Our World

Summary of Class 10/9/06

Overall today we mostly took lots and lots of notes about Latin America. First, thought, we did work on Latin America Politcal Maps which were quite easy if you ask me. Then after of course came the overabundant amount of notes and listening to Mrs. Hartman lecture about it. I must admit though, some of the things we learned today I found quite interesting. For example I thought the landscape of Latin America was pretty cool. I never knew that the Andes Mountains were as young as they are, guess I never just thought about it. Also, I thought it was funny when we were discussing how the Amazon Basin is the largest river system in the world by volume we somehow got onto the topic/debate of if the Mississippi is actually the longest river in the US or if it is actually the Missouri. Who knows? I guess when they finally get figure out the exact length of them both then we will.
Anyway... back to class. We also learned what Neotropics were; broke down the word into two parts: neo and tropics. Well neo means new (which again we got off track and started discussing Neo in the movie "The Matrix"). I just really remember this part because it was our trivia of the day and I found the answer and actually was chosen out of the box so yay for me! Anyway, Neotropics is the tropical ecosystems in the Wester Hemisphere, which makes total sense with the name. Not only did we learn about the landscape and population of Latin America, but we also talked about the deforestization of the rainforests. In my interest of why these rainforests are being destroyed I asked the dumb question, "do these people who are cutting them down realize that it is bad?". Well I had a lot of responses, "yes, but it's the only way they can survive", "no I don't believe they do know" (Mrs. Hartman), I forgot what else she said backing up her theory, but you get the idea. Obviously the deforestization of the rainforests is a very horrible thing and some of the concerns would be the loss of biological diversity.
Well all in all, today we learned about Latin America; the political and physical areas of it. I hope you all enjoyed and remembered a little something extra from today by reading this blog.

posted by Anonymous @ 10/09/2006 07:25:00 PM