Presentation time!!

Today in Human Geography we presented our projects. While we were watching other groups present their presentations we had to grade them on how we thought their power points were. I learned a lot of interesting things from others power points like I had an idea that a lot of stuff was made in China and foreign countries but I had no idea how much was being made. I also learned while preparing our project that there are a lot of safety measures that the United States has that China does not really care about all that much. There are also very bad working conditions in the factories of China and a lot of the workers there get sick and spread disease. One other thing that was so awful to learn was that Chinese factories put more led into their products than there should be and this could threaten someone’s life, watching how much led you put into a product is a key factor in manufacturing things but all they really want to do is make money.

Some visitors!

Today in Human Geography we continued to work on our projects. My group that I am working in had finished the research part of the project yesterday so today we finished things up by creating a small poster. This assignment will be one hundred points and each group will be grading other groups’ projects after they are done presenting them tomorrow. The past two days I forgot to mention that we have had some very special visitors from Japan. About 100 students came to shadow at our school for a week to see how we do things and if they would like to do an exchange program and possibly come back next year and stay with a host family and continue to learn more English and go to school at John Carroll for a while. This is very exciting for all of us and we hope that they will be joining us at school again!

the project!

Today in human geography we worked on a project that has to do with Chinese and American products. We had to split up into groups and pick whether or not we were going to be supporting America or China. The group that I worked in supported America and we did our project on the product of shoes and why you should buy them from American companies instead of Chinese companies. In our power point we talked about how the factories in China do not use caution with safety and sometimes put harsh chemicals into their products, making it less safe for the buyer. The working conditions are also bad inside the Chinese factories and workers are not paid as well as they would be in America.  Today my group finished pretty much all of our project and tomorrow we will be making a poster in class.

Some important terms!

Today we discussed four important terms:

Capitalism- An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. (America)

Communism- (classless; state owned/Gov.) a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community  as a whole or to the state.( China)

Free enterprise- an economic and political doctrine holding that a capitalist economy can regulate itself in a freely competitive market through the relationship of supply and demand with a minimum of governmental intervention and regulation.

Free market- an economic system in which prices and wages are determined by unrestricted competition between businesses, without government regulation or fear  of monopolies.

We also talked about how in America there are a lot of poor people but a very high number of rich people. Also We were talking about how a baseball player makes millions of dollars a year but a teacher doesn’t even make anything close to that and teachers better the world by helping people learn and baseball players don’t really do anything but play a sport and have people come and watch them.

Cites:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/free+market?s=t

China!

Today in human geography we started our class off by reviewing what we watched yesterday in the movie. We learned the following: Most of the cars being made in China are for American companies. When the Chinese want to buy a car they save up their cash to buy it, they do not use a credit card for it. Chinese car making factories have to be watched to make sure they aren't cutting corners on safety precautions in order to make more profit. There was a man that was being interviewed and he was making 28 dollars when working for an American man and when he changed jobs to work for a Chinese man he only would make 15 dollars an hour instead of 28. They also mentioned one of the biggest auto part industries which is Wanxiang, Chinese auto part industries will soon become the largest. The last thing we talked about was that China is the biggest producer and consumer of steel and that the Pittsburgh Steelers got their name because Pittsburgh was a steel State.

the other part of the movie!

Today in human geography we watched some more of the movie. In the part that we watched today they mostly talked about cars. China puts 25,000 cars on the road a day, but the people living in China do not really know how to use them yet. There are about 400 traffic accidents a day because there are so many people trying to drive in an overcrowded road, most of the people are just learning how to drive but they are not teenagers, they are probably in their mid-30s, and before cars about four years ago the people of China were using bikes to travel to where they needed to go. The city Jin Ch’ing is one of the fastest growing cities in the world. A lot of the people living here are poor and a lot need jobs, so there is a ton of manual labor for them in order to make money, like people build bridges, roads, highways, and tunnels but they only get a few dollars a day. 

People's republic of capitalism!

We have been watching a movie called “People’s republic of Capitalism” and we have been taking notes on the movie. I will just talk a little bit about the notes I have taken. People in China believe that girls should not be as well educated as boys, this was what one woman being interviewed was talking about, also she talks about how she makes all of the money in her family; she harvests lotus roots and she carries about 120 pounds worth of them to the market to sell by herself and she, along with the other people who do this only get about 3 American dollars for them. She gets about ten dollars a week and that comes to about 570 dollars a year. Half of this money goes to her child’s education and the other half goes to other necessities for her family.  The next person to be interviewed is Dr. Jung, he works in China and his family lives in America. He is currently searching for a cure for aids and some of his work has moved onto human trials, he works for NIH. Dr. Jung’s children go to high school in America and he has a house there also, he wanted his children to grow up in a non-communist place. Also he has his own lab in China and he does this because everything is cheaper than in America, he has a better deal in China than in America.  We also talked a little about how there a lot of interdependence is going between China and America.