title: What Happens in Vegas

text: What Happens in Vegas is a 2008 American romantic comedy film directed by Tom Vaughan and written by Dana Fox. It stars Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher as a couple who get married and win a casino jackpot prize during a drunken night in Las Vegas, but their simple plan to get a quick divorce and divide the money is complicated by the divorce court judge's ruling. The title is based on the Las Vegas marketing catchphrase "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas." Despite negative reviews from critics, the film was a box office success.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: In New York City, high-strung commodity futures trader Joy Ellis McNally (Cameron Diaz) is dumped by fiancé Mason at his surprise birthday party which she throws. At the same time, easy-going carpenter Jack Fuller Jr. (Ashton Kutcher) is fired by his father, Jack Sr. Both are distraught and, with best friends Toni "Tipper" (Lake Bell), who is a bartender, and Jeff "Hater" (Rob Corddry), a lawyer, take debauched trips to Las Vegas.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: Joy and Jack meet by chance when given the same hotel room due to a computer error. Once the misunderstanding is cleared up and receiving upgraded rooms and coupons to various clubs, they party and drink together and end up getting married. The next morning, agreeing it was a mistake, they plan to divorce.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: Before they can, Jack uses a quarter Joy gives him in a slot machine. He hits a three million dollar jackpot and Joy reminds him they are married and hence, she is entitled to half of the money. They return to New York, where they attempt to divorce. The judge declares they cannot divorce until they attempt to co-exist for six months, while attending weekly sessions with marriage counselor Dr. Twitchell. If they work at the marriage but still want to divorce after six months, each can keep half the winnings. If either party does not cooperate, the money will be tied up in litigation by the judge.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: The newlyweds devise more and more cunning schemes to undermine each other, such as Jack telling Joy that their counseling session is canceled to show she is not committed, and Joy inviting girls to their apartment to seduce him, throwing a party. Jack gives Joy's ex-fiancé, Mason, her engagement ring back without Joy knowing. However, at Joy's work retreat, they unexpectedly find themselves attracted to each other.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: Returning from the retreat, it is time for the judge to decide what happens to the money. On her way to the hearing, Joy sees Mason, who tells her he wants her back. Giving back the engagement ring, he tells her she is good enough for him. Joy thinks Jack set her up with Mason to cheat on him to guarantee divorce. She walks away from Mason and goes to the hearing. There, the marriage counselor testifies that the couple worked on the marriage. The judge decides they will split the remaining 1.4 million dollars (after taxes, bills Joy ran up, and money Jack spent on his new woodworking business). Joy tells the judge she does not want any of the money and as she leaves she gives the engagement ring to Jack, telling him she wants nothing from him.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: Joy is offered the promotion, but declines it, telling her boss she would rather be happy doing nothing than miserable doing something she hates. Jack's parents tell him it looks like he and Joy are in love. Realizing his mistake, he goes to find her. Tipper tells Jack that she quit her job and nobody knows where she is. He suspects that she has gone to Fire Island, New York, the only place that makes her feel truly happy. Finding her, Jack proposes (again) and she says yes.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: During the closing credits, there are scenes from the day Jack and Joy get married, of Tipper and Hater subsequently enacting a plan of revenge on Mason, and of Hater cutting off Dave.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: The film had its world premiere at the Odeon in Leicester Square, London on April 22, 2008. Twentieth Century Fox held the U.S. premiere on May 1, 2008, at the Mann Village Theatre in Westwood, CA. It opened in wide release in the United States on May 9, 2008.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: American "Big Brother 9" housemates Ryan and Sharon were given a special screening of the film after winning a "luxury competition" in April. They were also awarded tickets to the May 1 Hollywood premiere.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: "What Happens in Vegas" grossed $80.3 million in the United States and Canada and $131.4 million in other territories for a total of $219.4 million worldwide, against a production budget of $35 million.


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: In its opening weekend, the film grossed $20.2 million in 3,215 theaters in the United States and Canada, ranking finishing second at the box office behind "Iron Man".


