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Geography has been described as "why what is where." Students may come into the field remembering a middle-school course that catalogued the countries of the world in a litany of place names, capital cities, primary exports, and so on. Such data are the raw material of geography, but they become much more useful and interesting when the "why" aspects are added in. Why were the steel mills built in Pittsburgh; why do trees get sparse west of the Mississippi River? These questions involve interactions of physical and human systems that are not often studied together, except by geographers.

AREA OF EMPHASIS AT DELAWARE

Geography courses at Delaware and in most other American universities fit into three categories. Physical geography primarily covers natural processes that create the background environment in which human activities occur: climate and weather, landform shaping and soil developing processes, and biogeography. Human geography examines the significance of where human events occur, from social, cultural, economic, political, and historical perspectives. Emphasis is also placed on how society changes and responds to environments. In the questions they ask, human geographers consider the importance of cultural values expressed in art and literature as well as in the ways that the necessities of life - of food and shelter - are obtained. Geographers have a special set of technical methods developed for our unique, place-oriented view of the earth. These include all aspects of map making and map analysis, as well as data analysis techniques that are specialized for use with geographic data. In recent years, a computerized mixture of mapping, spatial data analysis, and spatial database handling known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) become a multi-billion-dollar industry with a thriving job market.