Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Geography is one of humanity's big ideas. It literally means something like ‘writing the world'. Thus, traditionally, geography is associated with rich descriptions of places. For many years geographers were almost synonymous with explorers, bringing back data of all kinds which could be added to the evolving maps and the world. To this day, atlases and globes are a source of endless fascination; the names, the shapes, the distributions, the relationships ...and these days brought to life through Google Earth and such like.

As with all subject disciplines, classifying these data about the world is vital. Hand-in-hand with this is the development of organising ideas, which helps us make sense of the world and all its diversity. In this way, concepts such as place, region, location and interdependence have been developed which enable us the think geographically. For example, ‘tropical rainforest' has particular characteristics and is found in certain regions around the world. Coniferous forest has different characteristics and distributions. There are reasons for this. And equally interesting and significant are the ways human beings use and sometimes abuse these particular environments.