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Today, most Inuit live in modern houses. Many still hunt or fish for a major part of their food supply and sometimes some income. Seal pelts are used to protect from the extreme cold in the Arctic and are far more effective than man-made fabrics. The technology has worked well for many thousands of years. Besides, commercial winter clothes are expensive. Today, they use rifles and snowmobiles when hunting, however traditional values respecting the animals hunted still very much applies. In Alaska, many of the people have received money from the oil discovered in that state on their traditional lands. |
The Arctic is very different from the rest of the world. The way of life in the south does not work well in the north. Canada values having Inuit peoples in Canada's northernmost lands as proof of sovereignty over the Canadian portion of the Arctic Circle. It's a very challenging living in an Arctic environment. There is some controversy over the practice of sinking the corpses of child victims of hypothermia under the ice, as bodies have been known to drift through the currents and wash up on the eastern coast of Canada, and, upon occasion, the northeastern United States. |
Basket |
A basket is a container. It is usually light. |
Basket makers use a wide variety of materials to create a basket, such as bark, willow rods, leaves, wire, plastic, paper, and rope. There are three basic kinds of baskets—coiled, twined, or woven. A woven basket is made of spokes and weavers: the spokes run up and down and the weavers go over and under the spokes. A coiled basket is made by sewing rings of a fibrous material to the previous ring. Twined baskets have flexible weavers that are twined around the spokes in a variety of patterns. |
Basketmaking is so old that it features in myths from various cultures. Baskets are used to carry babies, plants, fruit, cotton, and Easter eggs. Coroners once used a basket coffin to collect bodies, thus the expression "a basket case" which meant the person was dead. |
In basketball, the basket is an open net fixed to a metal ring in which players try to throw the ball. |
Software |
Computer software, also called software, is a set of instructions and documentation that tells a computer what to do or how to perform a task. Software includes all different programs on a computer, such as applications and the operating system. Applications are programs that are designed to perform a specific operation, such as a game or a word processor. The operating system (e.g. Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, Android and various Linux distributions) is a type of software that is used as a platform for running the applications, and controls all user interface tools including display and the keyboard. |
The word software was first used in the late 1960s to emphasize on its difference from computer hardware, which can be physically observed by the user. Software is a set of instructions that the computer follows. Before compact discs (CDs) or development of the Internet age, software was used on various computer data storage media tools like paper punch cards, magnetic discs or magnetic tapes. |
The word firmware is sometimes used to describe a style of software that is made specifically for a particular type of computer or an electronic device and is usually stored on a Flash memory or ROM chip in the computer. Firmware usually refers to a piece of software that directly controls a piece of hardware. The firmware for a CD drive or the firmware for a modem are examples of firmware implementation. |
Today, software has become an important part of our lives. software is used everywhere. software engineers are responsible for producing fault-free software which has literally become an essential part of our daily lives. Changeability and conformity are two of the main properties of software design. There are also different processing models for designing software including Build and Fix, Waterfall and Agile software processing design methods. |
The different types of software can be put into categories based on common function, type, or field of use. There are three broad classifications: |
Container |
A container is an object used for holding something. People put things in a container. The use of shipping containers is called Containerization. |
South America |
South America is the continent to the south of North America. These two continents are separated by the Panama Canal. There are seven continents which make up the globe, South America being the 4th largest.South America includes 14 countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Falkland Islands (United Kingdom), French Guiana (France), Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. |
South America is attached to Central America at the boundary of Panama. Geographically all of Panama – including the part east of the Panama Canal in the isthmus – is usually included in North America alone, among the countries of Central America. |
