Resources

We explain what resources are and what their essential characteristics are. In addition, 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 that is very commonly used in numerous areas, especially in economics and industry, and comes etymologically from Latin. resourcescomposed of the prefix re– (“backwards” or “again”) and courses (“career”, “course”).

Resources are always an essential part of a venture or a project of any type, and in general they usually have three essential characteristics:

• They have a utilitywhich is determined by their very nature and by the context in which they are required.
• are availablethat is, human beings can go to them, either directly or indirectly, and with more or less work.
• They are consumed or exhausted in their useespecially 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 beingsserving 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 farmed animals. Many of them arise spontaneously, without the need for human intervention, while others require certain collection or harvest mechanisms to be economically useful.

Natural resources can be classified into two, according to their availability and margin of depletion:

• renewable resources, those whose natural replacement rate is so fast that they can be replaced faster than human beings consume them, so that they are not exhausted in their use. For example: wind, sunlight, hydroelectric energy or certain agricultural products.
• non-renewable resources, those whose natural replacement rate is so slow that if they are consumed indiscriminately, they run the risk of exhaustion. For example: oil, uranium, 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 processwhether raw materials or secondary inputs. For this reason, they are considered part of the productive factors required by companies or organizations of different types.

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 availabilitycan be differentiated between:

• Scarce resources: When their number is finite and they are at risk of being exhausted, thus requiring strict management.
• Abundant resources: When they exist in large quantities, they allow for continuous replenishment.
• Superabundant resources: When they exist in virtually unlimited quantities, at least from the point of view of human life.

According to your propertycan be differentiated between:

• Own resources: When they are generated by the company or organization itself.
• External resources: When they come from third parties.

Examples of economic resources are: raw materials, electrical energy, labor, work tools and machinery, etc.

Literary resources

In writing and literature, literary resources are known as the set of writing procedures available to an author, with which he can enhance the expressiveness and beauty of his worksince they consist of original language management (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 resourceswhen they work with the sound of language, that is, when they modify its musicality, its rhythm or its cadence, to achieve more original sound effects. Examples of them are: alliteration, onomatopoeia or paronomasia.
• Grammatical Literary Resourceswhen they work with the morphosyntax (morphology and syntax) of the language, altering the common order of sentences or interrupting their usual structure. Examples of them are: anaphora, concatenation, asyndeton and polysyndeton.
• Semantic literary resourceswhen they work with the meaning of words, rather than their form. Examples of them are: antithesis, apostrophe, metaphor, hyperbaton or hyperbole.

References

• “Resource” in Wikipedia.
• “Natural resource” on Wikipedia.
• “Resource” in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
• “Natural resources, depletion of” at CONICET Mendoza (Argentina).
• “Definition of literary resources and their uses” in UNIR, The university on the Internet.
• “Economic resources” in Web and Companies.