A Quiz on the Entire Course

Questions

  1. Name fifteen California counties
  2. Find these states on a map of the US: Texas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Utah
  3. Find these countries on map of the world: Brazil, Iraq, Afghanistan, Austria, Congo, Viet Nam
  4. How many time zones are there?
  5. How many congressional districts are there in the US? How do they get their shape? What is the average population density of a congressional district?
  6. On what continent would you find longitude 0, latitude 0?
  7. Name someone who lives at latitude 180
  8. What is the difference between a coordinate reference system and a projection?
  9. Identify the projections in the maps below:
  10. What do contour lines represent on a topographical map?
  11. What are TIGER files and what does the acronym stand for?
  12. About how many census tracts are there in Oakland?
  13. Describe five levels of census geography starting with states.
  14. Explain the difference between vector and raster data and give an example of each.
  15. What is a cadastral map?
  16. What are "metes and bounds"?
  17. What are the elements of visual vocabulary that can be used in making maps?
  18. Match this map to the histogram that represents the same data.
  19. Consider the following data distribution. Show what cutpoints we would use if we were dividing the range into 5 classes (a) by equal intervals, (b) by percentiles, (c) by natural breaks.
  20. Select the classification method that will make a US map of party vote percentages by county make the country look very polarized (i.e., that some counties are democrat and some republican). Select a method that would show that at the county level there variation but not radical polarization.
  21. What is apportionment and how is GIS used in connection with it?
  22. Explain and illustrate what we mean by "joining data to a map layer."
  23. In a database, what is the difference between a field and a record?
  24. If you were hiking, would you rather have a 1:24,000 map or a 1:3,000,000 map?
  25. If the US is about 2500 miles wide (that's 13,200,000 feet) and you want to draw a map on an 11" wide piece of paper, what will be the scale (using the simplest approximation you can).
  26. If we map census data on owner-occupied housing units in an urban area, why might 30% owner-occupied be a very high number?
  27. Explain the difference between an equal-area and conformal map projections.
  28. What coordinate system(s) is(are) used in California?
  29. What is the UTM coordinate system?
  30. What is metadata?
  31. What do the US Census race and ethnicity variables look like for the 2010 census?
  32. Why would a "shade by value" population map of the US be a misleading visualization?
  33. What does GPS stand for?
  34. How does a GPS unit work?
  35. What is XML? How is it related to GIS work?
  36. What kind of data file is used by Google Earth?
  37. Name and explain three different ways data can be geocoded.