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Shorthand is where a word is written in a shorter way because it is quicker and easier to type. It is also done to fit more text into a limited space. |
Internet slang uses many acronyms because they are quicker and easier to type. They are often shorthand for common phrases and idioms, but they can show somebody's emotions and their certainty. |
Leet speak (written as: L33T or 1337) is the most common language on MMORPGs because rude words are not stopped by filters. This language is changing all the time because new words are made and used. A lot of the words use numbers instead of letters but some were made because of typing errors which are now done on purpose. Also, some suffixes are used, such as "-age" and "-ness". |
Some of the numbers and symbols used instead of letters are in the table below. |
Nauru |
Nauru, ( ) officially the Republic of Nauru, is a sovereign island nation located in the Micronesian South Pacific. Its nearest neighbour is Banaba Island in the Republic of Kiribati, due east. Nauru is the world's smallest island nation, covering just , the smallest independent republic, and the only republican state in the world without an official capital. With 10,670 residents, it is the third least-populated country after Vatican City and Tuvalu. |
Nauru is a phosphate rock island, and its primary economic activity since 1907 has been the export of phosphate mined from the island. English and Nauruan are the official languages of Nauru. The current president of Nauru is Lionel Aingimea. |
Nauru is a oval-shaped island in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, south of the Equator. The island is surrounded by a coral reef, which is exposed at low tide and dotted with pinnacles. The presence of the reef has prevented the establishment of a seaport, although channels in the reef allow small boats access to the island. A fertile coastal strip wide lies inland from the beach. |
Coral cliffs surround Nauru's central plateau. The highest point of the plateau, called the Command Ridge, is above sea level. The only fertile areas on Nauru are on the narrow coastal belt, where coconut palms flourish. The land surrounding Buada Lagoon supports bananas, pineapples, vegetables, pandanus trees, and indigenous hardwoods such as the tomano tree. |
Nauru was one of three great phosphate rock islands in the Pacific Ocean (the others were Banaba (Ocean Island) in Kiribati and Makatea in French Polynesia). The phosphate reserves on Nauru are now almost entirely depleted. Phosphate mining in the central plateau has left a barren terrain of jagged limestone pinnacles up to high. Mining has stripped and devastated about 80 per cent of Nauru's land area, and has also affected the surrounding Exclusive Economic Zone; 40 per cent of marine life is estimated to have been killed by silt and phosphate runoff. |
There are only about 60 recorded vascular plant species native to the island, none of which are endemic. Coconut farming, mining, and introduced species have caused serious disturbance to the native vegetation. There are no native land mammals, but there are native insects, land crabs, and birds, including the endemic Nauru Reed Warbler. The Polynesian rat, cats, dogs, pigs, and chickens have been introduced to Nauru from ships. |
There are limited natural fresh water resources on Nauru. Rooftop storage tanks collect rainwater, but the islanders are mostly dependent on three desalination plants housed at Nauru's Utilities Agency. Nauru's climate is hot and very humid year-round because of its proximity to the equator and the ocean. Nauru is hit by monsoon rains between November and February, but does not typically experience cyclones. Annual rainfall is highly variable and is influenced by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, with several significant recorded droughts. The temperature on Nauru ranges between and during the day and between and at night. |
As an island, Nauru is vulnerable to climate and sea level change. Nauru is the seventh most global warming threatened nation due to flooding. At least 80 per cent of the land of Nauru is well elevated, but this area will be uninhabitable until the phosphate mining rehabilitation programme is implemented. |
Nauru is divided into fourteen administrative districts which are grouped into eight electoral constituencies. |
Noun |
A noun is a kind of word (see part of speech) that is usually the name of something such as a person, place, thing, animal, or idea. In English, nouns can be singular or plural. |
Nouns often need a word called an article or (like "the" or "that"). These words usually do not go with other kinds of words like verbs or adverbs. (For example, people do not also describe nouns). In English, there are more nouns than any other kind of word. |
