Second half of Thursday. This is a study session, not new material: we work through questions in the same style as the textbook quizzes, and the answers are in these speaker notes. Put a question up, let the room answer, then reveal. Do not rush; the discussion after a wrong answer is where the learning happens.

Ask for a show of hands at the end on which sections felt worst; that tells you what to send out as follow-up.

Be explicit about the AI rule: no chatbot, no assistant, no phone. Also remind them of the Testing Center's closing time on the last day of the exam window; that catches somebody every semester.

Exam 2 is cumulative. Students who only review the new chapters get burned on the data model and cartography questions, which are the easy points.

Answer: D. Collection, storage, maintenance, analysis, output and distribution — the whole chain. If a piece of software only draws maps, it is a mapping program, not a GIS.

Answer: H, selling stocks and bonds. Every other option is about something with a location. Stocks and bonds are the one business activity in the list with no geography in it.

Answers: 3 True, 4 True. Buying the software is the easy part; the hard parts are the needs assessment, the data, the people and the procedures. And real GIS work loops — you rarely get to a decision on the first pass through the workflow.

Answer: B, GRASS. The textbook's list predates QGIS being the obvious answer — QGIS is also free and open source, and GRASS ships inside QGIS as a processing provider. If a question like this appears, look for the name that is not a commercial product.

Answer: B. Raster operations are simple cell-by-cell arithmetic, so they are fast; vector geometry follows the real boundary, so it is more faithful. The trade-off is the whole reason both data models still exist.

Answer: C. Rivers and a border are lines; store locations at global scale are points; runways drawn at airport scale have real width and area, so they are polygons. This is a question about scale: the same feature is a point at one scale and a polygon at another.

Answer: F, none of the above — every one of them is raster. Photos, scans, DEMs and rendered map tiles are all grids of cells. The trap is thinking a "map" must be vector.

Answers: 4 is A. Garden beds are discrete objects with crisp edges, so vector. Groundwater pressure and terrain vary continuously, so raster; a photo is already a raster. 5: each row holds the descriptive information for a single feature — one county polygon, one county row, with its own name and population.

Answers: 1 is D, all of the above. 2: contour maps — lines of equal value, used for elevation, temperature and rainfall. Do not confuse them with choropleth maps, which shade whole polygons by a value like population density.

Answers: 3 is D, B and C. Either zoom in to a larger scale, or go back and get better data; never publish something you know is too generalized for its purpose. 4: all map symbology is included — every symbol on the map appears in the legend.

Answer: D. Metadata is data about the data: what is in it, where it came from, when it was collected, what projection it is in, how accurate it is, who to contact, and what you are allowed to do with it. If you cannot answer "what projection is this layer in" without opening it, you needed metadata.

Answers: 1 is D — anything you can display underneath the canvas can be traced. 2: a starting node, vertices in between, and an ending node. "A beginning, a middle and an end" is the joke answer.

Answers: 3 is A — a spline fits a smooth curve through your digitized vertices instead of joining them with straight segments. 4: both line thinning and reducing the width of lines or points to a single pixel — it is how a scanned, raster line gets turned into a one-cell-wide line ready for vectorizing.

Answer: C. Rubbersheeting stretches a layer non-uniformly so that known control points line up with their true positions — exactly what an old, distorted map needs before it can sit on a modern basemap.

Answers: 1 is A — the space segment, the ground control segment, and the user segment. 2: a receiver at a known location can estimate the timing and range errors in the signal right now, and that correction is applied to your rover.

Answers: 3 is B. Survey-grade equipment with corrections gets centimeters; a phone under tree cover or between tall buildings can be off by a hundred meters or more. 4 is False — RMSE is an error measure, so lower is better.

Answers: 1 is B — a passive sensor collects energy that came from somewhere else, usually the sun. An active sensor, like radar or LiDAR, sends out its own pulse. 2: the science of measuring geometry from images.

Answers: 3 is B, C and D. Satellites have very precise pointing, their imagery often needs specialist processing, and their high altitude and near-vertical view reduce terrain distortion compared with an aircraft. They are not cheaper for a small area — that is when you hire a plane or fly a drone. 4 is False: LiDAR emits its own laser pulse, so it is active.

Answers: 1 is A — the measurement of the earth's shape, size and gravity field. 2: that the sun and stars provide a stable reference frame. Every classical measurement of the earth is really an angle measured against something in the sky.

Answers: 3 is B, the ellipsoid — the key word is *mathematical*. The geoid is closer to the real earth but it is measured, not defined by an equation, so 4 is False. Order to remember: terrain (real, bumpy) → geoid (gravity, measured) → ellipsoid (smooth, mathematical) → sphere (simple). Question 4 in the geoid set also asks what shapes the "imaginary sea": the answer is the earth's gravity.

