Public Domain

Because of the wide exposure to various types of media that we experience in our modern world, you probably already have a basic perception of what many parts of the world are like. Let's test your knowledge of the world. In the activity below, you will see a series of pictures. Look closely at the pictures and then answer the questions that follow.

The images presented in this flash activity are in the public domain, or are distributed under the described here. GNU licensing or Creative Commons licensing terms. For information about each image included in this activiy, please click here.

The presentation that you just viewed contains some examples of perceptual regions. When viewing the pictures of Africa, you probably had a good idea of what part of the world you were looking at. Even so, a closer study of Africa would show you that some of the pictures do not apply to all of Africa. The picture of the Sahara Desert is only one of the different types of climates that exist in Africa. There are many countries in Africa and each of the countries is distinctive. There are also many different languages; in fact, it is estimated that there are between 2000 to 3000 languages spoken in Africa with over 8000 different dialects! The perception of Africa as a region by someone in the US is probably not the same viewpoint that a person living in Africa would have.

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