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CSS Geography Culture and Development Flashcards
50 question-and-answer cards covering Culture and Development as it is examined in CSS Geography. 24 of them are printed below, taken from across the deck — no signup, no paywall on the preview.
24 sample cards from the Culture and Development deck
Sampled from the end of the deck, so these are different cards from the ones shown on the syllabus page.
What are the two main competing hypotheses for the Indo-European homeland?
1) The Kurgan/Steppe hypothesis (Marija Gimbutas) — origin among horse-riding pastoralists on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, spread by migration; 2) The Anatolian hypothesis (Colin Renfrew) — origin in Anatolia (modern Turkey), spread with the diffusion of agriculture.
Name the major branches of the Indo-European family.
Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan + Iranian), Romance/Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Hellenic (Greek), Albanian, Armenian, and the extinct Anatolian and Tocharian branches.
To which Indo-European branch does English belong, and what are its sister languages?
The Germanic branch — sister languages include German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish), Frisian, and Afrikaans.
Which languages make up the Romance branch of Indo-European?
Languages descended from Latin: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan.
To which Indo-European sub-branch do Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Persian belong?
The Indo-Iranian branch — Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Punjabi are Indo-Aryan; Persian (Farsi), Pashto, and Kurdish are Iranian.
Distinguish a universalizing religion from an ethnic religion.
A universalizing religion seeks to appeal to all people everywhere and actively seeks converts (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). An ethnic religion appeals primarily to one group in a particular place and generally does not seek converts (e.g. Hinduism, Judaism).
List the three major universalizing religions in order of number of adherents.
Christianity (largest, ~2.4 billion), Islam (~1.9 billion), and Buddhism (~500 million).
Where did each of the three universalizing religions originate (hearth)?
Christianity and Judaism in the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant/Palestine); Islam in the Arabian Peninsula (Mecca and Medina); Buddhism in northeastern India (near the India-Nepal border).
How did Christianity and Islam primarily diffuse?
Christianity spread through relocation diffusion (missionaries) and hierarchical diffusion (e.g. adoption by the Roman Empire under Constantine), plus colonialism. Islam diffused through military conquest, trade, and missionary activity outward from Arabia.
What are the two largest branches of Islam and their approximate proportions?
Sunni (about 85-90% of Muslims) and Shia (about 10-15%). Sunnis form the majority in most Muslim countries; Shias predominate in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain.
What are the three major branches of Christianity?
Roman Catholicism (largest), Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Which is the world's largest ethnic (non-universalizing) religion, and where is it concentrated?
Hinduism (about 1.2 billion adherents), overwhelmingly concentrated in India and Nepal.
Identify the dominant religion of each region: Latin America, the Middle East/North Africa, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
Latin America: Roman Catholic Christianity. Middle East/North Africa: Islam. South Asia: Hinduism/Islam (Buddhism in Sri Lanka/Myanmar). East Asia: a blend of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, and large non-religious populations.
Which country has the largest Muslim population in the world?
Indonesia.
Distinguish ethnicity from nationality.
Ethnicity is identity based on shared cultural traits — ancestry, language, religion, customs — tied to a place of origin. Nationality is identity tied to a particular country/state through citizenship or affiliation. (Race, by contrast, refers to perceived biological/physical traits.)
What is a nation, a state, and a nation-state?
A nation is a group of people with a shared cultural identity who feel they belong together. A state is a politically organized territory with sovereignty (a country). A nation-state is a state whose territory corresponds to a single nation/ethnic group (e.g. Japan, Iceland).
What is a multinational/multiethnic state? Give an example.
A state that contains more than one nation or ethnic group within its borders. Examples: the former USSR, India, Nigeria, the United Kingdom (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish).
What is a stateless nation? Give an example.
An ethnic group or nation that has no state of its own, often spread across several countries. Examples: the Kurds (across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria) and the Palestinians.
Define ethnic cleansing.
The forced removal, expulsion, or extermination of an ethnic or religious group from a territory by a more powerful group, in order to create an ethnically homogeneous (uniform) region.
How does ethnic cleansing differ from genocide?
Genocide is the deliberate, systematic killing of a group with intent to destroy it in whole or part. Ethnic cleansing aims primarily to remove a group from a territory (by expulsion, terror, or killing); the two overlap but ethnic cleansing's core goal is territorial homogeneity rather than total extermination.
Name two widely cited cases of ethnic cleansing/genocide in the 1990s.
1) The Balkans/former Yugoslavia — Bosnian Serbs against Bosniaks (Muslims), including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre; 2) Rwanda (1994) — the genocide of the Tutsi minority by Hutu extremists.
What underlying factors commonly drive ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing?
Competition over territory and resources, religious/linguistic differences, historical grievances and nationalism, weak or partisan state institutions, political manipulation of identity by elites, and economic inequality between groups.
What is balkanization?
The process by which a state or region fragments into smaller, often hostile, ethnically based units — named after the repeated breakup of states in the Balkan Peninsula.
What are the most common economic indicators used to measure a country's level of development?
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and GDP per capita, Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, the Human Development Index (HDI), and structural measures like the share of employment in primary/secondary/tertiary sectors. GDP per capita = total GDP ÷ total population.
What this deck covers
The Culture and Development deck follows the CSS Geography Culture and Development syllabus — 4 chapters and 15 topics — so questions land on material that is genuinely examinable rather than trivia around it. That works out to roughly 12.5 cards per chapter.
Answers are written to be recallable, not just readable — averaging about 184 characters, which is long enough to carry the reasoning and short enough to say out loud.
A deck like this earns its keep on the second and third pass. Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then use the cards to find the specific facts that have not stuck.
Culture and Development flashcards FAQ
How many Culture and Development flashcards are in this CSS Geography deck?
50 cards. This page previews 24 of them, sampled evenly across the deck so you can judge the difficulty before installing anything.
Are these CSS Geography flashcards free?
Yes. The preview here is free to read with no signup, and the full 50-card deck is free inside the Examius app.
What do the Culture and Development cards cover?
They follow the CSS Geography Culture and Development syllabus — 4 chapters and 15 topics — so the questions track what is actually examinable.
How should I use these flashcards?
Read the syllabus first so you know the shape of the subject, then drill the deck. Examius schedules each card with spaced repetition, so cards you keep missing come back sooner and ones you know drift further apart.