Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state. Texas is in the south-central part of the United States of America. With 10 climatic regions, 14 soil regions, and 11 distinct ecological regions, regional classification becomes problematic with differences in soils, topography, geology, rainfall, and plant and animal communities. The Gulf Coastal Plains region wraps around the Gulf of Mexico on the southeast section of the state. Vegetation in this region consists of thick pineywoods. The Interior Lowlands region consists of gently rolling to hilly forested land is part of a larger pine-hardwood forest. In the state's extreme west, is the state's Basin and Range Province. The most complex of the regions, this area includes Sand Hills, the Stockton Plateau, desert valleys, wooded mountain slopes and desert grasslands.Texas has 3,700 named streams and 15 major rivers. The largest of these rivers is Rio Grande. While Texas does not have any large natural lakes, Texans have built over 100 artificial reservoirs.

Texas is the southernmost part of the Great Plains, which ends in the south against the folded Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico. The continental crust forms a stable Mesoproterozoic craton which changes across a broad continental margin and transitional crust into true oceanic crust of the Gulf of Mexico.

The oldest rocks in Texas date from the Mesoproterozoic and are about 1,600 million years old. The oldest sediments were deposited on the flanks of a rifted continental margin, or passive margin that developed during Cambrian time. This margin existed until Laurasia and Gondwana collided in the Pennsylvanian era to form Pangea.

The economy of Texas is one of the largest and fastest growing economies in the United States. Texas has an economy that was the second largest in the nation and the 15th largest in the world based on GDP (nominal) figures. As the largest exporter of goods in the United States, Texas currently grosses more than $100 billion a year in trade with other nations.

Much economic activity in Texas is regional. Houston, the state's largest urban economic enclave stands at the center of the petrochemical, biomedical research trades, shipping, and aerospace (particularly NASA). Dallas/Fort Worth houses the state's predominant defense manufacturing interests and the expansive information technology labor market. West Texas and the panhandle is dominated by ranching and the petroleum industry.

Texas's growth can be attributed to the availability of jobs, the low cost of housing, the lack of a personal state income tax, the quality of higher education, low taxation and limited regulation of business, a central geographic location, a limited government, favorable weather, and plentiful supplies of oil and natural gas.

By Bernardo, Breno, Lucas, Rodrigo