PNG Facts

Today in class we chose a group of 3-4 kids to research on PNG on what is it like. There are 49/50 people to work that want to have work in the country which is way less then others. It is the 12th fastest growing economy in the world, part of that is because it was so far behind, but now everyone is participating and growing rapidly. The country is one of the least researched countries in the world which may have many different animals and plants that have been yet to be discovered. Everything that lives in the high mountains is what the world was like before the world has started deforesting it even though they are cutting down a little, but there are many things that are similar like the beginning of the world. The people of PNG's net migration rate is zero even though it has a booming economy. The number one religion is Roman Catholic. There are 542 unpaved airways (runways) for planes to land. The infrastructure is not there yet, even though they are doing it slowly. PNG has an army and even an air force and the legal age to get into it is 16. There are about 3 million people that could be drafted and there are. 37% of the population is below the poverty line, but these people have crops to grow by themselves. 13% of the population is urban in PNG. There are 2.4 million cell phones used in PNG out of around 6 million years. 3,100 people are in the active armed forces for the country. The three main sports are soccer, rugby, and cricket. The internet host is 5,006 and internet users are 125,000. There are only 57.3% of people that can read and write, also there are over 800 different languages (861) because the people don't interact with each other and when they interact with each other they have tribal conflict. 8.9% in gdp and they are ranked 12th fastest economy in the world. They only have 2 TV stations to serve 6.2 million. They export 6.48 billion. That is one of the reasons their economy is growing. They export gold, oil, lumber, coffee, coco, natural gas, and precious minerals. 10% of the languages in the world are from this little island nation. The life expectancy rate is 66 years old, even though their people live a very physical life style even though they don't have a good health care system. The tfr is 3.39. 13% if the people are in urban areas, but 50% of the people in the world live in cities.

Class Participation

I think my class participation should be a solid 93 because I have really participated in class alot and in the groups, but I have talked a lot in class.

Today's Class

In today's class we finished up to part 6 today of the video of Guns, Germs. and Steel. It was very interesting watching the rest of this video because in this part Jared Diamond basically told us the whole point of the video up to this. The question that Wally had, "Why do your people have so much more cargo then my people?" The answer that he had was basically because you got geographically lucky on where you were born and where your ancestors were. There were some civilizations on which they do not have enough resources to go onto a more advanced way of living, or in a case such as the Americas where they got these resources imported in and had a good enough fertile soil to have these crops grown there.

Continuation of video

We learned more and more in the video, for today's lesson we learned about how the people got lucky on where they were born and where they settled. We were informed by Jared Diamond that there were 148 plant eating animals that weighed over a 100 pounds in the world that could be domesticated, but there were only 14 that were domesticated successfully. There are many reasons why the others were not domesticated as in they didn't have something, ate too much, took too long to reproduce, and also they were too hard to contain. There was no animals of these 14 that could be found in North America and there was only one in South America. The other 13 domesticated animals was found in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. The reason why North America developed so much was because they got all their animals from when Europe brought them over. However, the first reason to this is that there were not enough crops to feed the animals and the people to have them domesticated so this never worked for Papua New Gunie. That was the main point behind Jared Diamonds theory that people were not as developed simply because of the area that they grew up in and it all depended upon geographical luck.

Video on Guns Germs And Steel

In this part of the video we watched and saw that the Middle East prospered through bad conditions and actually advanced as a society despite those horrendous conditions. An archaeological dig was found in Draugh where supposedly the first village in the Middle East was created where the first grannary was find(a place to store grains). People at this time started making their own food and the Middle Eastern people were the first farmers of the world, which were able to domesticate wild animals and plants. After the Middle East it was China-rice, Americas- corn squash, and  beans then in Africa- sorghu millet and yams.  Whereever there was farming it seemed like those nations would prosper, but that was not the case of Papua New Gunia which did not thrive like other nations. They did not thrive because the plants they had to farm were not nearly as well neutriotous as the other plants that other nations and areas were growing so they did not prosper. So basically you got lucky where you were born if you were born in a great wheat and barely nation then good for you, but New Gunia not so much.

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond is a human geography professor and was born on  September 10, 1937. He was born in Boston in a Jewish family. He is a professor at the University of California, is an author, and a scientist.. He has been awarded the  MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Genius Award). He got his education from Harvard. He also has a phd in geography and physiology. Some of the books he has written include Guns, Germs and Steel, f Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He is a great researcher and has gotten many grants from different colleges across the nation. He is a genius and has done research in 22 expeditions in Papua New Guinea and neighboring islands to study ecology and stuff on birds. The man has also taken part of taken part in numerous field projects for the Indonesian government and World Wildlife Fund. He may be the most interesting man on earth.
Jared Diamond goes to Papua New Guinea and changes his life direction and wrote a book about it, which turned into a book. This book exposes the great forces that shaped the human history over the past 10,000 years. It was awarded Pulitzer Prize and was awarded the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. is the This book was a mutli-million seller by the renowned academic Jared Diamond. The book will take you on a 10,000 year journey through history, and through every continent. This was first published  in the United States by W.W.Norton and Company, on March 1 1997.

Final Day on Google Presentation

Today in human geo class we were given the class period to do our google presentation slides on the product in which we were either for America or for foreign products. My group was to be for America and to convince or persuade them to buy the American good. The item/product in which we are doing is chopstick. This is traditionally a Chinese product that America is starting to produce because of the demand it is having over seas since the Chinese and Japanese do not have enough wood to produce these. A couple facts about the American products is that they have more quality that the other foreign products and it is helping America with its economy because the chopstick is one of the most commonly used products in China and they are buying tons of them from us all from the little town of Americus,Georgia. My group had worked on it over the weekend and we had a lot of it already done, but we needed a little more information in which we got and until Wednesday my group and I will be putting the finishing touches on it!