Unit 9 Latin America Vocabulary 1. Andes Mountains: Are the longest and one of the highest mountain ranges in the world. They are located in South America and stretch 4,500 miles from north to south, along the west coast of the continent. 2. Amazon River/ Basin: Located in South America is the second largest river in the world stretching about 4000 miles and has the world’s largest river basin. 3. Atacama Desert: a plateau in South America, covering a 600-mile strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. 4. Aztec Civilization: The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. 5. Inca Civilizations: began as a tribe in the Cuzco area, where the legendary first Sapa Inca, Manco Capac founded the Kingdom of Cuzco around 1200. 6. Maya Civilization: The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. 7. Brasilia, Brazil: Capital city of Brazil since, 1960. 8. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Capital city of Argentina. 9. CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement): is a free trade agreement (legally a treaty under international law, but not under US law). Originally, the agreement encompassed the United States and the Central American countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and was called CAFTA 10. Cash Crop: A crop produced for its commercial value rather than for use by the grower 11. Catholicism: The faith, practice, and church order of the Roman Catholic Church 12. Cloud Forest: High mountain forests where temperatures are uniformly cool and fog or mist keeps vegetation wet all the time. 13. Columbian Exchange: The Columbian Exchange was a dramatically widespread exchange of animals, plants, culture and human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases, and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. 14. Cottage Industry: small-scale industry that can be carried on at home by family members using their own equipment. 15. Cultural Convergence: The growing similarity between national cultures, including the beliefs, values, aspirations, and the preferences of consumers, partly driven by global brands, media, and common global icons. 16. Cultural Divergence: the tendency for cultures to become increasingly dissimilar with time. 17. Debt-for-nature swap: an agreement between a developing nation in debt and one or more of its creditors. Many developing nations are severely limited by huge debts they have accrued. 1) minimize the negative effect debt has on developing nations 2) minimize the environmental destruction that developing nations frequently cause. 18. Deforestation: clearance or clearing is the removal of a forest or stand of trees where the land is thereafter converted to a non-forest use 19. Dictatorship: form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations. 20. Drug trafficking: a global illicit trade involving the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of substances which are subject to drug prohibition laws. 21. Ecotourism: responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people 22. Favela: a shanty town in Brazil, most often within urban areas. This was the place where former slaves with no land ownership and no options for work lived. 23. Infrastructure: the basic, underlying framework or features of a system or organization. 24. Lake Titicaca: is a lake in the Andes on the border of Peru and Bolivia. By volume of water, it is also the largest lake in South America 25. Lima, Peru: is the capital and the largest city of Peru. 26. Llanos: a vast tropical grassland plain situated to the east of the Andes in Colombia and Venezuela, in northwestern South America. 27. Maquiladoras: is the Mexican name for manufacturing operations in a free trade zone (FTZ), where factories import material and equipment on a duty-free and tariff-free basis for assembly, processing, or manufacturing and then export the assembled, processed and/or manufactured products, sometimes back to the raw materials' country of origin. 28. Mercosur: an economic and political agreement among Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Its purpose is to promote free trade and the fluid movement of goods, people, and currency. 29. Mestizo: a term traditionally used in Spain and Latin America for people of mixed heritage or descent. 30. Mexico City: capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union 31. Mullatto: a term used to refer to a person who is born from one white parent and one black parent, or more broadly, a person of mixed black and white ancestry. Also understood as an admixture of Native American, South American native and African Americans. 32. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement): an agreement signed by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, creating a trilateral trade bloc in North America in order to reduce trading costs, increase business investment, and help North America be more competitive in the global marketplace. 33. Pampas: are fertile South American lowlands, covering more than 289,577 miles. 34. Panama Canal: ship canal in Panama that connects the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) to the Pacific Ocean. The canal cuts across the Isthmus of Panama and is a key conduit for international maritime trade 35. Portuguese: an ethnic group native to the country of Portugal, in the west of the Iberian peninsula of south- west Europe adjacent to Spain. 36. Spanish: Traditionally, it applies to people native to any part of Spain. 37. Push factors/Pull Factors: The push factor involves a force which acts to drive people away from a place and the pull factor is what draws them to a new location. 38. Rain Forest: A dense evergreen forest with an annual rainfall of at least 160 inches. 39. Forest floor: Bottom layer of the rain forest which receives little to no sun light, with little plant life growing there as a result. 40. Rio de Janerio, Brazil: Second largest populated city in Brazil. The city was the capital of Brazil for nearly two centuries, from 1763 to 1815 during the Portuguese colonial era. 41. Rio de la plata: is the estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay River and the Paraná River on the border between Argentina and Uruguay. It is a funnel-shaped indentation on the southeastern coastline of South America, about 180 mi long. 42. Orinoco River: one of the longest rivers in South America at 1,330 miles. Its drainage basin, sometimes called the Orinoquia, covers 340,000 sq miles, with 76.3% of it in Venezuela and the remainder in Colombia 43. Amazon River: the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by water flow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined. 44. Parana River: river of South America, the second longest after the Amazon, rising on the plateau of southeast- central Brazil and flowing generally south. 45. Santiago, Chile: Capital city of Chile 46. Slash and Burn: cutting down the vegetation in a particular plot of land, setting fire to the remaining foliage, and using the ashes to provide nutrients to the soil for use of planting food crops. 47. Spatial diffusion of phenomena: A graphical display of a spatial distribution may summarize raw data directly or may reflect the outcome of more sophisticated data analysis. 48. Terraced Farming: developed first by the Inca people. This method of farming uses "steps", called andenes, that are built into the side of a mountain or hill. On each anden, various crops are planted, and when it rains, instead of washing away all of the nutrients in the soil, the nutrients are carried down to the next level 49. Tierra Caliente: the low-elevation forest zone in the mountains of Central and South America 50. Tierra Fria: the upper forest zone in the mountains of low-latitude Central and South America 51. Tierra Helada: the high-elevation zone in inter-tropical latitudes of Central and South America 52. Tierra Templada: the middle-elevation forest zone in the mountains of Central and South America 53. Traditional Economy: an economy based on custom and tradition/command. No money is exchanged. 54. Treaty of Tordesillas: a treaty dividing territory between Spain and Portugal in the Americas. Its signing prevented war over territory between the two countries. 55. Urbanization: the social process whereby cities grow and societies become more urban 56. Rural: living in or characteristic of farming or country life 57. Vertical Trade: – Countries with higher GDP export more expensive, manufacturing goods, while more labor- intensive goods (like farm goods and other raw materials) are exported by relatively poorer countries .