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Texas is a state located in the Southern and Western regions of the United States of America. With an area of 268,581 square miles (695,622 km²) which includes 254 counties, the state is second-largest in both area and population—behind Alaska and California, respectively. About half the state's population resides in either the Dallas–Fort Worth or Houston metropolitan areas.
The state's name derives from a word in the Caddoan language of the Hasinai: tecas, or tejas; meaning "those who are friends," "friends," or "allies." Because of the difficulty of pronouncing Tejas in English the name was eventually changed to Texas, similarly to the county of Bejar to Bexar County, where San Antonio is located. Texas declared its independence from Mexico in 1836 and existed as the independent Republic of Texas for nearly a decade. In 1845, it joined the United States as the 28th state.
Texas is internationally known for its energy and aeronautics industries, and for its use of ship channel at the Port of Houston—the largest in the U.S. in international commerce and the sixth-largest port in the world. The state is home to numerous Fortune 500 companies located in major metropolitan areas. The Texas Medical Center contains the world's largest concentration of research and healthcare institutions.
The geography of Texas spans a wide range of features and timelines. Texas is the southernmost part of the Great Plains, which ends in the south against the folded Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico. It is in the south-central part of the United States of America. It is considered to form part of the U.S. South and also part of the U.S. Southwest.
The Rio Grande, Red River and Sabine River all provide natural state lines where Texas borders Oklahoma on the north, Louisiana and Arkansas on the east, and New Mexico and the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas to the south.
By residents, the state is generally divided into North Texas, East Texas, Central Texas, South Texas, and West Texas, but according to the Texas Almanac, Texas has four major physical regions: Gulf Coastal Plains, Interior Lowlands, Great Plains, and The Basin and Range Province. This is the difference between human geography and physical geography.
Some regions of Texas are associated with the South more than the Southwest (primarily East Texas and North Texas), while other regions share more similarities with the Southwest than the South (primarily West Texas and South Texas). The Texas Panhandle and South Plains regions don't fit either category; they seem to have more in common with parts of the Midwestern United States. The size of Texas prohibits easy categorization of the entire state wholly in any recognized region of the United States; geographic, economic, and even cultural diversity between regions of the state preclude treating Texas as a region in its own right.
Texas is the southernmost part of the Great Plains, which ends in the south against the folded Sierra Madre Oriental of Mexico. It is mostly sedimentary rocks, with east Texas underlain by a Cretaceous and younger sequence of sediments, the trace of ancient shorelines east and south until the active continental margin of the Gulf of Mexico is met. This sequence is built atop the subsided crest of the Appalachian Mountains—Ouachita Mountains—Marathon Mountains zone of Pennsylvanian continental collision, which collapsed when rifting in Jurassic time opened the Gulf of Mexico. West from this orogenic crest, which is buried beneath the Dallas—Waco—Austin—San Antonio trend, the sediments are Permian and Triassic in age. Oil is found in the Cretaceous sediments in the east, the Permian sediments in the west, and along the Gulf coast and out on the Texas continental shelf. A few exposures of Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rocks are found in the central and western parts of the state, and Oligocene volcanic rocks are found in far west Texas, in the Big Bend area. A blanket of Miocene sediments known as the Ogallala formation in the western high plains region is an important aquifer. Texas has no active or dormant volcanoes and few earthquakes, being situated far from an active plate tectonic boundary. (The Big Bend area is the most seismically active; however, the area is sparsely populated and suffers minimal damages and injuries, and no known fatalities have been attributed to a Texas earthquake.)
The large size of the state of Texas and its location at the intersection of several climate zones gives the state highly variable weather. In general, though, there are three main climatic zones: the humid subtropical climate (Koppen Cfa) of the eastern half of Texas, the temperate semi-arid (Koppen BSk) steppe climate of the northwestern part, including the Panhandle, and the subtropical steppe climate (nearly an arid desert climate, Koppen BSh) of the southern parts of West Texas, particularly around El Paso.
The Panhandle of the state is cooler in the winter than North Texas or the Gulf Coast. Different regions of Texas experience vastly different precipitation patterns: El Paso averages as little as 7.8 inches of rain per year while the average annual precipitation is 59 inches in Orange, Texas. Moderate snowfall often falls in the winter months in the north. Maximum temperatures in the summer months average from the 80s °F in the mountains of West Texas and on Galveston Island to around 100 °F in the Rio Grande Valley. Nighttime summer temperatures range from the upper 50s °F in the West Texas mountains to 80 °F in Galveston.
Thunderstorms are more common in the eastern and northern part of the state, although they are far from rare elsewhere in the state. Tornadoes are common in Texas, with the state averaging around 139 a year, more than any other state. Tornadoes are most frequent in the northern half of the state from April-July, although tornadoes can happen anywhere in the state, except perhaps for the Big Bend area.
Metropolitan areas by population
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