With Regard to Our Recent Work on Population and Birth Rates....

Brazilian Women’s Power Leads to Falling Birth Rate

   

From Houghton-Mifflin's Current Events Site: (http://hmcurrentevents.com/brazilian-womens-power-leads-to-falling-birth-rate/ )

Population reports don’t usually hold many surprises. But the news about Brazil’s plummeting fertility rate is astounding. A few decades ago, the rate was 5.3 children per woman; today, it is about 1.9. Experts predict the rate will be 1.5 children per woman by 2030.

How did this happen? There is no one reason. Instead, a combination of causes has led women of all social classes to challenge tradition and limit the size of their families. Brazil’s booming economy is key to this development. Women have more opportunities for careers in the growing cities, where families don’t need numerous children to work as farmhands. Improved health care assures women they don’t need to have more babies to replace those that die. Advances in Brazil’s pension system assures parents they don’t have to depend on additional children to support them in their old age. Brazil’s women also have plenty of role models to inspire them to move away from the traditional role of motherhood and toward more independence. Brazil’s newly elected president is a woman, there are high-ranking female officers in the military, and special police stations are run for and by women.

One particularly interesting cause is called the “soap opera effect.” On a typical Brazilian soap opera, called a telenovella, 90 percent of the female characters have only one child or none. The women in the telenovellas lead more glamorous lives than their working- or middle-class viewers, who may equate such lifestyles with having fewer children. Script writers for these wildly popular dramas weren’t intentionally discouraging large families. Rather, they were criticizing the traditional values endorsed by the dictatorship that ruled Brazil until 1985. In the process, they may have helped empower Brazilian women, and the women are not looking back.

(This is a real life example of what we discussed last week!)

In Honor of Spring and the Easter Holiday Next Weekend, Let's Look at the Spring Equinox

Denmark Preparing North Pole Claim (Interesting?)

DENMARK PREPARING NORTH POLE CLAIM

Denmark and its self-governing dependency of Greenland plan to present a seabed claim extending to the North Pole before the end of 2014 against competing claims from other Arctic states, Danish officials have said.

BY REUTERS | AUG 23, 2011

Ownership of the Arctic seabed has grown in importance as the shrinking of sea ice has opened new prospects for exploration and production of the region's potentially vast oil and gas resources.

Under international law, no country now owns the North Pole or the Arctic Ocean area surrounding it.

Denmark's claim will be presented to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS), the Danish government said in a new Strategy for the Arctic.

"The Kingdom's claim on the continental shelf will in a number of areas overlap with other countries' continental shelf claims," Denmark, Greenland and the Faroe Islands said in the new Arctic strategy to 2020.

The claim would extend north from Greenland and follow two Arctic continental shelf claims already submitted to the CLCS by the Faroe Islands, another semi-autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.mindfood.com/at-denmark-says-preparing-north-pole-claim.seo

Important Definition!!!

Add this definition to your "capital resources" definition:

Any asset that allows the production of goods and/or services such as transportation, factories, tools and machinery, etc.

You'll need to know this for the test!

Spring Frenzy....

While everyone around is in a frenzied state to start cramming for the TCAP with their students, I am proud to say we are almost finished. Boys and girls, I can't tell you how proud I am of you for your hard work during the past 4 or five weeks of school. You guys have really stuck with it, and have been making such wonderful grades during this review time. You should all give yourself a pat on the back! But, don't let my praise lessen the resolve! We have to keep our little noses to the grindstone for a few more weeks before we can breathe that blessed sigh of relief. All of you put such good amounts of time in studying for the last test when I posted it on the TCAP Review Blog, that I believe I will do the same thing this afternoon. Hopefully, that gave you some real incentive. Don't forget that the test is tomorrow.