AP Human Geography Ethnicity Review Questions

1. What is ethnicity?
2. Why is ethnicity important in the face of globalization?
3. Name the four most numerous ethnicities in the US?
4. What are the three major Hispanic origins in the US?
5. Name 3 states that are a part of where more than half of all Hispanics in the US?
6. Name one of two states where the highest concentrations of Asians are located?
7. What ethnic group has similar distribution to African-Americans?
8. In the early 20th century what did Midwestern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit attract and why?
9. For descendants of European immigrants, how is ethnic identity more likely to be retained?
10. What is a visible remnant of early 20th century ethnic neighborhoods?
11. Describe racial tensions in LA in 1992.
12. What is the clustering of ethnicities within the US a function of?
13. What are the 3 major migration flows that have shaped the African-American distribution within the US?
14. Who was responsible for diffusing slavery to the Western Hemisphere?
15. Where did most of the slaves get imported to in the western hemisphere?
16. What is race?
17. Distinguish between race and ethnicity for Hispanics.
18. What are traits that characterize race?
19. What is racism?
20. Why is ethnicity important to geographers?
21. What is a distinctive feature of race relations in the US?
22. What is apartheid?
23. What is nationality? Where does it derive from?
24. How does nationality tie a group of people?
25. Where do the cultural values shared w/ other of the same ethnicity come from ?
26. Where do the cultural values shared w/ others of the same nationality come from?
27. Describe nationality, race, and ethnicity in the United States.
28. Give an example of distinct ethnicity in Canada.

29. How do 19th century immigrants identify themselves today?

30. Why have ethnic groups transformed into nationalities?
31. What is self-determination?
32. What is a nation-state?
33. What was most of Western Europe made of around 1900? Nations, states, or nation-states?
34. What is nationalism? What does it typically promote?
35. How do people display nationalism?
36. How can nationalism have a negative impact?
37. How did colonial boundaries affect ethnicities?
38. What did Britain do with South Asia?
39. What cultural trait has become a great source of national unity in India?
40. Describe the conflicts between Muslims and Hindus in India.
41. Describe the conflict over Kashmir
42. What are Sikhs?
43. Why is conflict widespread in Africa today?
44. How many ethnicities does Africa contain?
45. Why is it difficult to determine the precise # of tribes in Africa?
46. What was the traditional unit of division of African society before Europeans came in?
47. What happened when the colonies became independent states?
48. What is a multi-ethnic state? What is an example?
49. What is a multinational state? What is an example?
50. Between what groups have there been conflicts in Sudan?
51. What happened to Jerusalem in 1948?
52. What is special about Israel?
53. What is ethnic cleansing?
54. Why is ethnic cleansing undertaken?
55. What is a recent example of ethnic cleansing?
56. What is balkanized?
57. What is balkanization?

AP Human Geography Ethnicity Answers

1. Ethnicity is identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth.
2. It stands as our strongest bulwark for the preservation of local diversity. Even if globalization takes away language,
religion, and other cultural elements, the diversity of ethnic identity will remain.
3. African-Americans-12%; Hispanics-9%, Asians-3%, American Indian-1%
4. Mexico (Chicano-as)-64%; Puerto Rico- 11%; Cuba-4%
5. AZ, CA, NM, TX; these four states plus FL and NY
6. Hawaii where they comprise 62% of the population; California w/ 9.6% is home to 1/3 of all Asians
7. Hispanics
8. They attracted ethnic groups primarily from S and E Europe to work in the rapidly growing steel, automotive, and
related industries.
9. Through religion, food, and other cultural traditions, rather than through location of residence.
10. Clustering of restaurants in areas such as Little Italy and Greektown.
11. White police officers were acquitted despite videotape evidence, of beating an African-American Rodney King. In the
south side of neighborhoods, unrest broke out. Many of the stores that were looted or burned by African-Americans
were owned by Asian-Americans.
12. Migration
13. Immigration from Africa to the American colonies in the 18 th century; immigration from the US South to northern cities
during the first of the 20th century; immigration from inner-city ghettos to other urban neighborhoods in the 2 nd half of
the 20th century
14. Europeans
15. Caribbean islands; Brazil
16. An identity with a group of people who share a biological ancestor it comes from a middle-French word for
generation
17. Hispanic or Latino is not considered a race, son on the census form members of the Hispanic or Latino ethnicity select
any race they wish-white, black, or other
18. Those that can be transmitted genetically from parents to children
19. The belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an
inherent superiority of a particular race; a person who subscribes to the beliefs of racism

