Cindy Macut, age 10, of Temperance, Michigan, for her question:

What exactly is the meaning of the word "geography?"

As a rule, we can give a word several slightly different meanings and use it lots of different ways. To solve the tangle, we trace it down to its very roots the original root meanings that we find in a good dictionary. Then we discover that our word descended from an ancestor or maybe two or more ancestors. Its basic meaning is rooted in those ancestor words and all the other meanings we give to it are its natural cousins. They also resemble the meaning of the same original ancestor words.

The ancestors of many of our words date back to older languages. A lot of them have been handed down from older forms of English and French, Spanish and Norse. Most of our science words were borrowed or put together from Latin and Greek. The clues we want are in the meanings of those older words. Geography is a science word created from two Greek words. "Geo" was taken from a word for the earth. It was added to another word that meant "writing" or "diagram". The result was "geography", the science subject that shows us maps or picture diagrams of the ups and downs on the face of the earth.