ENGINEERING

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Engineering

    There are many types of Engineering. One of the 2 most commons one is Civil Engineering. Your house was built by some sort of civil engineer, the road you use to get to your house was probably built by an engineer (unless it´s Costa Rica, they don´t have many engineers). Civil Engineering is a very common job that only a few people are good at.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Date: 4/10/2008                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Engineering is not only the act of constructing something from scratch, or something new. It also includes giving maintenance to previously built structures. I bet everyone has seen workers covering holes with asphalt. Although some of you may think that covering holes is a simple task it isn’t. In many countries not including Costa Rica, the roads are made out of cement and have a very thin layer of asphalt on top. When there is hole in the road it is caught when it is breaking through the asphalt so it doesn’t ever damage the cement. Most of the times the asphalt deteriorates unanimously so it is all scraped out with special machines and then that scraped asphalt is recycled and put into the road again. In Costa Rica I still haven’t seen one of these scraping machines. When the workers are filling holes up the just do small sized replacements of asphalt that leave the whole road rough instead of smooth. The workers don’t ever have the presence of a professional in the task that leads them and guides them through their job. Although Costa Rica is still a country that is developing very fast in the private entities we hope that the government will continue developing this country in the public structures. United States colleges are the most thought of when it comes to deciding colleges. Among the best rated colleges in the US are: 

    This information was gathered from www.graduateshotline.com. These are the best ranked engineering colleges in the US I’m 2006. 

Date: 21/04/2008

Economy hand-in-hand with infrastructure?

A countries economy and expansion depends in many things, one of the most significant being infrastructure. A country may be very attractive but if it has no infrastructure to support a business such as tourism for the country this source of money (tourism) is probably not going to evolve or be exploited for the countries benefit. It is in all the countries benefit to acquire a certain infrastructure that can supply with the countries needs and that is currently growing as tourism or any other economy grows.

Tourism, is probably one of the main incomes for many countries in Central America amongst other throughout the world. Tourism heavily depends on the countries´ infrastructure. We (People living in Costa Rica) experience this problem first hand. Costa Rica´s crisis has been for a long time, that the countries´ infrastructure doesn´t meet the countries overwhelming tourism growth. This issue is causing chaos and is making many frequent tourists avoid coming back to Costa Rica even though this country has superb things to show. While tourism decreases economy decreases at the same rate. Countries that are tourism-dependent need to develop some sort of infrastructure or else they will sink and so will their economy.

Economy, a more general word is used for a countries economy. Although economy can mean many things sometimes it is referred as the important source incomes for a country. In Costa Rica not only tourism is fairly important to the countries income but so is the fruit exporting. Costa Rica is known for their banana plantations and is now being recognized for their pineapple exports. There are also many important products being exported like: cut flowers, melon, mango etc. When you have such a big income as the banana´s (611 million dollars in 2007) and pineapples (470 million dollars in 2007) you really should be watching out that those incomes aren´t affected by something such as infrastructure because money like that means “a world” to countries like Costa Rica (not saying it doesn’t mean “a world” to many countries in the world). An issue that made melon farmers lose a lot of money where the lack of trucks to transport the melon from the farm to the docks. This incident made them lose 35% of their crops due to the melon being ripe before taken to the docks (melon generates 82 million dollars in 2007).

Most of this information I knew myself (reading La Nacion every day and being the son of a man who owns a banana and pineapple plantation) but just to make sure I checked the following sites:

Melon- www.vanguardia.com.mx/diario/noticia/economia/finanzas/preven_caida_de_35_por_ciento_en_las_exportaciones_de_melon_de_costa_rica/145154Banana- www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/resumen/23331

Pineapple-

http://www.radiolaprimerisima.com/noticias/resumen/23414

Date 5/2/2008:

Recently a bridge has been just finished in China. This is the longest bridge ever made that crosses an ocean. The bridge is 37 kilometers long and was started in November of 2003. Industrial engineers estimate that about 40,000 cars are going to be transiting through this bridge every day. It required 800.000 tons of steel and required 11.800 million yens or 1.600 million dollars. It has it a 6 way road and was designed in an “S” form so that conductors can´t go to sleep while driving therefore they hypothesize that the death rate will go down or decrease.

The bridge itself has more than 600 pillars of about 90 meters high each. This high quantity of pillars was made because of the constant typhoons passing nearby. During the construction of this bridge 19 typhoons crossed the area. There is another current construction still to be finished in this bridge. They have planned to do a rest area and a food and other service area in the middle of this bridge so that drivers can stop there. It is also expected that this service area is going to serve as a touristic place because of the great number of tourists a bridge/construction like this can attract.

This bridge was built so that the economy between the towns. The actual road is 400 kilometers but by building this bridge it is now 120 kilometers.  

This bridge has a lot of expectations by the China government. They expect that this bridge is going to affect Shanghai in such a way so that it makes it the 6^th biggest metropolitan area in the world.

Although these bridges take a lot of money and time to do they are very valuable to a countries economy and development. China is currently having great sums of money coming into the country and it is a good thing that they are using it to develop their country.

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