Short answers, pulled from the story.
Geography is the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of planet Earth. It seeks an understanding of Earth's human and natural complexities, not merely where objects are but how they changed and came to be. It has been called a bridge between natural science and social science disciplines.
The word geography comes from Ancient Greek, combining gê for Earth and gráphō for write, meaning Earth writing. Eratosthenes of Cyrene may have coined the term geographia around 276 BC, and the first recorded use of the word appeared as the title of a book by Claudius Ptolemy, who lived from 100 to 170 AD.
The main branches of geography are physical geography, human geography, and technical geography. Physical geography focuses on the natural environment, human geography on how humans interact with the Earth, and technical geography on developing the tools used to understand geography.
The core concepts of geography that stay consistent across all approaches are space, place, time, and scale. Space is the most fundamental, since anything within geography must be describable spatially, while scale is the ratio between a distance on a map and the matching distance on the ground.
Tobler's first law of geography states that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant. Waldo Tobler proposed it in 1970, and it is the most generally accepted law in the discipline.
Richard Hartshorne and Joseph Kerski have regarded Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter as the founders of modern geography. Both men were the first to establish geography as an independent scientific discipline, during the period when it became recognized as a distinct academic field in the 18th and 19th centuries.