The soil in Argentina's Pampas is among the best in the world. Brazil's soil is very good for growing coffee. A great number of minerals have been found. Few, however, have been mined. Among those that were mined are iron, manganese, gold, and gemstones. The tropical forests are rich in valuable trees, like mahogany, ebony, and rubber. Oil is also a resource in some places. |
South America is home to a large variety of animal life. These include animals such as jaguars, macaws, monkeys, anacondas, llamas, piranhas, toucans, tapirs, cougars, condors and chinchillas. |
The most popular attractions are: |
The amazon rain forest is a moist grassy land where many wild animals live and contains the amazon river which is the 2nd longest river in the world and and has the largest volume of water.The world's longest river is the Nile in Africa. The forest is known as a rain forest as it rains very often but due to the dense surroundings not every droplet reaches the bottom. The Amazon is shared by eight countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana and Suriname) and stretches for 6.7 million kilometers2. In the amazon rain forest, hundreds of thousands of trees have been cut down for wood and paper,meaning that the forest is endangered. Unlike the Boreial forest in Canada the trees are not getting replanted. |
Bed |
A bed is a piece of furniture that people sleep on. It normally has a soft mattress on a bed frame. Many beds also have bed sheets to cover the mattress and additional sheets for the people to sleep under. People also use a pillow under their heads. A bed comes in many different sizes including a single, double and king size. |
In August 2020 archaeologists reported the discovery of the oldest grass bedding from Middle Paleolithic (at least 200,000 years ago). This was much older than the oldest previously known bedding. |
They found insect-repellent plants and ash layers beneath the bedding. This would have made a dirt-free, insulated base which helped to keep away insects. So early beds were little more than piles of straw or some other natural material (e.g. a heap of palm leaves, animal skins, or dried ferns). |
Here's an example of what they said: "Several cultures have used ash as an insect repellent because insects cannot easily move through fine powder. Ash blocks insects' breathing and biting apparatus, and eventually dehydrates them. "Tarchonanthus" (camphor bush) remains were on top of the grass from the oldest bedding in the cave. This plant is still used to deter insects in rural parts of East Africa". |
Mattresses stuffed with feathers were first used in Ancient Rome. |
There are several kinds of bed in use today. Several terms refer to the size of the mattress. Some kinds are usually temporary, such as camp cots, air mattresses, and hammocks. |
Asia |
Asia is a large region on Earth mainly in the northern hemisphere. Asia is connected to Europe in the west, forming a continent called Eurasia, though sometimes it is viewed as a separate continent from Europe. Some of the oldest human civilizations began in Asia, such as Sumer, China, and India. Asia was also home to some large empires such as the Persian Empire, the Mughal Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the Ming Empire. It is home to at least 44 countries. Turkey, Russia, Georgia and Cyprus are partly in other continents. |
Asia includes a large amount of land. Covering about 30% of the world's land area, it has more people than any other continent, with about 60% of the world's total population. Stretching from the icy Arctic in the north to the hot and steamy equatorial lands in the south, Asia contains huge, empty deserts, as well as some of the world's highest mountains and longest rivers. |
Asia is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. It is separated from Europe by the Pontic Mountains and the Turkish Straits. A long, mainly land border in the west separates Europe and Asia. This line runs North-South down the Ural Mountains in Russia, along the Ural River to the Caspian Sea, and through the Caucasus Mountains to the Black Sea. |
Some countries are variously located in both Europe and Asia, namely Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, and Turkey. |
The Sinai Peninsula of Egypt lies in the Arabian peninsula, with the rest of the country lying in North-East Africa. |
Wall |
A wall is a vertical dividing surface. It divides space in buildings into rooms or protects buildings. It is usually made of stone or brick. Walls have two main purposes: to support the top part of buildings, and to divide space, giving protection from invasion, escape, and weather. |
Before powerful artillery was invented, many cities had protective walls. Since they are not suitable for defense any more, most city walls have been removed. |
The term "the Wall" usually referred to the Berlin Wall, built during the Cold War, which fell in 1989, but may also refer to the Pink Floyd album of the same name. |
A retaining wall is a structure made to hold soil from collapsing. It is made in special areas for any other construction work, such as farming or road making. |
Types of retaining wall are: |
Load Bearing Wall is a structural element. It carries the weight of a house from the roof and upper floors, all the way to the foundation. It supports structural members like beams, slab and walls on above floors. |
