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Direction lanterns are also found both inside and outside elevator cars, but they should always be visible from outside because their primary purpose is to help people decide whether or not to get on the elevator. If somebody waiting for the elevator wants to go up, but a car comes first that indicates that it is going...
There are several technologies aimed to provide better experience to passengers suffering from claustrophobia, anthropophobia or social anxiety. Israeli startup DigiGage uses motion sensors to scroll the pre-rendered images, building and floor-specific content on a screen embedded into the wall as the cab moves up and ...
In most US and Canadian jurisdictions, passenger elevators are required to conform to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Standard A17.1, Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators. As of 2006, all states except Kansas, Mississippi, North Dakota, and South Dakota have adopted some version of ASME codes, though ...
Most elevators have a location in which the permit for the building owner to operate the elevator is displayed. While some jurisdictions require the permit to be displayed in the elevator cab, other jurisdictions allow for the operating permit to be kept on file elsewhere – such as the maintenance office – and to be ma...
As of January 2008, Spain is the nation with the most elevators installed in the world, with 950,000 elevators installed that run more than one hundred million lifts every day, followed by United States with 700,000 elevators installed and China with 610,000 elevators installed since 1949. In Brazil, it is estimated th...
Double deck elevators are used in the Taipei 101 office tower. Tenants of even-numbered floors first take an escalator (or an elevator from the parking garage) to the 2nd level, where they will enter the upper deck and arrive at their floors. The lower deck is turned off during low-volume hours, and the upper deck can ...
The high-speed observation deck elevators accelerate to a world-record certified speed of 1,010 metres per minute (61 km/h) in 16 seconds, and then it slows down for arrival with subtle air pressure sensations. The door opens after 37 seconds from the 5th floor. Special features include aerodynamic car and counterweigh...
The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is the common name for a series of elevator attractions at the Disney's Hollywood Studios park in Orlando, the Disney California Adventure Park park in Anaheim, the Walt Disney Studios Park in Paris and the Tokyo DisneySea park in Tokyo. The central element of this attraction is a simu...
The passenger cabs are mechanically separated from the lift mechanism, thus allowing the elevator shafts to be used continuously while passengers board and embark from the cabs, as well as move through show scenes on various floors. The passenger cabs, which are automated guided vehicles or AGVs, move into the vertical...
Guests ascending to the 67th, 69th, and 70th level observation decks (dubbed "Top of the Rock") atop the GE Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City ride a high-speed glass-top elevator. When entering the cab, it appears to be any normal elevator ride. However, once the cab begins moving, the interior lights tur...
Part of the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and Disneyland in Paris, France, takes place on an elevator. The "stretching room" on the ride is actually an elevator that travels downwards, giving access to a short underground tunnel which leads to the rest of the attraction. The elevator ...
Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun in the Solar System. It is the fourth-largest planet by diameter and the third-largest by mass. Among the giant planets in the Solar System, Neptune is the most dense. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and is slightly more massive than its near-twin Uranu...
Neptune is not visible to the unaided eye and is the only planet in the Solar System found by mathematical prediction rather than by empirical observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Uranus led Alexis Bouvard to deduce that its orbit was subject to gravitational perturbation by an unknown planet. Neptune was su...
Neptune is similar in composition to Uranus, and both have compositions that differ from those of the larger gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Like Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune's atmosphere is composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, along with traces of hydrocarbons and possibly nitrogen, but contains a higher proporti...
In contrast to the hazy, relatively featureless atmosphere of Uranus, Neptune's atmosphere has active and visible weather patterns. For example, at the time of the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989, the planet's southern hemisphere had a Great Dark Spot comparable to the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. These weather patterns are driv...
Some of the earliest recorded observations ever made through a telescope, Galileo's drawings on 28 December 1612 and 27 January 1613, contain plotted points that match up with what is now known to be the position of Neptune. On both occasions, Galileo seems to have mistaken Neptune for a fixed star when it appeared clo...
In 1821, Alexis Bouvard published astronomical tables of the orbit of Neptune's neighbour Uranus. Subsequent observations revealed substantial deviations from the tables, leading Bouvard to hypothesise that an unknown body was perturbing the orbit through gravitational interaction. In 1843, John Couch Adams began work ...
