All Americans know that much of our coffee comes from Brazil. Most have heard of marvelous Rio de Janeiro, one of the beauty k queens of the earth—a city compressed between ocean and granite hills with dazzling white beaches, mosaic sidewalks, scores of night clubs, merry-making sambas, and a lavish Carnival. Quite a number have read of its awesome new capital Brasília, a fabulous creation of glass and concrete built in the middle of nowhere. Some are aware that it is a vast country, our largest and most powerful Latin American neighbor, with huge natural resources and a mushrooming growth in population: its high-grade iron ore reserves are among the richest in the world; its population is estimated to be 80,000,000, the major portion distributed along the Atlantic seaboard. Brazil, the fourth largest country in the world, occupies approximately one-half of South America, with a surface of 3,287,195 square miles, much of it unexplored, and has borders with all the countries of that continent excepting Ecuador and Chile.
Estimate of rock mass stability in surface–borehole mining of high-grade iron ore
