Chapter One Media Article

3mn Face Drinking Water Scarcity In Southern, Eastern China

November 9th, 2006

After the big drought in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Southern and Eastern China will be facing their biggest problem, scarcity of water. Nearly three million people in Southern and Eastern China are facing clean water shortage after the drought; it caused forty-four reservoirs to dry up. More than 2.4 million people are suffering clean water scarcity since late October. The average rainfall in Guangxi has added up to 29 millimeters, 65 percent less than last year. The regional meteorological department said that eight cities and counties in Guangxi had no rainfall last month and the capital Nanning had been experiencing a serious drought for straight thirty-seven days. High temperatures have worsened the situation in the region. Water storage in the reservoirs had dropped from eight billion cubic meters to 4.7 billion after the drought. Forty-six reservoirs in Nanning have gone dry. A separate report from east China's Anhui said that 53,000 people in the province are also facing abnormal drought over the last two months. 60% of the rainfall’s average dropped in the last two months, affecting clean water supplies in three counties of Anqing city and almost 11,61,370 acres of farmland across the province. The city of Anqing hardly had any rainfall since September. That resulted in large number of ponds drying up and rivers running dry. The local government is using tractors and fire engines to bring water into affected areas

Related To The Chapter:

In this chapter, we have learned about scarcity. The more goods that are needed is scarce, more people would be in difficult situations. In my article, China is facing a really big problem. They are running out of water. A lot of people haven't consume any water after the drought. The water supply dropped twice as much as original. This clearly explains that water is scarce in the eastern and Southern part right now. They have only limited amount of water left. Water is essential in life, for the people to live, they must consume water. So if this situation is not solved, then people in China would be in trouble.

Personal Reflection:

I think if people where to only to have a limited supply of water, there would be a big problem for them. If the water are used up what would they do? Without water for a long period of time, people would eventually die. I think the solution they thought of to solve this problem is effective only a certain number of times. I would suggest that they should fill back up the reservoirs by using dirty water and filter all the dirty stuff and make it into drinking water so the people in China will have water to use.

Chapter Two Media Article

Demand For Scrap Steel Is Outpacing Supply

November 9th,2006

The high demand for scrap steel in developing countries, along with demand in China and India that is outpacing domestically generated scrap, will cause significant growth in the scrap metal market, according to the World Scrap Congress 2006 and research by Industrial Info Resources. This rush in demand is fueling the search for alternative sources of supply and the development of new technologies to abuse unproductive scrap. Estimates show that even if all technologically recoverable scrap were to be recuperated, the domestic feedstock available in tons would still be too low to meet material demands. At a meeting of the Ferrous Round Table of Bureau of International Recycling at the end of October, John Neu of Sims Hugo Neu, Richmond, California, noted that there was concern for the future of hard scrap when, two years ago, China was investing heavily in gigantic blast furnace-based steel production. But with substantial new electric furnace capacity being added or proposed in Turkey and a number of other countries, it is proved that scrap is not gone out of the market. He expects that scrap prices will probably increase in December and certainly in January when consumers fill for the winter ahead. In Europe, crude steel production has increased 4 percent to 100.7 million tons in the first half of 2006, while scrap consumption is estimated to have risen 5 percent over the same period to 53 million tons and could reach 106 million tons for 2006, reported Anton van Genutchen of TSR GmbH & Company, Bottrop, Germany. Ferrous scrap exports from the EU-25 region soared 124.1 percent in the first half of 2006. But when compared to the same period in 2005, EU shipments to India slumped 78 percent to 288,000 tons.

Relation To The Chapter:
In this article, scrapped steal is being demanded by many countries. The supply of scrapped steel is increasing because of the demanding from different countries are increasing. The rapid increasing of supply of scrapeed steel causing the pace of it to be overwhelm. The more people demand for a product, the more they will supply for it. As they supply more for it both the supply and demand curve will go up. As the supply curve goes down the demand curve will go down too.


Personal Reflection:
I think that the pace of supplying the scrapped steel is going too fast. If suddenly, people stop demanding for scrapped steel and they have a lot of supply of scrapped steel left they loose a large amount of money for producing and supplying the scrapped steel. In the end, they would just have to dump out all the supplying of scrapped steel. I suggest that they should produce a little more of the amount than all the people that demand for so there are only still left overs and could be sold to other people. That way they could save more money and less products being stored. Don't you all think this is a more convienent way to solve the problem?