Meanwhile, Le Verrier by letter urged Berlin Observatory astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle to search with the observatory's refractor. Heinrich d'Arrest, a student at the observatory, suggested to Galle that they could compare a recently drawn chart of the sky in the region of Le Verrier's predicted location with the c...
In the wake of the discovery, there was much nationalistic rivalry between the French and the British over who deserved credit for the discovery. Eventually, an international consensus emerged that both Le Verrier and Adams jointly deserved credit. Since 1966, Dennis Rawlins has questioned the credibility of Adams's cl...
Claiming the right to name his discovery, Le Verrier quickly proposed the name Neptune for this new planet, though falsely stating that this had been officially approved by the French Bureau des Longitudes. In October, he sought to name the planet Le Verrier, after himself, and he had loyal support in this from the obs...
Most languages today, even in countries that have no direct link to Greco-Roman culture, use some variant of the name "Neptune" for the planet. However, in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the planet's name was translated as "sea king star" (海王星), because Neptune was the god of the sea. In Mongolian, Neptune is called Da...
From its discovery in 1846 until the subsequent discovery of Pluto in 1930, Neptune was the farthest known planet. When Pluto was discovered it was considered a planet, and Neptune thus became the penultimate known planet, except for a 20-year period between 1979 and 1999 when Pluto's elliptical orbit brought it closer...
Neptune's mass of 1.0243×1026 kg, is intermediate between Earth and the larger gas giants: it is 17 times that of Earth but just 1/19th that of Jupiter.[d] Its gravity at 1 bar is 11.15 m/s2, 1.14 times the surface gravity of Earth, and surpassed only by Jupiter. Neptune's equatorial radius of 24,764 km is nearly four ...
The mantle is equivalent to 10 to 15 Earth masses and is rich in water, ammonia and methane. As is customary in planetary science, this mixture is referred to as icy even though it is a hot, dense fluid. This fluid, which has a high electrical conductivity, is sometimes called a water–ammonia ocean. The mantle may cons...
At high altitudes, Neptune's atmosphere is 80% hydrogen and 19% helium. A trace amount of methane is also present. Prominent absorption bands of methane exist at wavelengths above 600 nm, in the red and infrared portion of the spectrum. As with Uranus, this absorption of red light by the atmospheric methane is part of ...
Models suggest that Neptune's troposphere is banded by clouds of varying compositions depending on altitude. The upper-level clouds lie at pressures below one bar, where the temperature is suitable for methane to condense. For pressures between one and five bars (100 and 500 kPa), clouds of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide...
High-altitude clouds on Neptune have been observed casting shadows on the opaque cloud deck below. There are also high-altitude cloud bands that wrap around the planet at constant latitude. These circumferential bands have widths of 50–150 km and lie about 50–110 km above the cloud deck. These altitudes are in the laye...
For reasons that remain obscure, the planet's thermosphere is at an anomalously high temperature of about 750 K. The planet is too far from the Sun for this heat to be generated by ultraviolet radiation. One candidate for a heating mechanism is atmospheric interaction with ions in the planet's magnetic field. Other can...
Neptune also resembles Uranus in its magnetosphere, with a magnetic field strongly tilted relative to its rotational axis at 47° and offset at least 0.55 radii, or about 13500 km from the planet's physical centre. Before Voyager 2's arrival at Neptune, it was hypothesised that Uranus's tilted magnetosphere was the resu...
The dipole component of the magnetic field at the magnetic equator of Neptune is about 14 microteslas (0.14 G). The dipole magnetic moment of Neptune is about 2.2 × 1017 T·m3 (14 μT·RN3, where RN is the radius of Neptune). Neptune's magnetic field has a complex geometry that includes relatively large contributions from...
Neptune has a planetary ring system, though one much less substantial than that of Saturn. The rings may consist of ice particles coated with silicates or carbon-based material, which most likely gives them a reddish hue. The three main rings are the narrow Adams Ring, 63,000 km from the centre of Neptune, the Le Verri...
Neptune's weather is characterised by extremely dynamic storm systems, with winds reaching speeds of almost 600 m/s (2,200 km/h; 1,300 mph)—nearly reaching supersonic flow. More typically, by tracking the motion of persistent clouds, wind speeds have been shown to vary from 20 m/s in the easterly direction to 325 m/s w...