Every language in the world has nouns, but they are not always used in the same ways. They also can have different properties in different languages. In some other languages, nouns do not change for singular and plural, and sometimes there is no word for "the". |
Examples of nouns: "time, people, way, year, government, day, world, life, work, part, number, house, system, company, end, party, information". |
The word noun comes from the Latin "nomen" meaning "name." Words like nouns were described in early days by the Sanskrit grammarian and ancient Greeks like Dionysios Thrax. |
In English sentences, nouns can be used as a subject, object, or complement. They often come after prepositions, as the 'object of preposition'. |
Nouns can sometimes describe other nouns (such as a soccer ball). When they do this, they are called modifiers or adjuncts. |
There are also verb forms that can be used in the same way as nouns (such as 'I like "running".') These are called "verbals" or "verbal nouns", and include "participles" (which can also be adjectives) and "infinitives". |
Nouns are classified into common and proper. Pronouns have commonly been considered a different part of speech from nouns, but in the past some grammars have included them as nouns as do many modern linguists. |
Proper nouns (also called proper name) are specific names. Examples of proper nouns are: "London, John, God, October, Mozart, Saturday, Coke, Mr. Brown, Atlantic Ocean." Proper nouns are individual things with names, not general nouns. |
Proper nouns begin with an (capital) letter in English and many other languages that use the Roman alphabet. (However, in German, all nouns begin with an upper case letter.) The word "I" is really a pronoun, although it is capitalized in English, like a proper noun. |
Some common nouns (see below) can also be used as proper nouns. For example, someone might be named 'Tiger Smith' -- even though he is not a tiger or a smith. |
Common nouns are general names. Sometimes the same word can be either a common noun or a proper noun, depending on how it is used; for example: |
In English and many other languages, nouns have 'number'. But some nouns are only singular (such as "furniture, physics") and others are only plural (such as "clothes, police"). Also, some nouns are countable (for example, "one piece, two pieces") but others are uncountable (for example, we do not say "one furniture, two furnitures"). |
The plural form of most nouns is created simply by adding the letter(s) -(e)s. |
Despite plural forms being written using the letter(s) -(e)s, the pronunciation of the letter(s) will pronounced as /-s/, /-z/, or /-ız/ depending on which type of phoneme, or unique sound, comes before it. These variations of the plural morpheme are called allomorphs. |
Some dictionaries list "busses" as an acceptable plural for "bus". Presumably, this is because the plural "buses" looks like it ought to rhyme with the plural of "fuse," which is "fuses." "Buses" is still listed as the preferable plural form. "Busses" is the plural for "buss," a seldom used word for "kiss." |
There are several nouns that have irregular plural forms. Plurals formed in this way are sometimes called mutated (or mutating) plurals. |
Many of the above irregular plural forms stem from Old English, which had more complex rules for making plural forms. |
And, finally, there are nouns that maintain their Latin or Greek form in the plural. |
Nouns are words for things, and since things can be possessed, nouns can also change to show possession in grammar. In English, we usually add an apostrophe and an "s" to nouns to make them "possessive", or sometimes just an apostrophe when there is already an "s" at the end, like this: |
Most adjectives become nouns by adding the suffix -ness. Example: Take the adjective 'natural', add 'ness' to get 'naturalness', a noun. To see a list of 100 adjectives used in Basic English, click here. |
A noun phrase is a phrase where the head word is a noun. In English, the word order of most noun phrases is that determiners, adjectives, and modifying nouns in respective order must appear before the head word, and relative clauses must appear after the head word. |
Nature |
The words nature and natural are used for all the things that are normally not made by humans. Things like weather, organisms, landforms, celestial bodies and much more are part of nature. Scientists study the way the parts of nature work. Things that have been made by people are said to be man-made or called artifacts. |
There are natural sciences that study different parts of nature, for example the science of ecology is about plants and animals as a whole, while biology studies every type of living thing. |
From one point of view, humans are a prime example of nature, and are the most widely studied natural inhabitants of the planet earth. Humans interact with each other in their natural environment on a day-to-day basis. Every part of nature everything from the air outside to the dirt on the ground is interdependent. Medicine studies humans in health and sickness. |
