The word American is used to mean a person or a thing from the United States or any country in the Americas - North America, Central America, or South America. In English, the most common use of this word is to mean a person or a thing from the United States.
Even though the islands in the Caribbean Sea are close to the Americas, people who speak English do not usually use the word "American" for people or things from these islands.
A Native American is someone who is mostly descended from the people who lived in the Americas before the Europeans arrived. Native Americans are also called First Nations and "Indians".
There is no language "American." Some important languages used in the Americas are English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Some people still use Native American languages. Quechua is the largest.
Grain
Grain is the seeds of some special kinds of grass. The main types of commercial grain crops are cereals. People grow different kinds of grain as food. The different kinds of grain are perhaps one of the most important foods in the world.
Some kinds of grain are:
87% of all grain grown by farmers around the world is maize. Grains contain carbohydrates that people can eat. In poorer countries, grains are a large part of the food supply. In richer countries, they are still important as food, but not as important as in poorer countries. Growing grain uses a lot of water. About 1,000 tons of water is needed to grow one ton of grain.
Many different foods are made from different types of grain. Grain is often ground into a powder called flour. Flour can be made into breads, cakes, or noodles.
Different kinds of beer are made from barley malt, wheat, and other grains.
Tortillas are made from a special flour of dried maize (corn) called "masa".
Clause
A clause is a part of a sentence. Each clause is made up of a subject (who or what the sentence is about) and a predicate (what happens in a sentence). Each predicate has only one main verb. "I love you" is a sentence which has only one clause. "I love you and I will always love you" is a sentence which has two clauses. The two clauses are "I love you" and "I will always love you". These clauses are joined together by the word "and", which is a conjunction). Clauses may be independent or dependent.
Two clauses can be joined with a pronoun. For example: "I live in London, which is in England". Here, "I live in London" is the first clause, and "which is in England" is the second clause. The word "which" is a pronoun which takes the place of "London". It joins the two clauses. A sentence can contain many clauses. But sentences with fewer clauses are easier to understand.
A simple sentence may also be called an independent clause. It may be a part of a compound or complex sentence, but it can also stand on its own as a simple sentence (or independent clause).
A subordinate clause also called a dependent clause is one which cannot stand by itself. This is because it does not express a complete thought. It contains both a subject and a verb. A subordinate clause always depends on a main clause. The main clause is almost always an independent clause, therefore the main clause by itself makes sense and can stand on its own. However, the subordinating clause does not. For example, "I love you" makes perfect sense left on its own. However, "and always will", does not. The only time a sentence can be made up of only dependent clauses is when they are joined by correlative conjunctions: conjunction pairs like "either/or", "neither/nor", and "not only/but also".
Marxism
Marxism is the name for a set of political and economic ideas.
The basic ideas are that:
These ideas come from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their most notable work is The Communist Manifesto. They have had a lot of influence in many countries. Marxism influenced other political views, such as social democracy and reformist socialism. Both believe that the ideas of Marx and Engels can be achieved through what Marx called 'bourgeois democracy'.
People disagree a lot on how a Marxist society should be organized: "Marxist political economists differ over their definitions of capitalism, socialism and communism. These differences are so fundamental, the arguments among... Marxist political economists have sometimes been as intense as their oppositions to capitalism".
Marxism says that people in the world are organized into different groups, or classes, based on what they do for work.
Most people are called "workers" because they work in factories, offices, or farms for money. They belong to the "working class" (or "proletariat"). These people do not own the factories they work in or the materials they need for their work.
Another group, who are not as big as the working class, are "capitalists" (or "bourgeoisie"). They own the factories, land, and buildings that the workers work in. They also own some of the tools the workers have to use. Marx calls capitalists the "Ruling Class" because they live off of the work of all the workers. He also says that the capitalists own the government, army, and courts.
In Marxist views, capital is the "means of production" and money which the capitalist can invest in different places of business, so that they can "profit" or gain more capital.
Most workers work for companies owned by capitalists or "petit-bourgeois" (small business owners). The capitalist pays the worker in exchange for the worker's time. The capitalist has bought a period of time from the worker, which the worker must then use to labor for the capitalist. According to Marxist thinking, this is the only way that a capitalist can create extra money from a commodity (a piece of merchandise). The capitalist exploits the worker's time as much as they can. The capitalist receives a certain price for the commodity the worker made. The capitalist builds up capital by paying the worker less than that price. In this way, the capitalist exploits the worker's labor by:
Here is an example of exploitation of labor. Jane is a shoemaker. She works for Michael, who owns a shoe factory that can make 60 pairs of shoes in a day. Jane makes 60 pairs of shoes every day. Michael pays Jane $20 a day. However, Michael sells each pair of shoes for $2 each. This means he makes $120 in a day. After he pays Jane her $20 wage, Michael has $100 left over. However he then has to pay for materials which cost $1 for each pair, so that's $60 each day. Then running expenses of the factory cost him $10 a day. So he only gets $30 at the end of the day for managing the business. This remaining wealth is called "Profit" or "Surplus [extra] Value." In other words, even though Jane makes 60 shoes every day, she only gets paid the value of 10 pairs of shoes. The rest of the day, while she is making the other 50 shoes, she is creating money for her boss. Her labor is making him richer and helping him earn money.
It is this Surplus Value, or Profit, which Marxism thinks as an exploitation of labor. This exploitation allows the smaller class (capitalists) to live without working while making a profit, while the bigger class (the workers) have to work for the capitalists to survive under usually poor working conditions.
Marxism says that factories, tools, and work places cannot create new value on their own. They are like a blueberry bush: it has no value on its own. People have to create that value by laboring. For example, someone spends a day picking blueberries. Those blueberries can now be traded or eaten because of the labor that was put in to pick them.
Marxist thinking claims that capitalists and workers are constantly struggling. They call this "Dialectical Materialism." This is the idea that the history of humans is the history of conflict between classes. Different classes with different interests argue or fight each other. Social change (or in its absence, social stagnation) is the result.