Make a list of all the different North American regions covered in this textbook by browsing through the book's table of contents. Then choose any one of these regions to examine more closely for this exercise

Question

After examining the regional map of your selected region at the beginning of the chapter that focuses on it, speculate on some of the subregions that may be located within this larger region. List each of these subregions on a piece of paper and then compare them to the map of your selected larger region. How might this region, and the subregions that are located within it, be useful in helping to explain what is meant by the geographic concept of scale?

Answer 1

Regions: Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountains, Far North, Great Plains, Great Lakes / Corn Belt, California, MexAmerica, Inland South, Coastal South, Megalopolis, Quebec, Atlantic Periphery.
The student should then take one of these regions and speculate on what may be the subregions within it. For example, the book lists Northern and Southern California as two subregions of California. At the broader scale, California forms a region because of a particular shared history, but Northern and Southern California have distinct cultural and physical characteristics. Southern California is significantly warmer and drier than Northern California. Southern California is also more highly urbanized than Northern California. These differences produce friction between the regions because a large amount of water from Northern California is piped to Southern California to supply large urban populations. No matter what the scale being conceptualized, each region is defined as being environmentally, culturally, and politically distinct from those around it.