2. UNIT 1: Texas Geography (topic/objective)
How do physical and human characteristics shape our state? (Essential Question)

3. Era of Natural Texas and Its People
What is an era? A fixed period of time characterized by particular events, features, developments, or people.
Why do historians divide history into eras? Historians divide history into eras in order to create blocks of time that have similar characteristics in order to organize and present information about the past.

4. Era of Natural Texas and Its People
TEKS 1A
Identify the major eras in Texas history, describe their defining characteristics, and explain why historians divide the past into eras, including Natural Texas and its People; Age of Contact; Spanish Colonial; Mexican National; Revolution and Republic; Early Statehood; Texas in the Civil War and Reconstruction; Cotton, Cattle, and Railroads; Age of Oil; Texas in the Great Depression and World War II; Civil Rights and Conservatism; and Contemporary Texas

5. 6 Geographical Questions
Location – Where is it?
Place – What is it like?
Regions – How does it compare to other places?
Human-Environment Interaction – How do humans react to their environment and how does it affect them?
Human Systems
Physical Systems

6. 1) Location – Where is it?
Absolute Location – The exact location of a place on the earth’s surface
Relative Location – The location of a place in relation to other places
The Absolute location and Relative location of Texas affect it in many ways – How has Texas’ relative location to Mexico affected it? (Left Column) *Turn and talk to a partner

7. chunk

8. 2) Place – What is it like?
Place refers to the physical and human characteristics of a location
Physical Characteristics include:
Landforms, Climate, plants, animals
Human Characteristics include:
Language, Religion, Architecture, Music, Politics, ways of life

9. Physical Characteristics

11. Human Characteristics

14. 3) Regions – How does it compare to other places?
Geographers divide areas into regions in order to better study them.
Regions are places that are united based on common characteristics
Regions can be based on physical, human, business and other characteristics

15. 4 Natural Regions of Texas

17. 4) Human-Environment Interaction
How do humans react to their environment and how does it affect them? Use, adapt to or change.
Ex: Pollution
Deforestation
Hurricanes/Tornadoes
Farming
Damming Rivers to make lakes

19. Texans have adapted and modified the environment by:
building dams on rivers to harness power for electricity.
irrigating the farms in the Great Plains region to yield sufficient crops such as cotton, wheat, rice, corn, etc.

21. 5) Human Systems Movement - How people move through the environment
Cultural Diffusion - new ideas brought by migrating people become widely accepted. Examples?
People bring ideas and goods with them when they move from one place to another.

22. 6) Physical Systems
Geographers analyze physical systems such as mountains, volcanoes, hurricanes, glaciers to see how they interact with and shape places and regions.
They also study plant and animal ecosystems that depend on each other and their surroundings in places and regions for their survival.

23. Movement in Texas

25. Roy Bedichek He was an author and speaker; considered a “Naturalist”
who traveled and
documented the
Texas landscape for
over 30 years. Died in
1959.

26. TEXAS GEOGRAPHY NOTES
PART 2

27. CLIMATE
Texas has the most varied climate of any other state in the U.S. It even varies greatly from one area of the state to the next.

28. Absolute Location
Texas lies in what are called the middle latitudes, the region about midway between the equator and the north pole.
Because of this absolute location of Texas being
not very far north
of the equator, it has mild winters, and because it is not very far south of the north pole is has mild summers.
TEXAS
EQUATOR

29. Northers
Sudden, icy blasts of cold air, called northers, extend south from Canada and sweep across the plains of Texas.
Despite its overall warmth, Texas is subject to periods of cold weather.

30. Storms
Violent storms form when cool air from the north collides with moist warm air from the Gulf of Mexico.
Because Texas is
on the Gulf,
destructive storms
such as hurricanes
sometimes sweep
across the state.

31. Relative Location
Because Texas is on the gulf coast, breezes from the Gulf of Mexico cool Texas in the summer and warm it in the winter.
Moisture from the Gulf gives Texas a lot of its rainfall. However,
some parts of
Texas are so far from
The Gulf it has little
effect on climate there.
In the hot, dry areas,
water is a precious,
natural resource.

32. Elevation
Elevation also affects the Texas climate. The temperature cools by 3 degrees every 1000-foot rise in elevation.
The temperature rises as elevation decreases

33. TEK 21C Les

34. Texas Growth by Ethnicity

35. Texas Population

36. Texas Population

37. TX Population

38. Texas Metropolitan Growth

39. TX Population By Age