Grade 9 · printable course

World Geography: Physical Systems, Human Patterns, and Regions

Grade 9 · 585 pages · 70 lessons · PDF, print at home

This is a year-long geography course built around one question: why does human life look so different from place to place, and what actually causes that, not what's the capital of where. Your child learns a small toolkit of ideas (climate, resources, colonialism, borders, trade) in the first third of the year, then spends the rest of the year using that same toolkit on six real regions of the world: the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia. By the end they should be able to hear a news story about a conflict or an economic crisis somewhere and explain the physical, economic, and political reasons behind it, not just recite facts about the place.

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What is inside

Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

World Geography: Physical Systems, Human Patterns, and Regions

70 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: The Geographer's Toolkit: Maps, Scale, and Physical Systems9 lessons
  1. 1.Latitude/longitude coordinate grid
  2. 2.Climate zone classification criteria
  3. 3.Mercator projection's area-shape tradeoff
  4. 4.Tradeoffs between equal-area and conformal (Mercator) projections
  5. 5.Distortion patterns as evidence of projection choice
  6. 6.The five themes of geography
  7. 7.Watershed as a bounded hydrological system
  8. 8.Drainage prediction from elevation contours in an unfamiliar landscape
  9. 9.Maps as rhetorical/argumentative artifacts
Unit 2: Population and Culture: Where People Live and Why9 lessons
  1. 10.Arithmetic density vs. physiological density calculation
  2. 11.Correspondence between physical-geography features and population clustering on a map
  3. 12.Cases where physical-geography prediction of population density fails and the non-physical (historical, economic, technological) factor responsible
  4. 13.Push and pull migration factors
  5. 14.Migration pressure prediction from combined physical and push/pull data
  6. 15.Evidence criteria distinguishing cultural diffusion from independent invention
  7. 16.Scale mismatch between national-level cultural/demographic statistics and sub-national patterns
  8. 17.Prediction and justification of migration pressure across multiple unfamiliar countries, including identification and explanation of a disconfirming case
  9. 18.Push/pull mechanisms underlying urbanization trends over time
Unit 3: Economic Geography: Development, Trade, and Inequality8 lessons
  1. 19.GDP per capita calculation formula
  2. 20.The averaging property of GDP per capita and what it hides about wealth distribution
  3. 21.The primary/secondary/tertiary/quaternary sector classification scheme
  4. 22.The relationship between sector composition and value-added capture in an economy
  5. 23.The causal divergence between two resource-comparable countries' development paths
  6. 24.The shared core-periphery structure across two distinct colonial case studies
  7. 25.The causal argument connecting colonial history and trade relationships to present-day development divergence, applied to a new country pair
  8. 26.The explanatory limits of the core-periphery/dependency model when applied to an anomalous case
Unit 4: Political Geography: Borders, Sovereignty, and Conflict8 lessons
  1. 27.The state/nation/nation-state taxonomy applied to real countries
  2. 28.The causal chain from Berlin Conference boundary decisions to post-independence conflict
  3. 29.Devolution, irredentism, and secession as distinct mechanisms of sub-state political change
  4. 30.Mechanism identification in an unfamiliar border conflict
  5. 31.The geographic separability of population as a constraint on border-redraw solutions
  6. 32.A generalized rule for the viability of border-redraw solutions across conflict types
  7. 33.Textual evidence used to support a mechanism-identification claim about a border conflict
  8. 34.Definitions of the unit's core political geography vocabulary
Unit 5: Regional Study: The Americas8 lessons
  1. 35.Physical geography of the Andes and Amazon and their constraints on settlement
  2. 36.Colonial legacy patterns of Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French colonization in the Americas
  3. 37.The relationship between colonial-era trade relationships and present-day GDP per capita in Latin America
  4. 38.USMCA/NAFTA trade bloc goals versus documented economic outcomes in Mexico, including cases where surface-level textual evidence conflicts with the underlying mechanism
  5. 39.Push/pull migration factors in two distinct Americas migration cases
  6. 40.Causes of megacity growth in São Paulo and Mexico City
  7. 41.Application of the physical/population-culture/economic/political toolkit to an unstudied Americas country
  8. 42.The validity of 'the Americas' as a single coherent region versus a constructed map argument
Unit 6: Regional Study: Europe8 lessons
  1. 43.Europe's major landforms, rivers, and peninsulas and their historical relationship to settlement/trade patterns
  2. 44.The causal chain from post-WWI border redrawing through WWII to Cold War division of Europe
  3. 45.The division of policy authority between EU member states and supranational EU institutions
  4. 46.The structural difference in depth of integration between a trade bloc (NAFTA/USMCA) and a supranational union (EU)
  5. 47.The range and variance of GDP per capita/HDI across specific European countries, contrasted with a continental average
  6. 48.The general conditions under which the sovereignty-cost/economic-benefit balance of supranational membership reverses (using Brexit as the contrasting case)
  7. 49.The distinction between internal-EU free movement, external immigration into the EU, and emigration out of the EU, and the specific policy mechanism enabling internal movement
  8. 50.The weighed cost-benefit case for a specific non-EU European country's potential EU membership
Unit 7: Regional Study: Africa and the Middle East11 lessons
  1. 51.Physical geography and resource distribution of Africa and the Middle East (Sahara, Sahel, oil reserves)
  2. 52.Colonial partition (Berlin Conference) and resulting arbitrary borders
  3. 53.The two-link causal chain from colonial-era decision to post-independence conflict trigger
  4. 54.Divergent post-independence outcomes despite similar colonial histories
  5. 55.Rentier states and the resource curse
  6. 56.Rentier-state mechanism applied to an untaught Middle Eastern case
  7. 57.The colonial-boundary-to-conflict causal mechanism applied to a genuinely novel country case
  8. 58.The selective framing of Africa and the Middle East through conflict coverage and who benefits from that frame
  9. 59.Regional organizations (African Union, Arab League)
  10. 60.Voluntary regional integration (AU) as a structural contrast to imposed colonial partition
  11. 61.The full causal-chain-and-resource-evaluation case study across two regions
Unit 8: Regional Study and Capstone Synthesis: Asia and the Pacific9 lessons
  1. 62.The causal chain from monsoon seasonality through wet-rice agriculture's labor intensity to settlement density in monsoon Asia
  2. 63.The specific historical mechanisms of Japan/South Korea's postwar industrialization
  3. 64.The export-oriented industrialization causal model applied to China's post-1978 economic reform
  4. 65.Demographic transition stages as represented in China's, India's, and Japan's population pyramids
  5. 66.The dependency ratio and its change over time in Japan's aging population
  6. 67.The geographic logic of Pacific Rim maritime trade network development
  7. 68.A cross-regional causal comparison using the four-category toolkit applied to two previously studied but not-yet-paired regions
  8. 69.A generalized rule governing when physical geography versus human decision-making dominates as an explanation of regional outcomes, tested across all six studied regions
  9. 70.The completeness of one's own toolkit-based causal argument in the capstone essay draft

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