AFGHANISTAN!

INTRODUCTION
Afghanistan is a beautiful country located in south central Asia. It is in a war at the moment. But it still has great food, lots of festivals and famous people and places. Afghanistan also has a great government.

CULTURE
Afghanistan has a big variety of foods, some of those are naan bread, the most eaten bread in Afghanistan, lamb kebab with yellow saffron rice and Bonjan Salad, a spicy eggplant salad. Afghans fast during Ramadan, which is the ninth month of the Muslim year. It is October in our calendar. This means the Afghans dont eat food for the day so most of the restaurants are closed. They do this because they want to show god that they are devoted. The reason they observe this is in the month Ramadan is because that is when Muhammad first got contact from god. Just like us they celebrate Labour Day and they also celebrate Jeshyn-Afghan day, which is their in dependence day.

There are lots of languages in Afghanistan but the main two languages are Pashto and Dari. To say hello in both languages is salaam. Although they dont speak Arabic the Pashto and Dari alphabet is Arabic. Afghans play lots of sports like cricket, soccer, basketball, volleyball, golf, handball, boxing, taekwondo, weightlifting, bodybuilding, track and field, skating, bowling, snooker, chess, and other sports. At the moment, cricket and soccer are the two most popular sports in Afghanistan. In the Olympics 2012 Afghanistan got one bronze medal in taekwondo and thats it
they had a team of six all of them were doing different sports except they had two competing in taekwondo. The national sport is Buzkashi or Kokpar how you play is ride horses while trying

to throw a headless goat into a goal with their bare hands, this game can go on for days.

The official religion in Afghanistan is Islam. But there are a few Christians, Buddhist, Parsi, Sikhs and Hindus as well. Islamic religion has lots of rules that you have to follow. Women are not treated very well in the Islamic religion so they have a strict dress code it depends how strict the area is on the dress code if they are very strict you will have to wear a berka which covers your body from head to toe covering your face so the wearer has to look through material to see, if the area is not that strict you are most likely to only have to wear

a hijab just covering the hair. These are some Muslims praying Muslims pray regularly normally five times a day by moving their hands and body while repeating words while facing Mecca. The five pillars are pray five times a, day participate in Ramadan, visit the holy city of Mecca, promise to only pray to Allah and give money to the poor if you can afford it.

HISTORY/POLITICS
This is the Afghanistan flag. The meaning of the colours is, black represents the past, red represents the blood in the war for Afghanistans independence, green means hope, agricultural richness and Islam and the emblem is the coat of arms. Afghanistan has had twenty-one different flags from 1709 to this day. On the years 1826 to 1880 they didnt even have an official flag.

The Afghan war started on the 7th of October 2001 and is still going on to this day. It all started when the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and France thought there was some bad people hiding in Afghanistan like Osama Bin Laden, but when they got there the Taliban (the people who were helping them hide) did not like it so they started fighting and they still havent stopped.

Afghanistan president is Hamid Karzai. He became president on the 22 December 2001

and is currently the twelfth president. After the Taliban lost its place in the government he was automatically put in as president and has been re-elected twice with for five year terms.

He does not like the Taliban and is helping everyone fight them. Also the Afghans have found 1 trillion dollars worth of iron, copper and gold. So they are a rich country but

they used to be quite poor. The Americans helped them find it so they will want some of the money.

Mr Abdul Shakoor Rashad is a famous poet, professor, Historian, Researcher, Writer who lived from 19341978.Abdul graduated from school when he was just 12 and became a teacher when he was 13.He spoke lots of different languages fluently. He went to India in 1948 and wrote a book while he was there and called Lodi Pashtoon.

ENVIRONMENT AND GEOGRAPHY

Afghanistan has a wide range of animals from snow leopards to rhesus monkeys. There are lots of mammals in Afghanistan one of them is a brown bear. Brown bears are very big and the adult bears normally weigh about 635 kilograms. The main food in their diet is salmon the salmon, but you should still stay away from the bears because they might eat you. They are no were near being extinct. There are also a lot of plants in Afghanistan like the Artemisia annua it is also called other names like sweet wormwood, sweet annie, sweet sagewort or annual wormwood. The Artemisia annua was used by Chinese herbalist in ancient time as a cure for fever. However it stopped being used after a while because it wasnt popular anymore because there were better things. But in the 1970 it was found again in the book Chinese Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency Treatments (340 AD).

The size of Afghanistan is 647,500 km which is about the size of Texas. The capital of Afghanistan is Kabul located in east central Afghanistan.

The population of Afghanistan is 30.4 million in the year 2012 going up and down with deaths and births, the growth rate is 2.63 percent. Using that growth rate in the year 2025 the population will be 50,252,227 and 2050 it will be 81,933,479.

ECONOMY
The currency in Afghanistan is the Afghani which is like a dollar here and a pul is like cents. Afghanistan does not have many tourists at all because there is a war going on and if you went you have a chance of being killed, so I dont think anyone would like to go there. But they do get people coming from other countries the soldiers. The health in Afghanistan is not the best it could be, it is actually quite bad. Afghanistan is the 15th least developed country. But in the late 2001 the United Nations started to slowly make a improvement to the health care of Afghanistan.

Dary-ye Qondz is in north east Afghanistan it has a lot of natural gas and minerals to offer. Dary-ye Qondz is farmed a lot because it has fertile soil mainly by Tadzhiks who live in villages that resemble little forts. Before getting badly damaged 1974 soviet invasion Daryye Qondz was one of the most heavily populated cities in Afghanistan.

THANKS FOR LISTENING

BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://dictionary.reverso.net/italian-english/Afghanistan http://afghanistan.saarctourism.org/festivals.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page <file://C:\Program Files\Microsoft Student\Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2009 DVD\ENCARTA.EXE> http://www.central-asia.info/afghanistan/famous-afghans http://president.gov.af/en http://www.london2012.com/country/afghanistan/athletes/index.html