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Introduction

Describe and explain how the improvement in transport over the last 50 years has increased the global interactions between countries (10 marks) Transportation is one of the main influences of the development of global interactions between countries. Over the years, transportation allows urban areas to expand, permit regional economic development and overcome the effect of distance -further developing universal communication. There are many forms of transport -road, rail, ocean, air and pipelines. In this essay, by comparing both ocean and air transportation and analysing the various advantages, we can see how the improvements in transport over the last 50 years has increased the global interactions between countries. First of all, although water transportation is considered to be quite expensive, however, it is fairly at a reasonable price as ocean shipping is able to bear more cargos than other forms of transport. ...read more.

Middle

This allows shipping to be more dynamic and proficient -making more countries wanting to send their cargos to the hub, thus, increasing global interactions. Besides that, another new improvement of the ocean transport is containerisation where goods are packed into containers at factories and taken by trains or lorries to the container port where they are easily and quickly loaded onto ships. It is considered to have been one of the major driving forces in the process of globalisation. For example, Singapore is one of the most popular countries for ocean transportation. Since Sir Stamford Raffles' days, there are now 400 shipping lines with more than 600 ports worldwide in the country. It has been improving efficiently ever since with various modern handling equipment enhancements that takes less than a second to move 1 tonne of cargo. ...read more.

Conclusion

With the improvement of air transportation, access to more airline routes which allows passengers to have a wider range of choice to the countries they want to visit and lower fares are available -encouraging more people to travel to other countries by air, thus increasing global interactions. At Heathrow Airport, London, which has been very advanced up to date, the establishment of the new terminal enables the airport to handle extra 30 million passengers annually. This definitely attracts more passengers from all around the world as it is now bigger and newer -possibly with new facilities which make travelling more comfortable and relaxing. In addition to that, the expansion is shown to create extra 6000 job opportunities as well as maintaining the existing 8000 direct and 60000 indirect jobs in the airport -attracting people from other countries to be interested to apply for a position in the airport, thus, increasing global interactions between countries. ...read more.

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our International Baccalaureate Geography section.