From another point of view, humans and nature can be said to be in conflict. Nature is often seen by humans as natural resources. People cut down trees, mine ores, and grow crops. Fires, cars, and factories make a lot of smoke and harm many places. People who like to leave nature unharmed and those who feel they need to use more of nature often fight about what they should do. In the modern world, with many more people and many big cities, these problems are becoming more serious. |
Nature, in the broadest sense, means the physical world as a whole. This is the meaning that physics, the study of nature (etymologically), takes. |
A useful definition of "natural" is |
Natural resource |
A natural resource is what people can use which comes from the natural environment. Examples of natural resources are air, water, wood, oil, wind energy, natural gas, iron, and coal. |
The dividing line between natural resources and man-made resources is not clear-cut. Hydro-electric energy is not a natural resource because people use turbines to convert the energy from moving water. Petroleum and iron ores are natural, but need work to make them into usable refined oil and steel. Atomic energy comes from metallic nuclear fuels, like fissionable uranium and plutonium, but natural rocks need technical work to make them into these nuclear fuels. |
We often say there are two sorts of natural resources: renewable resources and non-renewable resources. |
Most natural resources are limited. This means they will eventually run out. A perpetual resource has a never-ending supply. Some examples of perpetual resources include solar energy, tidal energy, and wind energy. There may be a limit to how much can be taken in a given day or year, but that amount can be taken again next day or next year. |
Non perpetual resources include Fossil fuels such as Petroleum,coal ,etc. They have a limit of usage. |
Some of the things influencing supply of resources include whether it is able to be recycled, and the availability of suitable substitutes for the material. Non-renewable resources cannot be recycled. For example, fossil fuels cannot be recycled. |
The demand for resources can change with new technology, new needs, and new economics (e.g. changes in cost of the resources). Some material can go completely out of use, if people do not want it any more. Demand of many natural resources is very high, but availability of some, such as precious metals, is very low. |
Different places have different natural resources. When people do not have a certain resource they need, they can either replace it with another resource, or trade with another country to get the resource. People have sometimes fought to have them (for example, spices, water, arable farmland, gold, or petroleum). |
When people do not have some resources, their quality of life can get lower. So, people protect resources. When they can not get clean water, people may become ill; if there is not enough wood, trees will be cut and the forest will disappear over time (deforestation); if there are not enough fish in a sea, people can die of starvation. Renewable resources include crops, wind, hydroelectric power, fish, and sunlight. Many people carefully save their natural resources so that others can use them in future. |
Negentropy |
Negentropy is reverse entropy. It means things becoming more in order. By 'order' is meant organisation, structure and function: the opposite of randomness or chaos. One example of negentropy is a star system such as the Solar System. Another example is life. |
As a general rule, everything in the universe tends towards entropy. Star systems eventually become dead. All energy has gone, and everything in the system is "at the temperature of the surrounding space". The opposite of entropy is negentropy. It is a temporary condition in which certain things are hotter and more highly organised than the surrounding space. This is the second law of thermodynamics: |
Life is considered to be negentropic because it converts things which have less order, such as food, into things with more order, such as cells in the body, tissues, and organs. In doing so, it gives off heat. Another example of negentropic things are societies, or social systems, because they take disorderly things such as communications, and make them more orderly and useful. |
North America |
North America is a large continent in the Northern and Western Hemispheres of Earth. It is to the east of the Pacific Ocean, the west of the Atlantic Ocean, the south of the Arctic Ocean, and it is the northern part of the Americas. The southernmost part is Central America. It is the third largest continent in the world, after Asia and Africa. North America has a population of around 371 million and is the 4th most populous continent in the world. |