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: "What Happens in Vegas" received generally negative reviews from critics. On "Rotten Tomatoes" the film has a rating of 26%, based on 133 reviews, with an average rating of 4.50/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""What Happens in Vegas" has a few laughs, but mostly settles for derivative romantic comedy conventions and receives little help from a pair of unlikable leads." On Metacritic the film has a score of 36 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: Manohla Dargis of "The New York Times" slammed it, stating that "What Happens in Vegas" is "one of those junky time-wasters that routinely pop up in movie theaters". Metromix Chicago's Matt Pais called it "bland, boring and not fun at all".


title: What Happens in Vegas

text: The film received two Razzie Award nominations including Worst Actress (Cameron Diaz) and Worst Screen Couple (Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher). Both awards went to Paris Hilton for "The Hottie and the Nottie".


title: Sous-chef

text: A sous-chef is a chef who is second in command in a kitchen; the person ranking next after the head chef, usually the more hands on manager with regards to training staff and organising the kitchen.


title: Sous-chef

text: The sous-chef has many responsibilities, because the executive chef has a more overarching role. Sous-chefs must plan and direct how the food is presented on the plate, keep their kitchen staff in order, train new chefs, create the work schedule, and make sure all the food that goes to customers is of the best quality to maintain high standards.


title: Sous-chef

text: Sous-chefs are in charge of making sure all kitchen equipment is in working order. They must thoroughly understand how to use and troubleshoot all appliances and cooking instruments in the event of a malfunctioning cooking device. Sous-chefs are in charge of disciplining any kitchen staff who may have acted against restaurant policy. Incentive programs are commonly used among sous-chefs to encourage their staff to abide by rules and regulations, and motivate them to work efficiently at all times. Under the oversight of the sous-chef, downtime should be used for prepping, cleaning and other kitchen duties. They are responsible for inventory, product and supply rotation, and menu tasting. Sous-chefs need to be responsive and have the ability to improvise when a problem arises while the restaurant is busy. They must also ensure safety precautions and sanitary provisions are taken to ensure a safe and clean working environment.


title: Sous-chef

text: Many sous-chefs get to their position through promotion after receiving training and experiences in the culinary profession.


title: Sous-chef

text: In Canada, one way to advance to the sous-chef position is by getting a specialized college diploma, acquiring the knowledge necessary to qualify to take the Red Seal for the Journeyman Cook exam. A year after completing the exam, it is possible to enroll in the Chef Program to take an exam with the Canadian Culinary Foundation. Then, after four to five years of working experience, one can apply to the Certified Chef de Cuisine program.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: Toyota Motor Corporation's A family is a family of automatic FWD/RWD/4WD/AWD transmissions built by Aisin-Warner. They share much in common with Volvo's AW7* and Aisin-Warner's 03-71* transmissions, which are found in Suzukis, Mitsubishis, and other Asian vehicles.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: This transmission is electronically controlled by an electronic shift control module. Mechanically similar to the A43D.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: Four speed automatic with lockup torque converter, electronic controls and viscous coupling center differential


title: Toyota A transmission

text: Three speed automatic front wheel drive, longitudinally mounted. Even with FWD, the engine is also mounted longitudinally.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: These transmissions have a governor gear. Unlike the A140E counterpart which is electronically controlled, the A140L uses a plastic governor gear to select which gear to go into. Over time and wear, this plastic gear's teeth shred and eventually cease to be able to control gears. This results in a transmission that can only shift to first and reverse, but not to any further forward gears. Replacement of this governor gear is relatively inexpensive compared to a replacement transmission as it can be serviced without taking the transmission out of the car.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: 4 Speed Transaxle A245E was based on the A240E used in the 1989 MR2, but was reduced in size and weight


title: Toyota A transmission

text: The detachable bell housing, which attaches the main transmission case to the engine, has an engine-specific bolt pattern, which appears on its upper surface as cast-in letters. "J" indicates the straight-6 1/2-JZ engine, "U" the V8 UZ engine.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: OEM with 2JZ-GTE twin turbocharged engines only. This is the twin turbo only heavy duty version with some internal mods. The main case is similar to the common A340E but not interchangeable, the bell housing has "J3" cast into the upper surface, and is larger diameter to accept the larger torque converter and special flex plate. Maximum power using the stock internals should be limited to 500 (significantly higher than the standard A340E used with the 2JZ-GE normally aspirated engine) .


