We explain what resources are and what their essential characteristics are. In addition, the natural, economic and literary resources.
What are resources?
In very general terms, a resource It is an instrument, a means or a good that serves, in a given context, to achieve an objective proposed. It is a word of very common use in many fields, especially in the economic and industrial, and that comes etymologically from Latin recursus, composed of the prefix re– (“backwards” or “again”) and cursus (“Career”, “course”).
Resources are always an essential part of an undertaking or a project of any kind, and in general they usually have three essential characteristics:
- They have a utility, which is determined by their very nature and by the context in which they are required.
- They’re available, that is, the human being can go to them, either directly or indirectly, and with more or less work.
- They are consumed or depleted in their use, especially when it comes to inputs intended to feed a transformation process, such as raw materials.
Also: Technological resources
Natural resources
Natural resources are the set of elements available in the natural environment that allow the subsistence and development of living beings, serving as an energy supply for their biological needs. In addition, they have productive potential, that is, they can serve as raw material for some type of industry, undergoing certain controlled transformation processes.
Examples of natural resources are oxygen, sunlight, water, but also the wood of trees, the fruits they produce, or the meat of farm animals. Many of them arise spontaneously, without the need for human intervention, while others require certain harvesting or harvesting mechanisms to be economically useful.
Natural resources can be classified into two, according to their availability and depletion margin:
- Renewable resources, those whose natural replenishment rate is so fast that they can be replenished faster than human beings consume them, so that they are not exhausted in their use. For example: wind, sunlight, hydroelectric power, or certain agricultural products.
- Nonrenewable resources, those whose natural replacement rate is so slow that if they are consumed indiscriminately, they run the risk of being exhausted. For example: oil, uranium, mineral coal, natural gas and other hydrocarbons.
Economic resources
In the field of economics, resources are considered all goods or services, tangible or not, required to feed the production process, either raw material or secondary inputs. For this reason, they are considered part of the productive factors that companies or organizations of different types require.
In general, economic resources are characterized by having a specific objective within the production chain, being transferable, easily accessible and given in limited quantities. Some of them come from nature, others from different industrial processes, and others from society itself, and therefore can be classified in two different ways:
According to your availability, can be differentiated between:
- Scarce resources: When their number is finite and they run the risk of being depleted, thus requiring strict administration.
- Abundant resources: When they exist in large quantities, they allow for continuous replenishment.
- Super abundant resources: When they exist in virtually unlimited quantities, at least from the point of view of human life.
According to your property, can be differentiated between:
- Own resources: When they are generated by the company or organization itself.
- Foreign resources: When they come from third parties.
They are examples of economic resources: raw materials, electrical energy, labor, tools and work machinery, etc.
Literary resources
In writing and literature, literary resources are known as all of the writing procedures available to an author, with which they can enhance the expressiveness and beauty of their work, since they consist of original handling of the language (oral or written).
Literary resources can be, in general, of three types, according to the type of procedure they involve in the language:
- Phonic literary resources, when they work with the sound of language, that is, when they modify their musicality, their rhythm or their cadence, in order to achieve more original sound effects. They are examples of them: alliteration, onomatopoeia or paronomasia.
- Grammar literary resources, when they work with the morphosyntax (morphology and syntax) of the language, altering the common order of the sentences or interrupting their customary structure. Examples of them are: anaphora, concatenation, asyndeton and polysyndeton.
- Semantic literary resources, when they work with the meaning of words, rather than with their form. They are examples of them: the antithesis, the apostrophe, the metaphor, the hyperbaton or the hyperbole.