Hundreds of millions of years ago, North America was part of a larger ancient supercontinent named Laurasia. A few million years ago, a new land bridge arose and connected North America to South America. Beringia connected North America to Siberia a few times during ice ages in the past 20,000 years. North America has lots of hot and nice tropical islands such as the Bahamas. North America is currently north of South America. |
Neptune |
Neptune is the eighth and last planet from the Sun in the Solar System. It is an ice giant. It is the fourth largest planet and third heaviest. Neptune has five rings which are hard to see from the Earth. It is seventeen times heavier than Earth and is a little bit heavier than Uranus. It was named after the Roman God of the Sea. |
Neptune's atmosphere is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium. It also contains small amounts of methane which makes the planet appear blue. Neptune's blue color is much darker compared to the color of Uranus. This planet also has the strongest winds of any planet in the Solar System, measured as high as 2,100 km/h or 1,300 mph. |
Neptune was discovered by the astronomers Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams. They were both honored for the discovery. The planet was the first to be discovered by mathematical calculations instead of using a telescope. In 1821, it was found that Uranus' orbit had some differences from its expected orbit. So astronomers searched for another new planet. |
The planet was visited by only one spacecraft, "Voyager 2" on 25 August 1989. Neptune once had a huge storm known as the "Great Dark Spot" which was discovered in 1989 by Voyager 2. However, the dark spot was not seen in 1994, and new spots were found since then. It is not known why the dark spot disappeared. Visits by more space probes have been proposed. |
The first possible sighting of Neptune is thought to be by Galileo as his drawings showed Neptune near Jupiter. But Galileo was not credited for the discovery since he thought Neptune was a "fixed star" instead of a planet. Because of Neptune's slow movement across the sky, Galileo's small telescope was not strong enough to detect Neptune as a planet. |
In 1821, Alexis Bouvard published the astronomical tables of the orbit of Uranus. Later observations showed that Uranus was moving in an irregular way in its orbit. Therefore some astronomers thought of another large body. In 1843, John Couch Adams calculated the orbit of an eighth planet that would possibly be influencing the orbit of Uranus. He sent his calculations to Sir George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, who asked Adams for an explanation. In 1846, Urbain Le Verrier, who was not working with Adams, made his own calculations but also failed to get much attention from French astronomers. However, in the same year, John Herschel began to support the mathematical method and encouraged James Challis to search for the planet. After much delay, Challis began his unwilling search in July 1846. Meanwhile, Le Verrier had convinced Johann Gottfried Galle to search for the planet. |
Heinrich d'Arrest, a student at the Berlin Observatory, suggested the following. A newly drawn map of the sky in the region of Le Verrier's predicted area could be compared with the current sky. It was needed to look for the change of position of a planet, compared to a fixed star. Neptune was then discovered that very night on 23 September 1846, within 1° (one degree (angle)) of where Le Verrier had predicted it to be, and about 10° from Adams' prediction. Challis later found out that he had seen the planet twice in August, failing to recognize it due to his careless work approach. |
When Neptune was discovered, there was also a lot of arguing between the French and the British. It was about who was to deserve credit for the discovery. Later, an international agreement decided that both Le Verrier and Adams together deserved credit. However, historians reviewed the topic after the rediscovery in 1998 of the "Neptune papers" (historical documents from the Royal Greenwich Observatory). It had seemingly been stolen and kept by astronomer Olin Eggen for nearly three decades and was only rediscovered (in his ownership) shortly after his death. After reviewing the documents, some historians now think that Adams does not deserve equal credit with Le Verrier. |
Shortly after its discovery, Neptune was temporarily called "the planet exterior to Uranus" or "Le Verrier's planet". The first suggestion for a name came from Galle. He proposed the name "Janus". In England, Challis suggested the name "Oceanus". In France, Arago suggested that the new planet be called "Leverrier", a suggestion which was met with a lot of opposition outside France. French almanacs quickly reintroduced the name "Herschel" for "Uranus" and "Leverrier" for the new planet. |