Non-Load Bearing Wall doesn’t help the structure to stand up and holds up only itself. It doesn’t support floor roof loads above. It is a framed structure. Most are interior walls whose purpose is to divide the structure into rooms. |
Partition Wall separates spaces from buildings. It can be solid, constructed from brick or stone. It is a framed construction. The partition wall is secured to the floor, ceiling, and walls. It is enough strong to carry its own load. It resists impact. It is stable and strong to support wall fixtures. The partition wall works as a sound barrier and it is fire resistant. |
Cavity Wall A cavity wall or hollow wall consists of two separate walls, called leaves or skins, with a cavity or gap in-between. The two leaves of the cavity wall may be of equal thickness if it a non-load-bearing wall or the internal leaf may be thicker than the external leaf, to meet the structural requirements. |
Veneered Wall holds up the material. It can be made of brick or stone. The most famous veneered wall is made of brick. The wall is only one wythe thick. It became the norm when building codes began to require insulation in interior walls. It is light weighted. Veneered walls can be built quickly. |
Coordinated Universal Time |
Coordinated Universal Time (or UTC) is the standard time system of the world. It is the standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is, within about 1 second, mean solar time at 0° longitude. |
The standard before was Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). UTC and GMT are almost the same. In fact, there is no practical difference which would be noticed by ordinary people. |
Some websites, for example Wikipedia, use UTC because it does not make any country look more important than the others. It offers one time for all the Internet (the same time can be used by people all over the world). |
Time zones are often named by how many hours they are different from UTC time. For example, UTC−5 (United States east coast) is 5 hours behind UTC. If the time is 07:00 UTC, the local time is 02:00 in New York (UTC−5) and 10:00 in Moscow (UTC+3). |
07:00 UTC is also written more simply as 0700Z (or 07:00Z). |
Note that UTC uses the 24-hour clock. That means there is no 'AM' or 'PM'. For example, 4:00PM would be 16:00 or 1600. |
When this page loaded, it was , 2021 23, 09:41:32 in UTC. |
Television |
Telegram television (also known as a TV) is a machine with a screen. Televisions receive broadcasting signals and change them into pictures and sound. The word "television" comes from the words tele (Greek for "far away") and vision ("sight"). |
Sometimes a television can look like a box. Older TVs had a large cathode ray tube in a large wooden frame and sat on the floor like furniture. Newer TVs are much lighter and flatter. |
A TV can show pictures from many television networks. Computers and mobile devices also can be used for watching television programs. |
The television was invented in the 1920s but the equipment was expensive and the pictures were poor. By the 1950s, these problems had been fixed and TVs became widespread. |
At first, all televisions used an antenna (or aerial). This would pick up television programmes from broadcasting stations. A TV station could be many miles or kilometers away, and still be received. TVs can also show movies from VCD and DVD players or VCRs. Cable TV and Satellite television can provide more programs at once than broadcast can. Video game consoles connect to most modern TVs. Some computers can also use a TV as a computer monitor. |
All TVs have screens where the picture is viewed. Before the 1950s these were usually "black and white", which made everything look grey, but all modern TVs show colors. Most 20th century screens also had rounded corners. That is because television screens were cathode ray tubes. These are like heavy glass jars with one side bulging out to form the screen. |
Today flat panel displays are the usual kind. These are usually flat rectangles with straight edges. This long rectangle looks more like the shape of a movie theatre screen. This is called widescreen. If a widescreen set was 30 cm tall, it would be 53 cm wide. For this to work best, TV shows also need to be made in widescreen. Widescreen sets can still be any size, but they have the same widescreen shape. |
The early 21st century is also when digital television transmission became more common than analog television. |
Sociology |
Sociology is the study of societies and how humans act in groups. Sociology is a social science. People who study sociology are called sociologists. A society is the community of people living in a particular country or region and having shared customs, laws, and organizations. |
Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1780 was first to use the term. The problems caused by the change to an industrial society, where many people moved to cities and worked in factories, were an early focus of sociology. Auguste Comte, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim were leading figures in the study of social phenomena. Themes included: community, authority, status, alienation and lack of power. |
