Class Precipitation Grade

One of the last grades to go into the grade book is our class precipitation grade. I think I should get an 85. I don't always raise my hand and give answers, but I am always paying attention. I always try and take the best notes that I can so, that my blogs are good. I try to make my blogs have all the information that we learned in class that day so that if I need to study  from them or use them for the test I can.

Finished the Movie

Today we finished watching Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond concluded by telling us that every type of race has the same intelligence but different  cultures. Diamond says the main reason that some people have more then others is geographical luck. New Guinea also has a few cities that use modern technology, but they are not as advanced as the cities that we have in the United States. New Guinea's currency is  the kina. They export oil, gold, copper ore, logs, palm, oil, coffee,cocoa, crayfish, and praws. They export a total of 6.6748 billion dollars a year. They import a total of 6.106 billion dollars a year. The products they import are machinery and transport equipment, manufactured goods, food, fuels  and chemicals. United States established diplomatic relations with  Papaua New Guinea in 1975. The terrain is mountains and high lands. One third of the population is living on less the $1.25 a day. The poverty rate is 37% under the poverty line.  The GDP growth is 8.9 and that's the 12th fastest growing in the world . Only 51% of the people that are fifteen years or older can read and write.  More males can read then females. New Guinea has a very diverse culture, and it speaks 841 different languages.  In New Guinea there are 125,000 people that have internet  in a country of over 6 million people. They spend 1.4% of their GDP on the military. They do not have a very high class military because no one wants to go into war with New Guinea.  They have 562 airports, but only 20 of them are paved. New Guinea's unemployment rate is 1.9%. Birth rate is  56 in the world.Poor countries usually have higher birth rates then developed successful countries because they have a great infant mortality rate, which means that they know that some of their children wont make it to adulthood.  Their GDP per capita is 2,500 and that is ranked 179 in the world.  3.39 is the total fertility rate. Net migration rate is 0, so their is the same amount of people leaving and going in. 27% are roman catholic and that is the official religion. 13% of the total population is Urban which means that they live in cities. Of the world wide population 50.5% are urban. September 16, 1975 is the date of their Independence.

Spreading of Farming

Today we watched more of Guns, Germs, and Steel. we started of by watching the part about how the climate of the middle east changed to dry and all the crops died. The people that lived started to leave and migrate to the west and east on the same latitude line. All of the places on the same latitude line have the same climate and amount of time during their days. When the people spread to Egypt a society exploded. The people their now had a surplus of food for the people to build pyramids. The same thing happened with the European countries. Their was enough food to feed the artist  and builders. The Europeans brought over cattle and grains to the United States. Their are now over 100 million cattle in the United States. Americans  now consume  over 20 millions tons of wheat a year, which is 40 billion pounds. That means that each person consumes about 133 pounds per year. Modern America would be unthinkable without the spreading of farming. New Guinea has not tried to get other animals and plants to grow because they don't want to, they don't have open farm land to house cattle, their crops can't grow in the climate, and their are lots of mountains which aren't good for some animals. New Guinea makes most of their money from Gold, Copper, and other precious medals.

Domesticated Animals

Today we watched more of the video about Jared Diamond and his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Today in the video we talked about domesticated animals and where they are from. New Guinea has pigs as their native animal. The pigs are only good for meat. They do not give any muscle power to the people, so all of the farm work is done by human hand. In India they use elephants for hard work. It is not a good animal for this because elephants do not reproduce fast and they eat a lot of food. It is very expensive for someone to raise and domesticate an elephant.Their are over 2 million species of animals in the world that could be domesticated. Good animals to domesticate are animals that reproduce in the first two years of their life, social animals, and animal that have a leader, so that once humans train the leader they have control over the whole group. Their are only fourteen animals that are wild, plant eating, and over one hundred pounds that have been domesticated successfully. Those animals are the goat, sheep, pig, cow, horse, donkey, bactrian camel, Arabian camel, water buffalo,llama, reindeer, yacs, mithan, and bali cattle. The llama is native to south america. All of the other 13 animals are native to Asia, North Africa,Europe, and the Middle East.

More of Guns, Germs, and Steel

Today we watched more of Guns, Germs, and Steel. We learned that all great civilizations have advanced technology, large populations, and well organized work forces. We also learned about the haves and have nots. The haves are things that you need in your society  to succeed. Have nots are things that you do not have that your society needs. Thirteen thousand years ago the middle east was less arid and people lived there as hunter and gathers. It is still possible to see how people lived back then in New Guinea . Hunting is unpredictable so gatherings is used most often. In New Guinea the woman gather the food. In New Guinea their main food source is the sago tree. They take of the bark to get the sago inside the tree. The sago is like a dough that they eat. Sago does not store well and is not healthy for you to eat. In the middle east they gathered cereal crops, such as wheat and barley. Wheat and barley were native to the middle east 13 thousand years ago. Drah is an argeologist site. Drah is one of the earliest permanent villages in the world. They had the first granary. A granary is where you store grain to protect it from the weather, insects, and keeps the moisture out. Domestication is when humans change the plant by growing it in a controlled area. China grew rice, Americas grew corn, squash, and beans, and Africa grew sorghun, millet, and yams. Animal domestication is when humans domesticate animals. New Guinea didn't prosper because they were harvesting sago and it was not good for them and it was hard to store. We learned that the main thing that helps a civilization is geographical luck.

Jared Diamond

Jared Mason Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts on September 10, 1937. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard in 1958. He also got a PhD on the physiology and biophysics of the gall bladder in 1961  from University of Cambridge. In 1968 he became a teacher on physiology at UCLA medical school and later on became  a teacher of geography at UCLA. He has learned many fields of knowledge including physiology, biophysics, ornithology, environmentalism, history, ecology, geography, evolutionary biology,  and anthropology. He has received many awards for his work including Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science in 1997,Royal Society Prize for Science Books in 1992, 1998, and in 2006, Pulitzer Prize in 1998, and National Medal of Science in 1999. He has written many books relating to science. Some of his famous ones are The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies was one of his most famous books. He published it in 1997. This book talks why some societies succeed and others fail. In this book he talks about how advanced a society is in technology can help it succeed or fail.  He also talks about how the location of the society can help it greatly in trying to succeed. The  book tries to address the questions, Why is it that white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? This question is talking about why some societies have more material things then other societies. This question is talked about throughout the story.

Exam Review

 We have our final exam on Monday.  Today we reviewed for it. Mr.Schick told us everything that we will need to know. He has a paper on his website that tells us how many questions and the topics of the questions. We will also have short answers on the exam. Mr. Schick gave us hints to what some of the short answer questions will be. Our exam for human geo is the second exam on Monday  Mr. Schick told us that some teachers might let us study for our next exam after we finish our first exam. I am going to bring my human geo books just in case I can. We also talked about how the cafeteria will be very crowded so we should pack a lunch instead of trying to buy food.