Meanwhile, Adams suggested changing the name "Georgian" to "Uranus", while Leverrier (through the Board of Longitude) suggested "Neptune" for the new planet. Struve gave support of that name on 29 December 1846, to the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Soon "Neptune" was internationally agreed among many people. It was the official name for the new planet. In Roman mythology, Neptune was the god of the sea, identified with the Greek god, Poseidon. |
At 102.413kg, Neptune's mass puts the planet between Earth and the largest gas giants. Neptune has seventeen Earth masses but just 1/18th the mass of Jupiter. Neptune and Uranus are often considered to be part of a sub-class of a gas giant known as ""ice giants"." It is given their smaller size and big differences in composition compared to Jupiter and Saturn. In the search for extrasolar planets, Neptune has been used as a reference to determine the size and structure of the discovered planet. Some discovered planets that have similar masses like Neptune are often called "Neptunes." |
The atmosphere of Neptune is made up mostly of hydrogen, with a smaller amount of helium. A tiny amount of methane was also detected in the atmosphere. The methane gives Neptune its blue color. |
Because of Neptune's far distance from the Sun, it gets very little heat. The average temperature on Neptune is about -201°C (−331 °F; 72 K). Therefore, Neptune is the coldest planet in the Solar System. But in the depths of planet the temperature rises slowly. The source of this heating is unknown. Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun, yet its internal energy is strong enough to create the fastest winds seen in the Solar System. Several possible explanations have been suggested. Firstly, radiogenic heating from the planet's core. Among the explanations is the continued radiation into space of leftover heat made by infalling matter during the planet's birth. The last explanation is gravity waves breaking above the tropopause. |
The structure of the inside of Neptune is thought to be very similar to the structure of the inside of Uranus. There is likely to be a core, thought to be about 15 Earth masses. It is made up of molten rock and metal surrounded by rock, water, ammonia, and methane. This mixture is referred to as icy. It is called a water-ammonia ocean. More mixtures of methane, ammonia, and water are found in the lower areas of the atmosphere. |
At a depth of 7, 000 km of Neptune, the conditions may be such that methane decomposes into the diamond crystals. These diamond crystals resemble hailstones. |
The pressure at the center of Neptune is millions of times more than that on the surface of Earth. |
One difference between Neptune and Uranus is the level of meteorological activity that has been observed. When the Voyager spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986, the winds on that planet were observed to be mild. When Voyager flew by Neptune in 1989, powerful weather events were observed. The weather of Neptune has extremely active storm systems. It's atmosphere has the highest wind speeds in the Solar System, thought to be powered by internal heat flow. Regular winds in the equatorial region have speeds of around 1,200 km/h (750 mph). Winds in storm systems can reach up to 2,100 km/h, near-supersonic speeds. |
In 1989, the Great Dark Spot, an anticyclonic storm system, was discovered by NASA's "Voyager 2" spacecraft. The storm resembled the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. However, on 2 November 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope did not see the Great Dark Spot on the planet. Instead, a new storm similar to the Great Dark Spot was found in the planet's northern hemisphere. The reason why the Great Dark Spot has disappeared is unknown. The Scooter is another storm, a white cloud group farther south than the Great Dark Spot. Its nickname was given when first noticed in the months leading up to the "Voyager" encounter in 1989. It moved faster than the Great Dark Spot. Later images showed clouds that moved even faster than Scooter. The Wizard's Eye/"Dark Spot 2" is another southern cyclonic storm, the second strongest storm seen during the 1989 encounter. It originally was completely dark, but as "Voyager" came closer to the planet, a bright core developed. |
Neptune also has similarities with Uranus in its magnetosphere. The magnetic field strongly tilted comparative to its rotational axis at 47° and offset at least 0.55 radii (about 13,500 kilometres) from the planet's physical center. The scientists think the extreme course may be characteristic of flows in the interior of the planet. |
Tiny blue-colored rings have been discovered around the blue planet. They are not as well known as the rings of Saturn. When these rings were discovered by a team led by Edward Guinan, originally, they thought that the rings might not be complete. However, this was proven wrong by "Voyager 2". Neptune's planetary rings have a weird "clumpy" arrangement. The scientists think that it may be because of the gravitational contact with small moons that orbit near them. |