title: Toyota A transmission

text: The A341F is an A340F with locking/unlocking transfer case differential to allow an AWD mode on the Sequoia.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: Type: Full automatic 4-speed transmission with converter lock-up. Fully mechanical / hydraulical control, no electrics or electronics. Mechanical throttle control input for kick-down function. Connects to external oil cooler. Uses ATF-II.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: I6 and V8 versions similar. However V8 versions have slight internal upgrades to handle the increased torque (35-50LS?).


title: Toyota A transmission

text: The AA80E (Aisin TL-80SN) becomes the world's first eight-speed automatic transmission. Smaller parts, a hydraulic circuit with fewer components allow the transmission to maintain the same size as the previous LS 430's unit. The aluminum die-cast case is 10% lighter, yet 30% more rigid, even with two additional gears and a 22% greater torque capacity the new transmission weighs 95 kg or 10% more than the previous unit. With new micro-laser technology gear tooth production tolerances have been reduced 50%. Aluminum has also replaced steel on gear tooth surfaces. Shift times are as low as 350 milliseconds or 41% faster than the previous LS 430's six-speed auto.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: The IS F and LS 460 (with sport package) use Sport Direct Shift (SPDS) which allows for faster shift times. The torque converter can lockup from 2nd to 6th gears. Final drive ratio is 2.937.


title: Toyota A transmission

text: 8-speed automatic 4WD transmission. Same gear ratios as the AA80E but a shorter 3.133 final drive ratio is used.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Robert Louis Ridarelli (April 26, 1942 – April 5, 2022), known by the stage name Bobby Rydell, was an American singer and actor who mainly performed rock and roll and traditional pop music. In the early 1960s he was considered a teen idol. His most well-known songs include "Wildwood Days," "Wild One" and "Volare" (cover of an Italian song by Domenico Modugno, "Nel blu, dipinto di blu"); in 1963 he appeared in the musical film "Bye Bye Birdie".


