South America
South America is a continent of the Americas, situated entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east by the Atlantic Ocean; North America and the Caribbean Sea lie to the northwest.
South America was named in 1507 by cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann after Amerigo Vespucci, who was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies, but a New World unknown to Europeans.
South America has an area of 17,840,000 square kilometres (6,890,000 sq mi), or almost 3.5% of the Earth's surface. As of 2005, its population was estimated at more than 371,000,000. South America ranks fourth in area (after Asia, Africa, and North America) and fifth in population (after Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America).
Mexico to Brazil and Beyond
South America stretches southwards from Mexico to Peru, Argentina, Chile and to the very tip of the south of this continent which is the famed Cape Horn. The central American countries have a tropical climate and feature many islands that have featured heavily as tourist spots. To the West of this continent we find Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia - steeped in history and stories of ancent gold. Brazil which is central has vast rainforest areas which account for a huge supply of the worlds timber. Argentina is the largest country in this region which is covered with cattle grasslands home to the famous Pampas cowboys.
Mexico
Mexico is a country located in North America. It is bounded on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the North Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of Mexico. The United Mexican States comprise a constitutional republican federation of thirty-one states and a federal district, Mexico City, one of the most populous cities on Earth.
Covering almost 2 million square kilometers,Mexico is the fifth-largest country in the Americas by total area and 14th largest in the world. With a population of almost 109 million,it is the 11th most populous country and the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world.
As the only Latin American member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) since 1994, Mexico is firmly established as an upper middle-income country. Elections held in July 2000 marked the first time that an opposition party won the presidency to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional: PRI), that held it since 1929, culminating a process of political alternation that had begun at the local level since the 1980s. |
