CH 2 Europe

• Estuary: A wide river mouth that experiences changes in tidal water level and quality
• Fjords: A formerly glaciated valley that was flooded with ocean water after the sea level rose in the post-glacial age
• Oceanic Temperate climates: The climate of the western margins of midlatitude continents, in which cool moist air from the ocean brings precipitation and moderate air temperatures
• Subtropical winter rain (Mediterranean climate): A climate that is characterized by summer drought and winter rains
• Continental temperate climate: The climates of continental interiors in midlatitudes
• Loess: Fine-grained and fertile soils developed from windblown deposits
• Acid deposition: Dry or wet acidic deposition of acidic material from the atmosphere, often resulting from sulfur and nitrate gases and particles emitted into the air from coal combustion in power plants
• Black Triangle: A heavily polluted industrial area straddling the Polish, Czech, and German borders
• Gentrification: The movement of higher-income groups to occupy and improve residences in older and poorer parts of cities
• State: The country or division of a country within a federal government
• Nation-State: The linking of a separate and distinct people (nation) and a politically organized territory with its own sovereign government (state)
• Nation-State Ideal: The belief that each people (nation) must have its own country (state) in order to be free and govern itself as it desires
• Irredentism: The desire to gain control over lost territories or territories perceived to belong rightfully to a group
• Genocide: The systematic extermination of an ethnic group, nation, or racial or religious group
• Communism: A system in which the workers govern and collectively own the means of economic production
• Democratic Centralism: The practice of sole governance by the Communist party, the political party of the working class because it is believed that only the communist party is the true representative of the people
• State Socialism: The communist party actively running the political, social and economic activities of the people
• Planned economy: The communist practive of the government rather than the free market, deciding what goods and services need to be produced within a country
• North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): A military alliance of non-communist European countries and the united states
• Imperialism: The practice of extending the rule of an empire over foreign lands
• Colonialism: The system by which one country extends its political control to another territory to improve local conditions and/or economically exploit the human beings and natural resources of the subordinate territory
• Industrial Revolution: The period of the late 1700s and early 1800s when increasingly complicated machines and chemical processes, fueled by inanimate power sources such as water and coal, replaced tradition ways of making goods by hand with simple tools
• Productive capacity: The total amount of goods a country's industries can produce during a given period
• Producer goods: Industrial goods used by other industries to make consumer goods
• Agglomeration economies: The total economies achieved by a production unit because of a large number of related economic activities in the same area
• Geographic Inertia: Once capital investments are made in factories and infrastructure that give a region agglomeration economies, production will continue there for a period of years after other areas emerge with lower production costs
• DeIndustrialization: A rapid fall in manufacturing employment and the abandonment of factories in a once-important industrial region
• Producer Services: Service industries that are involved in the output, including market research, advertising, accountancy, legal, banking, and insurance industries
• Productivity: The measure of the amount of product generated or work completed per hour of labor
• Concentration: Agricultural production carried out on fewer and larger farms and limited to smaller areas of higher productivity
• Intensification: In agriculture, the increased output of crops or livestock per area unit of land
• Specialization: The concentration on fewer commercial products within a farming region
• Market Gardening (Truck farming): The commercial production of high cash value, especially fruit and vegetable crops such as table grapes, raisins, oranges, grapefruit, apples, and lettuce
• Agribusiness: The large-scale commercialization of agriculture that places farming within the broader context of inputs of seeds, fertilizer, machinery, and so on, and of outputs of processing, marketing, and distribution
• Extensification: In agriculture, the production of fewer livestock or crops from the same area
• Benelux: An acronym for Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The term was coined in recognition of the close working relationship these countries have with one another
• European Union (EU): Name adopted by the European Community in 1993, suggesting both an expansion to other European countries following the end of the Cold war and the possibility of a future closer political federation
• Supranantionalism: The idea that differing nations can cooperate so closely for their mutual benefit that they can share the same government, economy (including currency), social policies, and even military
• Devolution: The process by which local peoples desire less rule by their national governments and seek greater authority in governing themselves
• Separatism: The desire by an ethnic group for independence, as in the case of the Basque group on the French-Spanish border