Proof that the rings are incomplete first began in the mid-1980s, when stellar occultation were found to rarely show an extra "blink" just before or after the planet occulted the star. Pictures from "Voyager 2" in 1989 solved the problem when the ring system was found to have several faint rings. The farthest ring, Adams, has three famous arcs now named "Liberté", "Egalité", and "Fraternité" (Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity). |
The existence of arcs is tough to understand because the laws of motion would predict that arcs spread out into a single ring in a very short time. The gravitational effects of Galatea, a moon just inward from the ring, are now thought to have created the arcs. |
New Earth-based observations published in 2005 appeared to show that Neptune's rings are a lot more unstable than thought before. To be exact, it looks like that the "Liberté" ring may disappear in less than 100 years. The new observations seem to puzzle our understanding of Neptune's rings into a lot of confusion. |
Neptune has a total of 14 known moons. As Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, the planet's moons were named after lesser sea gods or goddesses. |
The largest moon, and the only one big enough to have the shape of a sphere is Triton. Triton was discovered on October 10, 1846 by British astronomer William Lassell. Unlike all other large planetary moons, Triton moves in the other direction than the other moons. This shows the moon was probably captured and maybe was once a Kuiper belt object. It is close enough to Neptune to be locked into a synchronous orbit. It is also slowly moving into Neptune and will one day be torn apart when it passes the Roche limit. Triton is the coldest object that has been measured in the Solar System, with temperatures of −235°C (38 K, −392 °F). |
Neptune's second known moon (by order of distance), the odd moon Nereid, has one of the most unusual orbits of any satellite in the Solar System. |
From July to September 1989, "Voyager 2" discovered six new moons of Neptune. Of these, Proteus is the second most massive Neptunian moon. It has only one quarter of 1% of the mass of Triton. Neptune's closest four moons, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, and Galatea, orbit close enough to be inside Neptune's rings. The next farthest out, Larissa was originally discovered in 1981 when it had occulted a star. The moon was credited for causing Neptune's ring arcs when "Voyager 2" observed Neptune in 1989. Five new unusual moons discovered between 2002 and 2003 were announced in 2004. The latest moon, Hippocamp, was discovered from examining Hubble Telescope images on 16 July 2013. |
Neptune cannot be seen with naked eye alone, since Neptune's normal brightness are between magnitudes +7.7 and +8.0. It can be out-shined by Jupiter's Galilean moons, the dwarf planet Ceres, and the asteroids 4 Vesta, 2 Pallas, 7 Iris, 3 Juno and 6 Hebe. A telescope or strong binoculars will show Neptune as a small blue dot that looks similar to Uranus. The blue color comes from the methane in its atmosphere. Its small obvious size has made it difficult to study visually. Most telescopic data was quite limited until the arrival of the Hubble Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes with adaptive optics. |
With an orbital period (sidereal period) of 164.88 Julian years, Neptune was returning to the same place in the sky where it was discovered in 1846. In August 2011, it completed its first full orbit of the Sun. It happened three different times, also with a fourth in which it came very close to being at that position. This is explained by the idea of retrogradation. |
Currently, only one spacecraft has visited Neptune. NASA's "Voyager 2" probe made a quick flyby of the planet with its closest encounter on 25 August 1989. It was the last planet to have been visited by a spacecraft. |
One of "Voyager 2"'s important discoveries was its very close fly-by of Triton where took pictures of several parts of the moon. The probe also discovered the Great Dark Spot. However, it had now disappeared after the Hubble Space Telescope took pictures of Neptune in 1994. Originally thought to be a large cloud or cyclonic storm system. It was later guessed to be a hole in the visible cloud deck. |
The pictures sent back to Earth from "Voyager 2" in 1989 became the basis of a PBS all-night program called "Neptune All Night". |
After the "Voyager 2" flyby mission comes "Flagship orbital mission". This hypothetical mission is not possible until the late 2020s or early 2030s. |
"Neptune Odyssey" is the current mission concept for a Neptune orbiter. NASA's possible large strategic science mission would launch in 2033 and arrive at Neptune in 2049. |
Negative |
Negative may mean: |
Now |
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