In the 2000s, some sociologists look at such things as: race, ethnicity, class, gender, the family and social interaction. They also study the breakdown of social structures; crime and divorce. |
Sociologists research the structures that organize society, such as race, gender (whether a person is male or female), and social classes (rich or poor). They study the family and examine problems such as crime and drug abuse. |
Most sociologists work in one or more specialty areas or "sub-fields". Sociology includes many sub-fields that examine different aspects of society. For example, social stratification studies inequality and class structure in society. The field of demography studies changes in population size or type. Criminology examines criminal behavior and crime. Political sociology studies government and laws. Sociology of race and sociology of gender examine how people think about race and gender. |
Many sociologists also do research outside of the university. Their research is supposedly intended to help teachers, lawmakers, and government administrators to make better institutions, government programs, and rules. |
Sociologists often use statistics to count and measure patterns in how people act or behave. Sociologists also interview people or hold group discussions to find out why people behave in certain ways. Some sociologists combine different research methods. |
Social analysis has been done since the time of Plato. Sociology became accepted as a type of science in the early 1800s. European cities were changing as many people moved into cities and began working in factories. Sociologists tried to understand how people interacted and how groups interacted. |
The word "sociology" was invented by French thinker Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1780. Early thinkers who wrote about sociology included Auguste Comte and Max Weber. |
Sociology was taught in a university for the first time at the University of Kansas in 1890. The first European department of sociology was founded in 1895 at the University of Bordeaux by Émile Durkheim. The first sociology department to be established in Britain was at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1904. In 1919 a sociology department was established in Germany at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich by Max Weber. |
Sky |
The sky is the appearance of the atmosphere around the surface of the planet from our point of view. We see many objects that are actually in space such as the Sun, the Moon, and stars because they are in the sky. On a clear day the sky appears blue. At night it appears. The deepness of the blue increases as we look toward the horizon, and up to the point above us. |
The sky, which is made up of gas molecules, is blue because of the random scattering of sunlight by the molecules. Rayleigh scattering defines the amount of scattering of light rays. Blue light scatters much more than red, which is why the sky appears blue on a clear day. Depending on the time of day, the sky may appear different colors. At dawn or dusk the sky may appear red, orange, or even green and purple depending on how low the sun is and how close it is to night. |
Other planets have skies too. Because the types of gases in their atmospheres are different, they have different sky colors. For example, the sky on Mars is red. |
Many things can be seen in the sky. There are objects from space like the Sun, Moon, and stars. There are also many weather events seen in the sky. For example, these can be clouds, rain, lightning, or fog. Weather is caused by different patterns and temperatures in the atmosphere. Other things that can be seen in the sky are birds, other flying animals, and aircraft. |
Tone language |
A tone language, or tonal language, is a language in which words can differ in tones (like pitches in music) in addition to consonants and vowels. |
About 70% of world languages in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas are tonal, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Punjabi, Yorùbá, Igbo, Luganda, , and Cherokee. The other languages, including Indo-European languages such as English and Hindi, are not tone languages. |
In some languages, it is pitch accent that is important instead. A word's meaning can then change if a different syllable is stressed. Examples include Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian, and some Asian languages like Japanese and Korean. However, pitch accent is different from tones. |
Some tones may sound alike to people who do not speak a tone language. They are the most difficult part of learning a tone language for those people. |
In Mandarin, the most famous example ""mā má mǎ mà" ()" has four different words each pronounced in exactly the same way but with four different tones. If numbers identify the tones, they can be written m"a1 ma2 ma3 ma4", which means "mom hemp horse scold." Some ways of romanization mark each tone by a different spelling; "ma1 ma2 ma3 ma4" in Pinyin would be written "ma mha maa mah" in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Most use numbers or accent marks ("mā má mǎ mà" in Pinyin). There is a passage called (). It has 92 characters; all read the same way in Mandarin ("shi") but with different tones. |