20. Because its characteristics derive from the distinctive features of particular places on Earth
21. The strong discouragement of spatial interaction of races-in the past through legal means, today through cultural
preferences or discrimination
22. The physical separation of different races into different geographic areas
23. Identity with a group of people tied together to a particular place through legal status and cultural tradition; the Latin
word nasci which means to have been born
24. Through legal status and cultural tradition; nationality and ethnicity both defined through shared cultural values
25. Religion, language, and material culture
26. Voting, obtaining a passport, and performing civic duties
27. Nationality is generally kept reasonably distinct from ethnicity and race in common usage. The American nationality
identifies citizens of the USA, including those born in the country and those who immigrated and became citizens.
Ethnicity identifies groups w/ distinct ancestry and cultural traditions, such as Hispanic-Americans, African-Americans,
Chinese-Americans, or Polish-Americans. Race distinguishes blacks and other persons of color from whites. Every
citizen is a member of the American nationality and is a member of a race but only some Americans identify with an
ethnicity. A person could be distinct from an American in all three ways.
28. The Quebecois in Canada are clearly distinct from other Canadians in language, religion, and other cultural traditions.
Whether the Quebecois form a distinct ethnicity is disputed, because if they are a separate nationality, the Quebec
government has a stronger argument to separate from Canada.
29. By ethnicity rather than by nationality
30. Ethnic groups have been transformed into nationalities because desire for self-rule is a very important shared attitude for
many ethnicities. To preserve and enhance distinctive cultural characteristics, ethnicities seek to govern themselves
without interference
31. Concept that ethnicities have the right to govern themselves
32. A state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular ethnicity that has been transformed into a nationality
33. Most of Western Europe was made up of nation-states. They disagreed over their boundaries, and competed to control
territory in Africa and Asia. Eastern Europe included a mixture of empires and states that did not match the distribution
of ethnicities. Following their defeat in WWI, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were dismantled, and many
European boundaries were redrawn according to the principle of nation-states.
34. Loyalty and devotion to a particular nationality; a sense of national consciousness that exalts one nation above all others
and emphasizes its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations

35. By supporting a state that preserves and enhances the culture and attitudes of their nationality, By promoting symbols of
the nation-state such as flags and songs; Ex: hammer and sickle burning flag a symbol of protest; nationalism also
instilled through a national anthem
36. The sense of unity within a nation-state is sometimes achieved through the creation of negative images of other nationstates; Ex: Travelers in SE Europe during the 70s and 80s found that jokes directed by one nationality against another
recurred in the same form throughout the region, with only the target name changed
37. Boundaries of newly independent countries were often drawn to separate two ethnicities. However, boundary lines
rarely can segregate two ethnicities completely. Members of an ethnicity caught on the wrong side of a boundary may
be forced to migrate to the other side
38. When the British ended their colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, they divided the colony into 2 irregularly
shaped countries, India and Pakistan. Pakistan comprised two noncontiguous areas, West Pakistan and East Pakistan1600 km apart separated by India. East Pakistan became Bangladesh. An eastern region of India was also practically
cut off from the rest of the country, attached only by a narrow corridor north of Bangladesh that is less than 13 km wide
in some places
39. Hinduism has become a great source of national unity in India. In modern India, with its hundreds of languages and
ethnic groups, Hinduism has become the cultural trait shared by the largest percentage of the population.
40. After the British took over India in the early 1800s, a 3-way struggle began, with the Hindus and Muslims fighting each
other as well the British rulers. Muslims believed that the British discriminated more against them than against the
Hindus. When the British granted independence to the region following WWII, Hindus and Muslims fought over the
organization of the newly independent region. Gandhi, the leading Hindu advocate of nonviolence and reconciliation w/
Muslims, was assassinated in 1948, ending the possibility of creating a single state in which Muslims and Hindus lived
together peacefully.
41. Pakistan and India never agreed on the location of the boundary separating the 2 countries in the northern region of
Kashmir. The original partition gave India 2/3 of Kashmir, even though a majority of its ppl were Muslims. In recent t
years, Muslims on the Indian side of Kashmir have begun a guerrilla war to secure independence. India blames Pakistan
for the unrest and vows to retain its portion of Kashmir; Pakistan argues that Kashmiris on both sides of the border
should choose their own future in a vote, confident that the majority Muslim population would break away from India.
42. Religion combines elements of Islam and Hinduism; resents that they were not given their own independent country
when India was partitioned; comprise a majority in the Indian state of Punjab even though they are only 2% of entire
pop.; Sikh extremists have fought for more control over the Punjab or even complete independence from India

43. Because the present-day boundaries of states were drawn by European colonial powers about a 100 years ago w/o regard
for the traditional distribution of ethnicities
44. Several thousand with a common sense of language, religion, social customs Some tribes are divided among more than
on modern state, while others have been grouped w/ dissimilar tribes
45. It is difficult to determine the precise # of tribes, because boundaries separating them are not usually defined clearly.
Further, it is hard to determine whether a particular group forms a distinct tribe or is a part of a larger collection of very
similar groups
46. The tribe rather than independent states w/ political and economic self-determination
47. The boundaries of the new states typically matched the colonial administrative units imposed by the Europeans, and
most African states contained large #s of ethnicities
48. State that contains more than one ethnicity; Belgium with Dutch-speaking Flemish and the French-Speaking Walloons
49. State that contains two or more ethnic groups w/ traditions of self-determination that agree to coexist peacefully by
recognizing each other as distinct nationalities; UK
50. The black Christian and animist rebels in the southern provinces vs. the Arab-Muslim dominated government forces in
the north; the black southerners have been resisting govt attempts to convert the country from a multi-ethnic society to
one nationality tied to Muslim traditions
51. Gained independence from UN
52. The worlds only country w/ a Jewish majority, and the Israeli nationality is the only one that combines loyalty to a state
w/ Jewish religious traditions
53. A process in which amore powerful ethnic group forcibly removes a less powerful one in order to create an ethnically
homogeneous region
54. Not simply to defeat an enemy or to subjugate them; to rid an area of an entire ethnicity so that the surviving ethnic
group can be the sole inhabitants; involve removal of every member of the less powerful race
55. Practiced primarily by Bosnian Serbs against Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina
56. A small geographic area that could not successfully be organized into one or more stable states because it was inhabited
by man ethnicities w/ complex, long-standing antagonisms toward each other
57. Process by which a state breaks down through conflicts among ethnicities