Answers: 1 is A — a datum ties an ellipsoid to the actual earth, so coordinates mean something. NAD83 and WGS84 are datums; UTM is a projected coordinate system built on one. 2: because it registers the layers to a map coordinate system, that is, puts them in the same frame so they line up.

Answer: B. Distortion in this projection depends only on distance from the standard circle, so any two places on the same ring have the same scale error, however far apart they are. Southeastern Florida and northeastern Washington sit on the same ring. A straight line between Utah and Kentucky crosses several rings, and so does Texas from north to south. This is textbook figure 3-33.

Answer: C. The cylinder is turned on its side and touches the globe along a central meridian, so distortion is smallest there and grows toward the edges of the zone. That is exactly why the zones are only six degrees wide, and why Utah is split across zones 12 and 11.

Answer: A, Lambert Conformal Conic. Tennessee is wide east-to-west and narrow north-to-south, so a conic with two standard parallels running along its length fits it well; a UTM zone is tall and narrow and would need several zones to cover the state. The rule of thumb: east-west states get Lambert Conformal Conic, north-south states get transverse Mercator. This is textbook figure 3-40, the State Plane zones.

Answers: 1 is B. A uniform global source does not add datasets or fix your units for you; what it buys you is that you are not stitching together data collected by a hundred different agencies to different standards. 2: swimming pools. The NHD holds rivers, streams, lakes, wells and pipelines — the nation's surface water network.

Answers: 3 is A — the minimum mapping unit is a decision made before collection about how small a feature is worth recording, not a property of the imagery. 4: to set flood insurance rates. That is what FEMA's flood insurance rate maps are for.

Answers: 5 is True — TIGER is the Census Bureau's geographic database of roads, boundaries and address ranges, and it is a free download. 6: a rendered map image. A WMS serves pictures; a WFS serves the features themselves, so you can query and edit them; an XYZ tile service serves pre-rendered image tiles. If you can open the attribute table, you have vector features, not a picture. Question 6 was written for this review, not taken from the textbook quizzes.

Answers: 1 True; 2 False. The order matters. Each operation consumes the layer the one before it produced, so changing the order changes what the later operations are even looking at. This is textbook figure 9-1, and it is the same point we made this morning with the cookie cutter.

Answers: 3 True. 4 is a local operation: the output for each county depends only on that county's own value. 5 is a global operation: to know which county is the wealthiest you have to look at every county in the dataset. A neighborhood operation sits in between — a moving window, or "each county and the ones touching it".

Answers: 1 True — a raster buffer is a distance calculation over cells; a vector buffer builds a new polygon. 2 is C, nested: rings at 1, 2 and 5 miles, each one inside the next.

Answers: 3 True. 4 False — this is the one people miss. Points almost never fall exactly on a line, because a coordinate has to match to full precision; in practice you snap points to lines or buffer the line first, which is why point-on-line overlay is uncommon. 5: point-on-polygon overlay, the most common overlay of all — "which district is this address in?"

Answer: B. "At least 2 miles away from" is always a buffer followed by a difference: build the exclusion zone, then cut it out of your candidate area. "Within 2 miles of" is the opposite — buffer, then intersect or clip. These two site-selection questions were written for this review; the exam's site-selection questions come from the geoprocessing chapter and from Lab 11.

Answer: B. Each intermediate layer is one criterion applied. If your final answer looks wrong, the intermediates tell you which step broke it — and in the final project they are a graded part of the report.

Encourage them to study in pairs and quiz each other out loud; it exposes the topics they only recognize rather than know.

Fill in the exam window dates before class.

Conversion notes (2026-09-02): source "15 - Concepts Review.pptx" (2018, 33 slides), which is entirely screenshots of textbook quiz questions with a blue arrow marking each answer. Every question was transcribed to text and rebuilt as a quiz slide with the answer in the speaker notes, so none of the original screenshots are used as images; only three figures were carried over (the projection distortion diagram, the State Plane zone map, and the chapter 9 workflow chain). Dropped: the two Surveying sections, source slides 18-21 (surveying intro and surveying traverses, 10 questions on chains, bearings, azimuth formulas and traverse closure) because surveying is not in this course's Exam 2 scope; the azimuth-measurement question from the GPS section for the same reason; and the "Landsat satellites previous to Landsat-8 carried how many primary imaging scanners" trivia question. Added, not from the source: one web-services question (WMS vs WFS) and two site-selection questions, both flagged as instructor-written in their speaker notes, because those topics are in the Exam 2 scope but were not in the 2018 deck. The free/open-source-software question keeps the textbook's answer (GRASS) with a note that QGIS is also free and open source. No ArcGIS screenshots in this deck. Presenter titles updated from "Dr. Dan Ames and Dr. Jim Nelson" to the current instructors.