AP®︎ Human Geography: Unit 3 Practice Test
Prepare for your quiz, test, or the AP exam with focused practice questions on Unit 3 of AP Human Geography – Cultural Patterns and Processes.
Questions List
Unit 3 (All Topics)
Question 1 Topic 3.1Easy
This question tests the following: PSO-3.A.1
What is defined as the shared characteristics and practices of a particular group?
What You’re Being Tested On:
Explore the learning objectives taken directly from the College Board’s AP® Human Geography Curriculum. Ensure you’re prepared for the exact topics covered on the AP® exam, in-class tests, and quizzes, and gain confidence in your mastery of the material.
Unit 3: Cultural Patterns and Processes
This unit examines cultural practices, diffusion of ideas, language, religion, and how culture shapes landscapes and identities across space.
Topic 3.1: Introduction to Culture
Learning Objective: PSO-3.A
Define the characteristics, attitudes, and traits that influence geographers when they study culture.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.A.1
Culture comprises the shared practices, technologies, attitudes, and behaviors transmitted by a society.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.A.2
Cultural traits include such things as food preferences, architecture, and land use.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.A.3
Cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are different attitudes toward cultural difference.
Topic 3.2: Cultural Landscapes
Learning Objective: PSO-3.B
Describe the characteristics of cultural landscapes.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.B.1
Cultural landscapes are combinations of physical features, agricultural and industrial practices, religious and linguistic characteristics, evidence of sequent occupancy, and other expressions of culture including traditional and postmodern architecture and land-use patterns.
Learning Objective: PSO-3.C
Explain how landscape features and land and resource use reflect cultural beliefs and identities.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.C.1
Attitudes toward ethnicity and gender, including the role of women in the workforce; ethnic neighborhoods; and indigenous communities and lands help shape the use of space in a given society.
Topic 3.3: Cultural Patterns
Learning Objective: PSO-3.D
Explain patterns and landscapes of language, religion, ethnicity, and gender.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.D.1
Regional patterns of language, religion, and ethnicity contribute to a sense of place, enhance placemaking, and shape the global cultural landscape.
Essential Knowledge: PSO-3.D.2
Language, ethnicity, and religion are factors in creating centripetal and centrifugal forces.
Topic 3.4: Types of Diffusion
Learning Objective: IMP-3.A
Define the types of diffusion.
Essential Knowledge: IMP-3.A.1
Relocation and expansion—including contagious, hierarchical, and stimulus expansion—are types of diffusion.
Topic 3.5: Historical Causes of Diffusion
Learning Objective: SPS-3.A
Explain how historical processes impact current cultural patterns.
Essential Knowledge: SPS-3.A.1
Interactions between and among cultural traits and larger global forces can lead to new forms of cultural expression; for example, creolization and lingua franca.
Essential Knowledge: SPS-3.A.2
Colonialism, imperialism, and trade helped to shape patterns and practices of culture.
Topic 3.6: Contemporary Causes of Diffusion
Learning Objective: SPS-3.A
Explain how historical processes impact current cultural patterns.
Essential Knowledge: SPS-3.A.3
Cultural ideas and practices are socially constructed and change through both small-scale and large-scale processes such as urbanization and globalization. These processes come to bear on culture through media, technological change, politics, economics, and social relationships.
Essential Knowledge: SPS-3.A.4
Communication technologies, such as the internet and the time-space convergence, are reshaping and accelerating interactions among people; changing cultural practices, as in the increasing use of English and the loss of indigenous languages; and creating cultural convergence and divergence.
Topic 3.7: Diffusion of Religion and Language
Learning Objective: IMP-3.B
Explain what factors lead to the diffusion of universalizing and ethnic religions.
Essential Knowledge: IMP-3.B.1
Language families, languages, dialects, world religions, ethnic cultures, and gender roles diffuse from cultural hearths.
Essential Knowledge: IMP-3.B.2
Diffusion of language families, including Indo-European, and religious patterns and distributions can be visually represented on maps, in charts and toponyms, and in other representations.
Essential Knowledge: IMP-3.B.3
Religions have distinct places of origin from which they diffused to other locations through different processes. Practices and belief systems impacted how widespread the religion diffused.
Essential Knowledge: IMP-3.B.4
Universalizing religions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Sikhism, are spread through expansion and relocation diffusion.
Essential Knowledge: IMP-3.B.5
Ethnic religions, including Hinduism and Judaism, are generally found near the hearth or spread through relocation diffusion.
Topic 3.8: Effects of Diffusion
Learning Objective: SPS-3.B
Explain how the process of diffusion results in changes to the cultural landscape.
Essential Knowledge: SPS-3.B.1
Acculturation, assimilation, syncretism, and multiculturalism are effects of the diffusion of culture.
