Читать книгу Anglo-American Cultural Studies - Jody Skinner - Страница 16

states and districtsIf you quickly peek at the map we’ll be using to show population change a little later (figure 1.3), you can instantly see one way in which the US is divided for political purposes, namely into 50 states. Each state is made up of congressional districtscongressional districts, each of which elects its own member to the House of RepresentativesHouse of Representatives. [13]There are a total of 435 districts and with a total US population of roughly 320,000,000 each district should represent roughly 735,000 people. Since people tend to move a lot within the country, some areas lose population and others gain. Every ten years a national censuscensus takes place partly to see which districts need to be redrawn so that all districts more or less represent the same population. What sounds complicated sometimes turns out to be extremely complicated, especially when some politicians try to redraw districts so that their party can gain a majority ( 5). What’s much easier is the division for the SenateSenate: each state has two Senators regardless of area or of population and regardless of what the state actually looks like on the map!

state boundariesAnd what do you notice about the way state boundaries look on the map (figure 1.3)? When you look at the boundaries in the western two-thirds of the US west of the MississippiMississippi, you can easily see that mostly straight lines form the borders between the states, evidence that the vast western part of the United States was settled in a different way than the area east of the Mississippi, which was settled earlier. And although as you can see on the map, the area of the United States is already nicely divided up entirely into 48 sections, some say that there could be future states added to the Union.