical features affect the spread of culture. Today, I'll discuss barrier effects. (this is the term used to describe things that stop cultures from spreading)

Physical barriers are natural elements that prevent cultures from spreading. These physical barriers isolate people. They isolate them by somehow preventing or limiting cultures from changing.

Isolation is one general reason why we have so many cultures. Let's look at how this works: when people can easily communicate, they exchange information and ideas ... (values go back and forth between the cultures). Geographic isolation makes communication difficult, and this cause differences between cultures.

We'll discuss five (5) classic examples of physical barriers:
- The first is oceans: Oceans were barrier ['bariơ] for centuries. People living on islands surrounded by ocean, it were usually prevented from (to be unable) to exchange things with other cultures. So, until shipbuilding and navigation (ngành hàng hải), oceans were a powerful barrier. This is even true today.
Example: some islands in the Pacific Ocean are home to people who have little contact with the outside world.

- Forests are another example: In the past, forests were much larger than today. (nearly all of what is now the western United States). How did this affect culture? Well, once a group of people settled (v-định cư) in the forest, they became separate from other groups. (Can you imagine this?) The forest was so dense (adj-rậm rạt, dày) that they couldn't easily go through it. Forest societies were isolated because it was so difficult to travel.

- Our third example of a physical barrier is mountains: In areas that are extremely mountainous (adj-nhiều núi), we see that communication between cultures is also inhibited.
An example: the island of New Guinea, (You heard of it?) It's an island near Indonesia and Australia, in the South Pacific Ocean. this is small island (the total population is 7 million - there are an estimated 700 languages spoken. (What an amazing fact!) It makes no sense that so many languages exist in such a small space until you look at the geography.
Let me explain: New Guinea is extremely mountainous and has many deep valleys. It also has dense tropical forests in the lowlands. These extreme geographical features resulted in (v_prep-dẫn đến) hundreds of relatively isolated areas of people and these groups have developed their own languages.

-- Now, the last two types of barriers are deserts and tundra (n-địa chất):
You can easily see why deserts ['dezeơt] have also tended to isolate people and inhibit the spread of culture.
Tundra, you might not be familiar with Tundra, Tundra refers to areas like you find in northernmost North America and Europe. It's an area at the very high latitude (vĩ độ cao) at the top of the Earth. The environment is very cold, sub-freezing, and treeless (ko có cây). Native people adapted to this harsh (adj-khắc nghiệt) environment but the harshness of the climate made it difficult to access.

Those are the five barrier effects. The bottom line is, physical barriers have isolated peoples and culture. It's hard to imagine today, because of amazing advances on travel and communication but these barriers were a significant influence in the development of the cultures of the world.