AP teachers are constantly wrestling with ethnocentric books that focus on the details of the suburbanization, inner city change, or folk and country-western music in the United States. It is useful for North American students see textbooks and maps in other languages or from other countries and make use of the World Wide Web to take them outside the bounds of their textbook. The geographic concepts emphasized in the AP syllabus are space, place, scale, pattern, and regionalization. In addition to these terms the course is focused on spatial interaction and spatial behavior, so all the fundamental themes that have been described elsewhere are embedded deeply in this course. The only real difference in these sets of terms that are used in this course is the elevation of the concept of scale to one of the key concepts.
Scale means the level of generalization.
It is used in both geography and in vernacular speech. Complex systems can be examined from several scales, or levels of detail or generalization. The important thing about scale is the different levels of information are conveyed in different scales. Depending on the scale of one s questioning, the conclusions one reaches may vary. An example of that is viewing something on the global scale such as the migration of humans through time, versus the expansion and suburbanization of an individual city or movement of people within the neighborhood structure of that city.