Brazil

4 Pages 1007 Words

Brazil, one of the world’s largest and most populated countries. It is the largest country in South America. Its largest city is São Paulo, and its capital is Brasília. Brazil’s population is very diverse. There is a combination between Native Americans, Portuguese settlers, and African slaves, which made a society of racial and ethnicity. According to The Colliers Encyclopedia Brazil is the only Latin American country settled by the Portuguese. Before the Portuguese arrived in 1500, allot of Native American tribes had a small amount of people in Brazil. In the 16th century the Portuguese began to bring African slaves to work in agricultural production. The ethnic mix between these three groups, along with other European peoples who immigrated to Brazil after 1850, has contributed to some distinctly Brazilian cultural forms, especially in music and architecture. Distinct cultures also continue to survive among Afro-Brazilians, non-Portuguese immigrants from Europe and Asia, and isolated pockets of Native Americans. However, Portuguese cultural influences remain strong, with Portuguese as the primary language and Roman Catholicism as the principal religion.
The economic development of Brazil has been strongly influenced by a series of economic cycles in which different resources were exploited in different parts of the country. The first commodity to be exploited was the dyewood pau brasil, from which the country takes its name. In the mid-16th century colonists introduced sugar cultivation, taking advantage of the good soil and tropical climate along the Northeast coast. Gold was discovered in the 1690s in what became the state of Minas Gerais. This provoked a gold rush that brought the first significant settlement of the interior and shifted the country’s economic focus and population center from the Northeast to the Southeast.

Brazil has a dense and complex system of rivers. The most impressive river system is that of t...