Wherever one lives, that place is important to them personally. But until an event calls other peoples' attention to it, most places are only known to those who live there, or live nearby. Some places, e.g., New York City, London, Paris, Moscow, Washington, Tokyo, or even Hollywood, generate so much news that most people probably are at least aware of them. In turn other equally large places, e.g., New Delhi, Madrid, Capetown, Brasilia, Mexico City, Cairo or Lagos are not nearly as well known. Human nature is such that those places that generate the majority of the news, tend to receive and hold our attention. An interesting activity to help students begin to realize how public attention often becomes focused almost exclusively on those places generating "news," is to have them do the following First have individuals or teams collect a variety of popular weekly news magazines, e.g., Time, Newsweek, US News; examples of the weekly or daily editions of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or other "national" edition newspapers. Have students go through the collection and tally all of the mentions they find of geographic places. (Your may have to predetermine and agree on whether or not terms, e.g., the Capitol, the Kremlin, Parliament, the Diet, the White House or other descriptions qualify.) Next, have them develop maps – proportional to the number of times places were mentioned – and display them for their classmates. Or have them develop a large wall map of their collective findings. Obviously, depending on the dates of the materials they have collected, their results will vary. But if they have selected, e.g., one issue of Time each month for an entire year, the findings will reflect quite accurately those places that consistently generate the bulk of the world or this nation's news. By extending this activity over an entire school year students can develop a real "feel" or understanding of which specific places generate happenings or events that, in turn, may influence their own lives. Having students further research how or why this might be the case, provides many interesting possibilities. What major languages are spoken in each of these places? What religions are dominant there? What would be helpful to know about each of them if, in turn, students were ever to visit or work there?