In 2007, it was discovered that the upper troposphere of Neptune's south pole was about 10 K warmer than the rest of its atmosphere, which averages approximately 73 K (−200 °C). The temperature differential is enough to let methane, which elsewhere is frozen in the troposphere, escape into the stratosphere near the pol...
The Scooter is another storm, a white cloud group farther south than the Great Dark Spot. This nickname first arose during the months leading up to the Voyager 2 encounter in 1989, when they were observed moving at speeds faster than the Great Dark Spot (and images acquired later would subsequently reveal the presence ...
Neptune's dark spots are thought to occur in the troposphere at lower altitudes than the brighter cloud features, so they appear as holes in the upper cloud decks. As they are stable features that can persist for several months, they are thought to be vortex structures. Often associated with dark spots are brighter, pe...
Neptune's more varied weather when compared to Uranus is due in part to its higher internal heating. Although Neptune lies over 50% further from the Sun than Uranus, and receives only 40% its amount of sunlight, the two planets' surface temperatures are roughly equal. The upper regions of Neptune's troposphere reach a ...
On 11 July 2011, Neptune completed its first full barycentric orbit since its discovery in 1846, although it did not appear at its exact discovery position in the sky, because Earth was in a different location in its 365.26-day orbit. Because of the motion of the Sun in relation to the barycentre of the Solar System, o...
Neptune's orbit has a profound impact on the region directly beyond it, known as the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper belt is a ring of small icy worlds, similar to the asteroid belt but far larger, extending from Neptune's orbit at 30 AU out to about 55 AU from the Sun. Much in the same way that Jupiter's gravity dominates the...
There do exist orbits within these empty regions where objects can survive for the age of the Solar System. These resonances occur when Neptune's orbital period is a precise fraction of that of the object, such as 1:2, or 3:4. If, say, an object orbits the Sun once for every two Neptune orbits, it will only complete ha...
Neptune has a number of known trojan objects occupying both the Sun–Neptune L4 and L5 Lagrangian points—gravitationally stable regions leading and trailing Neptune in its orbit, respectively. Neptune trojans can be viewed as being in a 1:1 resonance with Neptune. Some Neptune trojans are remarkably stable in their orbi...
The formation of the ice giants, Neptune and Uranus, has proven difficult to model precisely. Current models suggest that the matter density in the outer regions of the Solar System was too low to account for the formation of such large bodies from the traditionally accepted method of core accretion, and various hypoth...
An alternative concept is that they formed closer to the Sun, where the matter density was higher, and then subsequently migrated to their current orbits after the removal of the gaseous protoplanetary disc. This hypothesis of migration after formation is favoured, due to its ability to better explain the occupancy of ...
Neptune has 14 known moons. Triton is the largest Neptunian moon, comprising more than 99.5% of the mass in orbit around Neptune,[e] and it is the only one massive enough to be spheroidal. Triton was discovered by William Lassell just 17 days after the discovery of Neptune itself. Unlike all other large planetary moons...
From July to September 1989, Voyager 2 discovered six moons of Neptune. Of these, the irregularly shaped Proteus is notable for being as large as a body of its density can be without being pulled into a spherical shape by its own gravity. Although the second-most-massive Neptunian moon, it is only 0.25% the mass of Tri...
Because of the distance of Neptune from Earth, its angular diameter only ranges from 2.2 to 2.4 arcseconds, the smallest of the Solar System planets. Its small apparent size makes it challenging to study it visually. Most telescopic data was fairly limited until the advent of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and large grou...
Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft that has visited Neptune. The spacecraft's closest approach to the planet occurred on 25 August 1989. Because this was the last major planet the spacecraft could visit, it was decided to make a close flyby of the moon Triton, regardless of the consequences to the trajectory, similarly t...
After the Voyager 2 flyby mission, the next step in scientific exploration of the Neptunian system, is considered to be a Flagship orbital mission. Such a hypothetical mission is envisioned to be possible at in the late 2020s or early 2030s. However, there have been a couple of discussions to launch Neptune missions so...
A railway electrification system supplies electric power to railway trains and trams without an on-board prime mover or local fuel supply. Electrification has many advantages but requires significant capital expenditure. Selection of an electrification system is based on economics of energy supply, maintenance, and cap...
Electric railways use electric locomotives to haul passengers or freight in separate cars or electric multiple units, passenger cars with their own motors. Electricity is typically generated in large and relatively efficient generating stations, transmitted to the railway network and distributed to the trains. Some ele...
