Geography and Numeracy Debra Donnelly and Margaret Martin At first glance, Geography may seem a simple study concentrating on locating places and determining how near or far they are from each other. Indeed, the origin of the term supports this idea. The term ‘Geography’ combines two Greek words, ‘geo’ meaning Earth and graphia ‘meaning to draw or describe the earth’. (Gilbert & Hoepper, 2014) However, the contemporary discipline of Geography has a much more ambitious agenda. Modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks to understand the world and all of its human and natural complexities. It is now defined as the investigation and understanding of the earth and its features and distribution of life on earth. It is the study of the earth and its features, inhabitants and phenomena. Geography answers questions about why places have their par- ticular environmental factors and/or human characteristics, looks to explain how and why these have changed and developed over time. These issues are investigated at all levels from local to global with an eye to management and sustainability (Taylor, Fahey, Kriewaldt, & Boon, 2012). Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main subfields: human geography and physical geography. The former focuses largely on the built envi- ronment and how space is created, viewed and managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy. The latter examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation, soil, water and landforms are pro- duced and interact. As a result of the two subfields using different approaches, a third field has emerged, which is environmental geography. Environmental geog- raphy combines physical and human geography and looks at the interactions between the environment and humans. D. Donnelly (&) Á M. Martin University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia e-mail: Debra.Donnelly@newcastle.edu.au M. Martin e-mail: Margaret.Martin@newcastle.edu.au © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 M. Sellars (ed.), Numeracy in Authentic Contexts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5736-6_10 197