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In the 1980s, he joined a trio called The Golden Boys, with fellow former teen idols Frankie Avalon and Fabian Forte. He continued to tour up until his death in 2022.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell was born in April 1942 and was the son of Jennie Ridarelli (nee Sapienza) and Adrio "Al" Ridarelli. Both of his parents were of Italian descent. He grew up in the Lower Moyamensing neighborhood of South Philadelphia.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: As a child, he mimicked the singers he saw on television, and at the age of seven his father took him around the clubs of Philadelphia, asking if he could sing and do some impersonations. By the time he was eight, his reputation led to an appearance on a talent show on the national television series,"TV Teen Club." He won the contest, and the show's presenter, Paul Whiteman, recruited him into the cast, where he remained for several years. It was here that his name was Anglicised to Bobby Rydell.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell played in several bands in the Philadelphia area, including Rocco and the Saints, in which he sang and played drums. After releasing three unsuccessful singles for small companies, he signed a recording contract with Cameo Records. This was run by Bernie Lowe, who had been the pianist accompanying him on "TV Teen Club." After a couple of flops, "Kissin' Time" made the charts in 1959. In May 1960, Rydell toured Australia with The Everly Brothers, Billy "Crash" Craddock, Marv Johnson, The Champs, The Crickets, and Lonnie Lee.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: His second success was "We Got Love". The album of the same name, his first, sold a million copies and obtained gold disc status. "Wild One" was followed with "Little Bitty Girl" which was his second million-selling single. He continued releasing hit songs with "Swingin' School" backed by "Ding-A-Ling" and "Volare" later in 1960, which also sold over a million copies. It is estimated he sold over 25 million records in total.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In 1961, he performed at the Copacabana in New York City, where he was the youngest performer to headline at the nightclub. In February 1961, he appeared at the Festival du Rock at the Palais des Sports de Paris in Paris, France.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell's success and prospects led his father, Adrio, a foreman at the Electro-Nite Carbon Company in Philadelphia, to resign in 1961 after 22 years to become his son's road manager.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In 1963, Rydell released the song "Wildwood Days," which reached Number 17 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart and remained there for nine weeks. A mural on the Wildwood, New Jersey, boardwalk, painted in 2014, honors Rydell, whose song placed the community in the national spotlight.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: That same year, Rydell portrayed Hugo Peabody in the film version of "Bye Bye Birdie," also starring Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke. The original stage production of "Bye Bye Birdie" had no real speaking role for the character of Hugo, but the movie script was rewritten specifically to expand the part for Rydell. In 2011, Sony Pictures digitally restored this film. Rydell and Ann-Margret were in attendance at the restoration premiere in Beverly Hills by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: During the 1960s, Rydell had numerous hit records on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart. His recording career earned him 34 Top 100 hits, placing him in the Top 5 artists of his era ("Billboard"). They included his most popular successes: "Wild One" (his highest scoring single, at number 2), "Volare" (number 4), "Swingin' School" (number 5), "Kissin' Time" (number 11), "Sway" (number 14), "I've Got Bonnie" (number 18), and "The Cha-Cha-Cha" (number 10). His last major chart success was "Forget Him", which reached number 4 on the Hot 100 in January 1964. The song, written by Tony Hatch, was his fifth and final gold disc winner.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell left Cameo-Parkway Records later in 1964 and signed with Capitol Records. By this point, the British Invasion had arrived and acts such as Rydell suffered a dramatic decline in popularity. Bands such as "The Beatles" became more popular, and Rydell unwittingly contributed to his own downfall by inspiring John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write ""She Loves You"," a song which catapulted their success way beyond his.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: During this time, he performed on many television programs, including "The Red Skelton Show", where a recurring role was written for him by Red Skelton as Zeke Kadiddlehopper, Clem Kadiddlehopper's younger cousin. He also appeared on "The Danny Thomas Show", Jack Benny, Joey Bishop, and "The George Burns Show". He was a regular on "The Milton Berle Show" and was a panelist on "To Tell the Truth" in 1964. On October 6, 1964, he made a guest appearance on the episode "Duel" of the television series "Combat!"; it was Rydell's first dramatic acting role.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In 1963, Rydell starred in an unsold television pilot called "Swingin' Together" produced by Desilu Productions, which featured him as the frontman for a four-piece rock 'n roll band seeking their big break. Also during this time Rydell served in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard's 103rd Engineer Battalion.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In January 1968, it was announced in the UK music magazine "NME" that Rydell had signed a long term recording contract with Reprise Records. He continued to perform in nightclubs, supper clubs and Las Vegas venues throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but his career was hampered by Cameo-Parkway catalog owner ABKCO Records' refusal to reissue Rydell's music, so the entire catalog was unavailable until 2005 (although he re-recorded his hits in 1995 for K-tel Records). He would have one more hit after 1965, a disco re-recording of "Sway" which reached "Billboard"s Easy Listening chart in 1976.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell continued to tour throughout the remainder of his life, often with Frankie Avalon and Fabian Forte; they performed under the name The Golden Boys. His autobiography was published in 2016.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell was married to his first wife, Camille Quattrone Ridarelli, for 35 years from 1968 until her death in 2003; they had two children. He married Linda Hoffman in 2009. Rydell was a longtime resident of Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, and lived in the same house from 1963 to 2013.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell served in the U.S. National Guard and began his service in 1964 with two months of basic training at Fort Dix.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell cancelled a 2012 Australia tour because his health had deteriorated significantly and he was in need of urgent major surgery. On July 9, 2012, he underwent a double organ transplant to replace his liver and one kidney at Thomas Jefferson University in his hometown of Philadelphia. In January 2013, six months after the double transplant surgery, Rydell returned to the stage in Las Vegas for a three night engagement to a sold-out audience. He continued to perform internationally and returned to tour Australia in 2014.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: Rydell died from complications of pneumonia at Jefferson Abington Hospital on April 5, 2022, at the age of 79.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In the Broadway musical drama "Grease", its film adaptation, and the film's sequel "Grease 2", the high school was named "Rydell High" after Rydell.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In 2000, in the book "The Beatles Anthology" (p. 96), Paul McCartney said: John [Lennon] and I wrote "She Loves You" together. There was a Bobby Rydell song out at the time and, as often happens, you think of one song when you write another. We'd planned an "answering song" where a couple of us would sing "she loves you" and the other ones would answer "yeah yeah". We decided that was a crummy idea but at least we then had the idea of a song called "She Loves You". So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few hours and wrote it—John and I, sitting on twin beds with guitars.


