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Middle America
Question | Answer |
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Primate City | A country’s largest city in its urban hierarchy that is most expressive of its national culture. An example is Mexico City, the core of Mexico. |
NAFTA | (North American Free Trade Deal) The free-trade area launched in 1994 involving the United States, Canada, and Mexico. |
Maquiladoras | Mexico’s U.S. border zone where U.S. owned factories are present. |
Land bridge | A narrow link between two landmasses. |
Archipelago | A set of islands grouped closely together, usually elongated into a chain. |
Hurricane Alley | The most frequent pathway followed by tropical storms and hurricanes over the past 150 years in their generally westward movement across the Caribbean Basin. |
Altitudinal Zonation | Vertical regions defined by physical-environmental zones at various elevations, particularly in the highlands of South and Middle America. |
Tropical deforestation | The clearing and destruction of tropical rainforests in order to make way for expanding settlement frontiers and the exploitation of new economic opportunities. |
Culture hearth | The heartland, source area, innovation center, or place of origin of a major culture. |
Mestizo | A person of mixed European (white) and Amerindian ancestry. |
Hacienda | A large estate in a Spanish-speaking country. |
Plantation | A large estate owned by an individual, family, or corporation and organized to produce a cash crop. |
Small-island developing economies | The additional disadvantages faced by lower-income island-states because of their often small territorial size and populations as well as overland inaccessibility. |
Acculturation | Cultural modification resulting from intercultural borrowing. |
Transculturation | Cultural borrowing and two-way exchanges that occur when different cultures of approximately equal complexity and technological level come into close contact. |
Ejidos | Government owned Mexican farmlands redistributed to peasant communities after the Revolution of 1910–1917. |
Remittances | Money earned by emigrants that is sent back to family and friends in their home country. |
Offshore banking | Term referring to financial havens for foreign companies and individuals, who channel their earnings to accounts in such a country (usually an “offshore” island-state) to avoid paying taxes in their home countries. |
Social Stratification | In a layered or stratified society, the population is divided into a hierarchy of social classes. In an industrialized society, the working class is at the lower end; elites that possess capital and control the means of production are at the upper level. |
Mulatto | A person of mixed African (black) and European (white) ancestry. |