Mr. Parker

Announcements

• Our Unit 9 Quiz is on Wednesday, April 1st.

Unit 11 Study Guide

Study up for the last test of the year!

Download Unit 11 Study Guide

Unit 9 Quiz

Our summative assessment on People and Places in Asia will take place on Wednesday, April 1st (no fooling).  The breakdown of the test is as follows:

• Five Major Religions of Asia (55% of quiz)
  • Hinduism
  • Buddhism
  • Confucianism
  • Shinto
  • Islam
• Geography (45%)
  •  Political Geography (locating Japan, India, China, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia on a map)
  • Physical Geography (know the major land features)
  • Human Environment interaction (know how people adapt to the geography)

Focus your study on the following notebook pages: 1,2,3 and 11,12,13

As usual, notebook will be collected.

Asian Religions Pop Quiz Alert

On Wednesday, March 25th we're having a pop quiz on the religions of Asia.  Obviously, if you are reading this it won't be a surprise. Focus your study on the the 5 religions graphic organizer and the comparing religions worksheet.

Foreign Aid versus Government Corruption in Africa

We already know countries in Africa are grappling with numerous problems like chronic diseases,   malnutrition, and serious poverty.  Many western governments try to help by sending billions of dollars in aid to Africa.  Unfortunately, much of this aid is stolen by corrupt government officials.

View ABC Video on Foreign Aid

Is there a way to send aid without it enriching the lives of some dictator? How do you think we can help the nations of Africa? (reply to this post to discuss)

Extra Credit Opportunity - Current Events in Africa

It's the end of the quarter and we have an opportunity to earn some bonus points. All you need to do is find a news article from 2009 covering any topic in Africa that relates to something we have covered in our standards.  To get credit you must:

1. Provide a copy of the article.

2. Write a 2-3 sentence summary of the article.

3. Using 2-3 sentences, relate that information to content that we learned this year.

There are lots of news events that fall into this category, including the suspicious "accident" in Zimbabwe shown below.

Economic Systems in Africa

Today we took our econ vocabulary quiz reviewed the four different types of economic systems:

1. Traditional
2. Market
3. Command
4. Mixed

We recalled that all economies really exist somewhere in between pure command and pure market economies.  Most do lean toward one end of the spectrum or another.  The U.S. is about 80% toward the "market" end of the spectrum.  Overall wealth tends to go up the closer you are to the market end.

Many people believe that our current economic crisis is the result of "unregulated capitalism" meaning that we wouldn't be in this recession if our economy leaned a little more toward the command side. More government regulation, they say, could have prevented the financial meltdown. Regardless, we are now moving toward a more command economy as the government nationalizes some banks.

Vocabulary Review & Africa's Resources and Industries

Today we reviewed key vocabulary termsfor our unit on Economic in Africa. These are the same terms we learned when we studied economics in Southwest Asia, so we didn't spend too much time on them. We will be having a quiz soon on these terms, so you really need to make sure that you have mastered all of them.  These will be important for the CRCT, too.

We also learned today that Africa has some of the largest reserves of Natural Resources in the world, including teeming forests, vast mineral resources (including gold and diamonds), and fossil fuels.  Yet, many African nations remain very poor. This is largely due to government corruption and inadequate management.

Investing in your Human and Capital Resources

We have learned that one of the only ways to increase your country's GDP (wealth) is to invest in your country's human capital and capital goods.  This is commonly done through educating your workers and developing better infrastructure like roads. 

Download InvestinginResourcesAfrica

If the country has corrupt leaders, however, this does not happen.  A clear example of this is Zimbabwe, where the country continues to wallow in severe poverty, struggles with a growing famine, and has been hit hard by an easilly preventable epidemic of cholera.  What is the leader of the country doing?  He's spending the nation's money on parties for himself.

Governments of Kenya, South Africa and Sudan

We started out class today by reviewing some of the concepts we mastered last week, as they will all be included on the Thurs/Fri unit test.

We then synthesized this content knowledge by examining the governmental systems of 3 African nations: Kenya, South Africa, and Sudan. All three are distinct and exhibit several of the features we studied.  We also expect to see all three featured on this week's test.

Download AfricanGovtReading   Download AfGovtMatrixBlank

Systems of Power Distribution

We reviewed the different systems countries use to organize government power. In unitary systems, all the power is concentrated at the top level with the national government.  In federal systems power is divided (shared) between a national government and regional or state governments. Confederations are loosely tied independent states. Unitary systems are the most common, while confederations are the most rare.

Remember that these systems have nothing to do with whether a country is democratic or autocratic.  Citizen participation is unrelated to this.  Many democratic countries, for example, are unitary.

We also played a game to review the all of these government concepts.  All of the powerpoints from class are embedded below.  Study these for next week's unit test.