Where do you live?
What kind of languages do the people around you speak and know?
Is it hot, dry, cold or humid where you live? What time of the year does it snow, or rain?
How does the night sky appear? Do you see nothing but darkness or a beautiful scene of flashing lights of many colors?
Where you live determines many things about the environment around you. You might know your environment well enough if you've become familiar with it, but how well do you know the environments around your region, or even country?
Knowing one's own country is usually where one starts their education on geography. But if you haven't noticed, Americans seem to be well behind when it comes to knowing geography, especially in young students with close to 80% of 8th-grade students being below proficiency. During and after high school, geography is mostly forgotten about all together, leaving some surely drastic consequences for American society as a whole.
But, as it turns out like with almost anything, most of the world doesn't understand just how complicated geography can be. There are around a total of 196 countries, but political philosophy makes it so that there are always more or less. That's just how complex border and state politics are; nobody can really agree on how many countries there are because theres no clear definition for what a country is.
How would you define a country?
By the number of people that live in a certain area? Can the area be flexible and moveable, or must the border be established in place? And how many people constitutes a country exactly?
What about language? Should each country have its own unique language? Its own currency of money?
All these questions of course are beyond just geography, but rather more geopolitical. In geopolitics, one studies the history of an area of the world and how different governments there have ruled throughout time, including modern day nations. Each area of the world determines how the people live, from everything to their resources to their transportation infrastructure. But geography doesn't just determine the intense history of conflicts, battles, wars, and other political spheres between different states. Geography also gives information on just about most things related to society and culture.
For the time being, anyways, nearly all humans live on this planet of many different regions, and each region flourishes a unique culinary, artistic, linguistic, and fashion-culture. The rivers, deserts, oceans and scenery give rise to the feel and style of entire populations, which is certainly something in of itself to educate others about. Think about it; some foods and plants for different dyes only come from certain climates and regions of the world. Knowing your geography also lets you know a lot about where the products that we use from day to day minute to minute come from.
But how about you?
Do you know how many countries there are in each other continents? Do you know the world's major deserts, forests, oceans and rivers?
What about flags? Do you recognize the flags of the countries around the world or the currency that countries use?
The world is filled with many different kinds of flags, currencies, people, and languages. But how well do you know the people around the world?
There are many places around the internet where you can take geography quizzes. Go ahead, check them out and see how well you do. Just remember, there's thousands of unique regions of the world, and the more we familiarize ourselves with geography, the more we can familiarize ourselves with people around the world.
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