Read the following passage carefully and answer questions:
The Greek scholar Eratosthenes, who lived in the third century B.C., was the first to use the word geography. But humans were investigating geographic questions long before this. The Greek geographers credit the beginning of geographical writings to Homer, but the earliest known map was made by the Sumerians in about 2700 B.C. The study of geography goes back to the beginnings of human scholarship. The first amazing period of intellectual ferment that is part of the written tradition of the Western world took place in ancient Greece, culminating in the fourth and third centuries B.C. The Greeks developed the procedures we describe as the scientific method. Plato, who developed the deductive procedures, is the most often quoted by those who prefer to give theory the position of chief importance. Aristotle. who developed the inductive procedures, preferred to formulate his concepts as generalizations of observed facts. Aristotle insisted on the importance of direct observation. instead of making logical deductions from theory. Among the ancient Greek Philosophers, two basic traditions of geographic study are to be found. One is the mathematical tradition. starting with Thales, including Hipparchus known for locating things and summarized by Ptolemy. The second is the literary tradition, starting with Homer, including Hecataeus and summarized by Strabo. A long period of decline set in during the Middle Ages, when geographic horizons contracted and observations piled up in Christian monasteries. Then the Age of Exploration began in the late 15th century, and the geographic horizons were again pushed back. The arrival of all these new innovations and observations in Europe was enormously stimulating and started a sequence of events that continues to the present. In the first place, the concepts derived from a literal reading of the scriptures were challenged, and the battle to establish the principles of what we call academic freedom began. This is the right of professionally qualified scholars to seek answers to questions, to publish their findings, and to teach what they believe to be the truth. free from any controls except the standards of scholarly procedure established within their own professions.