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ИКСИЯ.

1. The land of the us: geography, the face of the land, mountain and rivers, weather and climate.

Токарева, глава 1, с.13 и с. 31.

A PANORAMIC VIEW OF AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY

Americans' encounter with their land has been abrupt and often violent, consuming much of the nation's energies. Americans had to confront and come to terms with a huge, wild country. It has been said that America is a nation with an abundance of geography but a shortage of history. It took less than 400 years to subdue more than 3 million square miles of territory. Even today much of the U.S. remains relatively unpopulated.

Just as Americans have reshaped the face of their land, the people themselves have been shaped by constant contact with the land. But the geography of the country played into their hands — the country was insulated by large oceans from political threat, and the land allowed Americans to become self-sufficient in agriculture and basic minerals. A magnificent system of natural waterways linked distant parts of a vast territory, made travel cheap, and allowed great mobility.

Over the course of time the American land yielded a bounty whose reputation spread around the globe and attracted floods of immigrants. Sometimes the reports of that bounty were overblown by land speculatorsand travel agents, and people were enticed to America through promises of paradise on earth. In spite of such hyperboles, however, the wealth of the land was still considerable.

Settlement of the American land was often a painful process. Territory was usually settled before it was well known, and people learned geography from hard experience by trial and error.

Today the United States is the fourth largest country in the world, in both size and population. It covers an area of 3,618,465 square miles.1'2 The U.S. is divided into 50 states. Those which border one another on the continent are grouped into seven regions: New England (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont), Middle Atlantic States (New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania), Southern States (Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Flor­ida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia), Mid­western States (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin), Rocky Mountain States (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming), Southwestern States (Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas) and Pacific Coast States (California, Oregon, Washington). In addition, Hawaii and Alaska are grouped separately.

The Face of the Land

The framework of America is built around a huge interior lowland that has yielded some of the country's greatest agricultural and mineral wealth. It contains a large portion of its population and is the heart of what politicians like to call "middle America". The region is drained by the Mississippi River and its great tributaries, one of the largest navigable river systems of the world. The Mississippi is the traditional dividing line between "East" and "West". To east and^vest, the land rises to mountain ranges that flank the lowland to either side and separate it from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

The mountain ranges differ substantially from each other. The Appalachians on the east stretch are almost unbroken. They are not high and are set back from the Atlantic by a broad belt of coastal lowland.

While this coastal region contains little in the way of mineral wealth, it was here that the American nation was planted and took root in the 17th century. The original 13 colonies were all located in this belt, and almost half of American history has been played out here. Six states of the region are called New England. It was not until the Revolution (1775—1781) that significant numbers of American settlers began to spill westward across the Appalachians into the interior lowlands.

To the West of the internal basin lies the mighty system of mountains known as the Rocky mountains, — a collective term for all the huge rough country of the western third of the United States. It is part of a global mountain system that encircles the Pacific Basin. Here there is no coastal plain. The mountains along the Pacific coast drop abruptly and often spectacularly into the sea. This part of the country contains some of the highest mountains in North America. It has impressive scenery, considerable environmental variety, and great mineral wealth. It is hardly surprising that much of this western country was settled by adventurous folk in search of quick riches, of freedom from the conventions and traditions of the long-settled East. Its picturesque scenery and history have caused many Americans to see the West as a wild eccentric kind of place, a view reinforced by novelists, artists, and film-makers who have painted the American West in bright uncomplicated colors.

The Rivers

The Mississippi is one of the world's great continental rivers. It flows some 3,970 miles2 from its northern sources in the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, making it one of the world's longest waterways. The Missouri is its chief western branch. Where the Missouri pours into the Mississippi from the west, it colors the river deep brown with small pieces of soil. Farther downstream where the clear waters of the principal eastern tributary, the Ohio, join the Mississippi, evidence of the difference between the dry west and rainy east becomes apparent. For miles, the waters of the two rivers flow on side by side, without mixing. Those from the west are brown because they wash away the soil in areas of sparse vegetation. The waters from the east are clear and blue. They come from hills and valleys where plentiful forest and plant cover has kept the soil from being washed away.

Like the Mississippi, all the rivers east of the Rockies3 finally reach the Atlantic; all the waters to the west ultimately flow into the Pacific. The line that divides these rivers is called the Continental Divide. There are many places in the Rockies where a person may throw two snowballs, one to the east and one to the west, and know that each will feed a different ocean.

The two great rivers of the Pacific side are the Colorado in the south, and the Columbia, which originates in Canada and drains the north. The Columbia flows with quiet dignity. But the Colorado is a river of enormous fury — wild, restless, and angry. It races and plunges, cutting deeply into the desert rocks. But even the furious Colorado has been dammed and put to work. All the farms and cities of the southwestern corner of the country depend on its waters.

The Rio Grande, about 1,990 miles long, is the foremost river of the Southwest. It forms a natural boundaiy between Mexico and the United States, which together have built irrigation and flood control projects of mutual benefit.

Mountains.