In comparison to the principal alternative, the diesel engine, electric railways offer substantially better energy efficiency, lower emissions and lower operating costs. Electric locomotives are usually quieter, more powerful, and more responsive and reliable than diesels. They have no local emissions, an important adv...
Disadvantages of electric traction include high capital costs that may be uneconomic on lightly trafficked routes; a relative lack of flexibility since electric trains need electrified tracks or onboard supercapacitors and charging infrastructure at stations; and a vulnerability to power interruptions. Different region...
Railways must operate at variable speeds. Until the mid 1980s this was only practical with the brush-type DC motor, although such DC can be supplied from an AC catenary via on-board electric power conversion. Since such conversion was not well developed in the late 19th century and early 20th century, most early electr...
Motors have very little room for electrical insulation so they generally have low voltage ratings. Because transformers (prior to the development of power electronics) cannot step down DC voltages, trains were supplied with a relatively low DC voltage that the motors can use directly. The most common DC voltages are li...
There has, however, been interest among railroad operators in returning to DC use at higher voltages than previously used. At the same voltage, DC often has less loss than AC, and for this reason high-voltage direct current is already used on some bulk power transmission lines. DC avoids the electromagnetic radiation i...
1,500 V DC is used in the Netherlands, Japan, Republic Of Indonesia, Hong Kong (parts), Republic of Ireland, Australia (parts), India (around the Mumbai area alone, has been converted to 25 kV AC like the rest of India), France (also using 25 kV 50 Hz AC), New Zealand (Wellington) and the United States (Chicago area on...
3 kV DC is used in Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland, the northern Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Chile, and former Soviet Union countries (also using 25 kV 50 Hz AC). It was formerly used by the Milwaukee Road from Harlowton, Montana to Seattle-Tacoma, across the Continental Divide and including extensi...
Most electrification systems use overhead wires, but third rail is an option up to about 1,200 V. Third rail systems exclusively use DC distribution. The use of AC is not feasible because the dimensions of a third rail are physically very large compared with the skin depth that the alternating current penetrates to (0....
DC systems (especially third-rail systems) are limited to relatively low voltages and this can limit the size and speed of trains and cannot use low-level platform and also limit the amount of air-conditioning that the trains can provide. This may be a factor favouring overhead wires and high-voltage AC, even for urban...
Some street trams (streetcars) used conduit third-rail current collection. The third rail was below street level. The tram picked up the current through a plough (U.S. "plow") accessed through a narrow slot in the road. In the United States, much (though not all) of the former streetcar system in Washington, D.C. (disc...
A new approach to avoiding overhead wires is taken by the "second generation" tram/streetcar system in Bordeaux, France (entry into service of the first line in December 2003; original system discontinued in 1958) with its APS (alimentation par sol – ground current feed). This involves a third rail which is flush with ...
The London Underground in England is one of the few networks that uses a four-rail system. The additional rail carries the electrical return that, on third rail and overhead networks, is provided by the running rails. On the London Underground, a top-contact third rail is beside the track, energized at +420v DC, and a ...
The key advantage of the four-rail system is that neither running rail carries any current. This scheme was introduced because of the problems of return currents, intended to be carried by the earthed (grounded) running rail, flowing through the iron tunnel linings instead. This can cause electrolytic damage and even a...
On tracks that London Underground share with National Rail third-rail stock (the Bakerloo and District lines both have such sections), the centre rail is connected to the running rails, allowing both types of train to operate, at a compromise voltage of 660 V. Underground trains pass from one section to the other at sp...
A few lines of the Paris Métro in France operate on a four-rail power scheme because they run on rubber tyres which run on a pair of narrow roadways made of steel and, in some places, concrete. Since the tyres do not conduct the return current, the two guide rails provided outside the running 'roadways' double up as co...
An early advantage of AC is that the power-wasting resistors used in DC locomotives for speed control were not needed in an AC locomotive: multiple taps on the transformer can supply a range of voltages. Separate low-voltage transformer windings supply lighting and the motors driving auxiliary machinery. More recently,...
DC commutating electric motors, if fitted with laminated pole pieces, become universal motors because they can also operate on AC; reversing the current in both stator and rotor does not reverse the motor. But the now-standard AC distribution frequencies of 50 and 60 Hz caused difficulties with inductive reactance and ...