Mandarin does not have many syllables: the words for "mother," "hemp," "horse," "scold," and a word put at the end of sentences to make it a question are all pronounced "ma:" |
Mandarin has "first tone," "second tone," "third tone," "fourth tone," and "neutral tone." Other Chinese dialects have more tones, some as many as twelve. |
Vietnamese and Pinyin use accents as the tone marks for the Latin alphabet. Each accent shows an altered sound for the syllable. Most syllables have only one tone marking, but the letters in the syllable can be altered by other markings. Syllables usually form one word in un-hyphenated compound words. |
Pinyin may have style differences because its use is to help Westerners. On the other hand, Vietnamese has a national script that always follows and uses the same style. |
Dollar |
A dollar is a type of currency. Many countries have named their money "the dollar", so it is important to say which dollar is being talked about. The symbol for the dollar is a capital letter S, pierced by one or two vertical lines: $. |
The dollar is named after the thaler. The thaler was a large silver coin first made in the year 1518. The thaler named after the Joachimsthal (Joachim's valley) mine in Bohemia ("Thal" means valley in German). The later Spanish Peso was the same size and was often called "Spanish dollar" and the similar coin of the Dutch Republic was called “lion dollar”. In the 18th century it became a world currency. Many national currencies were originally Spanish dollars including the ones now called dollar or peso and the Japanese yen, Indian rupee and Chinese Renminbi. |
Beer |
Beer is a type of alcoholic drink. It is made with water, hops, barley (types of cereal grains), and types of yeast (a fungus that produces alcohol). A process called fermentation turns sugar into alcohol, using yeast. Another product of the fermentation is carbon dioxide. |
In general, all alcoholic drinks where yeast turns sugar into alcohol are called "beer". In these cases, distillation is not used. The difference to wine is that with wine, sugars from plants, such as fruit sugar, or that made by animals is used. As an example, mead is a wine made from honey. Japanese sake is made from rice, and uses yeast for fermentation; so even if some people call it "rice wine", sake is really a kind of beer. |
The act of making beer is called "brewing". Beer is made by adding warm water to malted barley and other grains. The enzymes in the barley change the malted barley and other grains into simple sugars. This is called the mash. The water is then sparged (drained) from the grain. The water is now called wort. The wort is boiled and hops are added. Hops provide flavour and preserve the beer. After boiling the wort is cooled and yeast is added. The yeast turns the sugars into alcohol and the wort into beer. |
Different beers can have different natures, depending on the ingredients used; for example, an ale uses top fermenting yeast. Top fermenting yeasts eat more sugar and produce more alcohol. A lager uses bottom fermenting yeast. Bottom fermenting yeasts eat less sugar and produce a crisper, cleaner taste. Adding hops makes the beer more bitter and aromatic. Specialty malts (different types of cooked barley) produce different flavours and colours. These flavours and colours are most notable in dark beers like Porter and Stout. |
Different countries have different ways to make beer. In Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, beer is usually made from just hops, malt, water, and yeast. This is because of the Reinheitsgebot. The Reinheitsgebot was a law that said says that beer can only be made from hops, malt, and water. Yeast was discovered after the Reinheitsgebot. The law was overturned by the European Union in 1992. In Belgium, however, beers have always been made with wheat, sugar, fruit, and other ingredients. |
The type of yeast used determines the kind of beer made: |
The earliest records of beer were written around 7000 years ago by the Sumerians. It is said that the Sumerians discovered the fermentation process by accident. It is not known exactly how this happened, but it could be that a piece of bread or grain became wet, and a short time later, it began to ferment and made a pulp that caused people to become drunk. A seal around 4,000 years old is a Sumerian "Hymn to Ninkasi", the goddess of brewing. This "hymn" is also a recipe for making beer. A description of the making of beer on this ancient engraving in the Sumerian language is the earliest account of what is easily recognised as barley, followed by a pictograph of bread being baked, crumbled into water to form a mash, and then made into a drink, that is recorded as having made people feel "...wonderful and blissful". It could even be possible that bread was first baked to be a way to make beer that is easy to carry around. The Sumerians were probably the first people to brew beer. They had found a "divine drink" -- they felt it was a gift from the gods. |
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