North of the Central Lowland, extending for almost 994 miles, are the five Great Lakes4 which the United States shares with Canada. The majestic Rocky Mountains stretch all the way from Mexico to the Arctic. They are high, sharp and rugged.9 In the days when gold was king and thousands of men lived in the mining camps in the wilderness, agriculture began in the Rockies. In this land of little water, farming was very difficult — and would have been impossible without a series of irrigation canals that bring water from the high mountain streams to the dry valleys below.

Not counting patches of cultivated soil, there are still about 130,000 square miles of desert between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Reno, Nevada. Here, there is nothing but dead lakes, dry rivers, snakes and small animal life, enormous mineral wealth, and the beauty of the desert. In the vast triangle of land between the Sierra Nevadas to the west and the Rockies to the east, the climate is so dry and hot that even fairly large rivers from the mountains evaporate so rapidly that they die before reaching the end of the desert.But even in the vast, silent desert there are rich oases — prosperous towns which were built where men found sufficient water.

CLIMATE AND WEATHER

On arriving in America Europeans had to learn to cope with the variety of unfamiliar climates and vegetation. European climatic experience was not a very useful guide for survival in America. That was especially true in the subtropical South and the arid West1, regions that provided unexpected opportunities but also posed obstacles for which there were no obvious analogies in the Old World.

Europeans expected America to be much the same, as America faced the Atlantic, just like Europe. The truth was quite different. America's western air comes not from the ocean, as in Europe, but from the continental interior which is extremely cold in the winter and ovenlike in the summer.

The northernmost zone, adjacent to the Canadian border, is a region of northern forest that stretches from Maine across northern New England and the upper Great Lakes. Here the growing season is very short, and the winters are long and fiercely cold. For farmers it has always been miserable country.

Southward the temperature moderates. The growing season is longer, winters are milder, and summers are hot. Settlers discovered that they could grow most of the crops they had known in the Old World and a variety of New World crops as well. Because American summers were considerably hotter and longer than in Europe, Amer­ican crops often yielded a larger harvest. It was here that America first developed its reputation abroad as a land of plenty.

Still farther southward one crosses an invisible but crucial line called the Mason-Dixon Line. The central features of Southern climate are hot humid summers and a long growing season. The climate is i good for a variety of valuable subtropical crops, such as indigo, rice, and cotton. The cotton monopoly of the American South came to an end in the early twentieth century as a result of competition from Indian and Egyptian cotton.

The climate of the Central Basin is rather moderate. Moist and dry years alternate. At the time of the native prairie, before the settlers came, the soil had been protected by a dense layer of turf. Intensive plowing exposed the cultivated soil to the wind and to the storms, and the harvest in dry years gets completely ruined.

Further west, in the semi-arid region of short grass where farms and cattle ranches begin, the situation is even more precarious. In years when rain is plentiful, the prairie grasses grow well and the herds of cattle grow fat. But during frequent droughts large herds of cattle suffer and may even die. Blazing summer heat dries up what little moisture is available, and in winter arctic temperatures and howling blizzards make life hard. The first farmers and ranchers had to learn climatic laws the hard way.

The only substantial humid region in the western United States is wedged into a narrow strip between the Pacific coast and the Sierra-Cascade ridge line.2 Unlike the East, with its continental extremes of summer and winter temperature, West Coast temperatures are moderated all year long by westerly winds from the ocean so that the entire coast from Canada to Mexico enjoys cool summers and mild winters.

West Coast rainfall patterns also differ from those in the East, and those differences impart a special personality to the Pacific Coast

climate. In the humid East rainfall is taken for granted since most places get plenty of rain year round. This is not true in the West, however, where rainfall differs significantly from place to place and from season to season.

To begin with, rainfall diminishes gradually from north to south. Thus western Washington and Oregon receive enough rain to support forests of tall, straight, fast-growing, evergreens. By contrast, central California is noticeably drier, with low trees and open grasslands that are well adapted to drought. In southern California, the climate is technically defined as semi-arid and true desert lies not far beyond the city limits of Los Angeles and San Diego.

On the West Coast, winter is the rainiest time everywhere, and summers almost everywhere are very dry. Under natural conditions brushfires are part of the natural ecological cycle, and periodic burning keep brush down and grasslands open. But when fires get started in California cities — and it is impossible to prevent them all — they can be devastating.

Despite drought and fire, Americans have found California's Mediterranean climatic zone a particularly alluring place. Near the coast summers are cool and pleasant, and even the mild rainy winter is often not very rainy, except in the far north. The combination has attracted both tourists and permanent residents from harsher climates in the North and East.

The unusual combination of wet winters and dry summers, moreover, makes it possible to grow crops that will not mature anywhere else in the country, with the result that California has the most lucrative agricultural industry in America.

Perhaps the most common feature of America's western climates, however, is the enormous variation to be found within very small areas. Much of the mountainous West contains such enormous variety within such small distances that it is broken into a mosaic of microclimatic regions. So the large variety of geographic and climatic environments in America guaranteed that people in America would find both oppor­tunities and challenges that would be denied to people in less favored parts of the earth. The country's riches rewarded luck and hard work, and its geographic and climatic variety rewarded those who were capable of adapting to new circumstances.