High-voltage AC overhead systems are not only for standard gauge national networks. The meter gauge Rhaetian Railway (RhB) and the neighbouring Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn (MGB) operate on 11 kV at 16.7 Hz frequency. Practice has proven that both Swiss and German 15 kV trains can operate under these lower voltages. The Rh...
In the United States, 25 Hz, a once-common industrial power frequency is used on Amtrak's 25 Hz traction power system at 12 kV on the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C. and New York City and on the Keystone Corridor between Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. SEPTA's 25 Hz traction power system uses the...
In the UK, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway pioneered overhead electrification of its suburban lines in London, London Bridge to Victoria being opened to traffic on 1 December 1909. Victoria to Crystal Palace via Balham and West Norwood opened in May 1911. Peckham Rye to West Norwood opened in June 1912. Fu...
Three-phase AC railway electrification was used in Italy, Switzerland and the United States in the early twentieth century. Italy was the major user, for lines in the mountainous regions of northern Italy from 1901 until 1976. The first lines were the Burgdorf-Thun line in Switzerland (1899), and the lines of the Ferro...
The first attempts to use standard-frequency single-phase AC were made in Hungary as far back as 1923, by the Hungarian Kálmán Kandó on the line between Budapest-Nyugati and Alag, using 16 kV at 50 Hz. The locomotives carried a four-pole rotating phase converter feeding a single traction motor of the polyphase inductio...
To prevent the risk of out-of-phase supplies mixing, sections of line fed from different feeder stations must be kept strictly isolated. This is achieved by Neutral Sections (also known as Phase Breaks), usually provided at feeder stations and midway between them although, typically, only half are in use at any time, t...
Modern electrification systems take AC energy from a power grid which is delivered to a locomotive and converted to a DC voltage to be used by traction motors. These motors may either be DC motors which directly use the DC or they may be 3-phase AC motors which require further conversion of the DC to 3-phase AC (using ...
In the Soviet Union, in the 1970s, a comparison was made between systems electrified at 3 kV DC and 25 kV AC (50 Hz). The results showed that percentage losses in the overhead wires (catenary and contact wires) was over 3 times greater for 3 kV DC than for 25 kV AC. But when the conversion losses were all taken into ac...
Newly electrified lines often show a "sparks effect", whereby electrification in passenger rail systems leads to significant jumps in patronage / revenue. The reasons may include electric trains being seen as more modern and attractive to ride, faster and smoother service, and the fact that electrification often goes h...
Network effects are a large factor with electrification. When converting lines to electric, the connections with other lines must be considered. Some electrifications have subsequently been removed because of the through traffic to non-electrified lines. If through traffic is to have any benefit, time consuming engine ...
Additionally, there are issues of connections between different electrical services, particularly connecting intercity lines with sections electrified for commuter traffic, but also between commuter lines built to different standards. This can cause electrification of certain connections to be very expensive simply bec...
Central station electricity can often be generated with higher efficiency than a mobile engine/generator. While the efficiency of power plant generation and diesel locomotive generation are roughly the same in the nominal regime, diesel motors decrease in efficiency in non-nominal regimes at low power while if an elect...
Energy sources unsuitable for mobile power plants, such as nuclear power, renewable hydroelectricity, or wind power can be used. According to widely accepted global energy reserve statistics, the reserves of liquid fuel are much less than gas and coal (at 42, 167 and 416 years respectively). Most countries with large r...
In the former Soviet Union, electric traction eventually became somewhat more energy-efficient than diesel. Partly due to inefficient generation of electricity in the USSR (only 20.8% thermal efficiency in 1950 vs. 36.2% in 1975), in 1950 diesel traction was about twice as energy efficient as electric traction (in term...
Besides increased efficiency of power plants, there was an increase in efficiency (between 1950 and 1973) of the railway utilization of this electricity with energy-intensity dropping from 218 to 124 kwh/10,000 gross tonne-km (of both passenger and freight trains) or a 43% drop. Since energy-intensity is the inverse of...
The Spanish language is the second most spoken language in the United States. There are 45 million Hispanophones who speak Spanish as a first or second language in the United States, as well as six million Spanish language students. Together, this makes the United States of America the second largest Hispanophone count...
