How to capture a region of the screen?

The Take Screenshot program under “Application–>Accessories–>Take Screenshot” offers only the basic screen capture capability such as capturing the whole desktop and the whole window. What if you want to capture a region of the screen? One possible solution would be to capture the whole window and then use an image editor to crop out the region. However, that’s really time consuming. There’s a function inside GIMP which allows you to acquire region of the screen. Start GIMP, then click on File-Acquire-Screenshot, from there you can specify to capture a region of the screen.