The Spanish language has been present in what is now the United States since the 16th and 17th centuries, with the arrival of Spanish colonization in North America that would later become the states of Florida, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and California. The Spanish explorers explored areas of 4...
Spanish was the language spoken by the first permanent European settlers in North America. Spanish arrived in the territory of the modern United States with Ponce de León in 1513. In 1565, the Spaniards, by way of Juan Ponce de León, founded St. Augustine, Florida, and as of the early 1800s, it became the oldest contin...
In 1821, after Mexico's War of Independence from Spain, Texas was part of the United Mexican States as the state of Coahuila y Tejas. A large influx of Americans soon followed, originally with the approval of Mexico's president. In 1836, the now largely "American" Texans, fought a war of independence from the central g...
After the Mexican War of Independence from Spain also, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, western Colorado and southwestern Wyoming became part of the Mexican territory of Alta California and most of New Mexico, western Texas, southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, and Oklahoma panhandle were part of the territory of ...
Through the force of sheer numbers, the English-speaking American settlers entering the Southwest established their language, culture, and law as dominant, to the extent it fully displaced Spanish in the public sphere; this is why the United States never developed bilingualism as Canada did. For example, the California...
For decades, the U.S. federal government strenuously tried to force Puerto Ricans to adopt English, to the extent of making them use English as the primary language of instruction in their high schools. It was completely unsuccessful, and retreated from that policy in 1948. Puerto Rico was able to maintain its Spanish ...
At over 5 million, Puerto Ricans are easily the 2nd largest Hispanic group. Of all major Hispanic groups, Puerto Ricans are the least likely to be proficient in Spanish, but millions of Puerto Rican Americans living in the U.S. mainland nonetheless are fluent in Spanish. Puerto Ricans are natural-born U.S. citizens, an...
Immigration to the United States of Spanish-speaking Cubans began because of Cuba's political instability upon achieving independence. The deposition of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship and the ascension of Fidel Castro's government in 1959 increased Cuban immigration to the United States, hence there are some one mill...
Likewise the migration of Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans also began as a result of political instability during the end of the 1970s and the 1980s. The uprising of the Sandinista revolution which toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979 caused many Nicaraguans to migrate particularly from those opposing the Sandinistas. T...
The exodus of Salvadorans was a result of both economic and political problems. The largest immigration wave occurred as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s, in which 20–30% of El Salvador's population emigrated. About 50%, or up to 500,000 of those who escaped headed to the United States, which was alrea...
As civil wars engulfed several Central American countries in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled their country and came to the United States. Between 1980 and 1990, the Salvadoran immigrant population in the United States increased nearly fivefold from 94,000 to 465,000. The number of Salvadoran immigr...
Until the 20th century, there was no clear record of the number of Venezuelans who emigrated to the United States. Between the 18th and early 19th centuries, there were many European immigrants who went to Venezuela, only to later migrate to the United States along with their children and grandchildren who born and/or ...
In the 2000s, more Venezuelans opposing the economic and political policies of president Hugo Chávez migrated to the United States (mostly to Florida, but New York City and Houston are other destinations). The largest concentration of Venezuelans in the United States is in South Florida, especially the suburbs of Doral...
Although the United States has no de jure official language, English is the dominant language of business, education, government, religion, media, culture, civil society, and the public sphere. Virtually all state and federal government agencies and large corporations use English as their internal working language, esp...
The state (like its southwestern neighbors) has had close linguistic and cultural ties with Mexico. The state outside the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 was part of the New Mexico Territory until 1863, when the western half was made into the Arizona Territory. The area of the former Gadsden Purchase contained a majority of S...
New Mexico is commonly thought to have Spanish as an official language alongside English because of its wide usage and legal promotion of Spanish in the state; however, the state has no official language. New Mexico's laws are promulgated bilingually in Spanish and English. Although English is the state government's pa...
Because of its relative isolation from other Spanish-speaking areas over most of its 400-year existence, New Mexico Spanish, and in particular the Spanish of northern New Mexico and Colorado has retained many elements of 16th- and 17th-century Spanish and has developed its own vocabulary. In addition, it contains many ...
In Texas, English is the state's de facto official language (though it lacks de jure status) and is used in government. However, the continual influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants increased the import of Spanish in Texas. Texas's counties bordering Mexico are mostly Hispanic, and consequently, Spanish is commonly spok...