title: Bobby Rydell

text: No specific song title is given in "The Beatles Anthology", but Bob Spitz writes in "" that McCartney originally modeled "She Loves You" on the Rydell "answering song" called "Swingin' School" (and not "Forget Him", as is commonly cited).


title: Bobby Rydell

text: In the Oscar-winning film "Green Book" (2018), Rydell is portrayed in the opening scenes by actor Von Lewis.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is a proof by British mathematician Andrew Wiles of a special case of the modularity theorem for elliptic curves. Together with Ribet's theorem, it provides a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem. Both Fermat's Last Theorem and the modularity theorem were almost universally considered inaccessible to prove by contemporaneous mathematicians, meaning that they were believed to be impossible to prove using current knowledge.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles first announced his proof on 23 June 1993 at a lecture in Cambridge entitled "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations". However, in September 1993 the proof was found to contain an error. One year later on 19 September 1994, in what he would call "the most important moment of [his] working life", Wiles stumbled upon a revelation that allowed him to correct the proof to the satisfaction of the mathematical community. The corrected proof was published in 1995.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles's proof uses many techniques from algebraic geometry and number theory, and has many ramifications in these branches of mathematics. It also uses standard constructions of modern algebraic geometry, such as the category of schemes and Iwasawa theory, and other 20th-century techniques which were not available to Fermat. The proof's method of identification of a deformation ring with a Hecke algebra (now referred to as an "R=T theorem") to prove modularity lifting theorems has been an influential development in algebraic number theory.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Together, the two papers which contain the proof are 129 pages long, and consumed over seven years of Wiles's research time. John Coates described the proof as one of the highest achievements of number theory, and John Conway called it "the proof of the [20th] century." Wiles's path to proving Fermat's Last Theorem, by way of proving the modularity theorem for the special case of semistable elliptic curves, established powerful modularity lifting techniques and opened up entire new approaches to numerous other problems. For proving Fermat's Last Theorem, he was knighted, and received other honours such as the 2016 Abel Prize. When announcing that Wiles had won the Abel Prize, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters described his achievement as a "stunning proof".


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Fermat's Last Theorem, formulated in 1637, states that no three positive integers "a", "b", and "c" can satisfy the equation


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Over time, this simple assertion became one of the most famous unproved claims in mathematics. Between its publication and Andrew Wiles's eventual solution over 350 years later, many mathematicians and amateurs attempted to prove this statement, either for all values of n > 2, or for specific cases. It spurred the development of entire new areas within number theory. Proofs were eventually found for all values of n up to around 4 million, first by hand, and later by computer. However, no general proof was found that would be valid for all possible values of "n", nor even a hint how such a proof could be undertaken.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Separately from anything related to Fermat's Last Theorem, in the 1950s and 1960s Japanese mathematician Goro Shimura, drawing on ideas posed by Yutaka Taniyama, conjectured that a connection might exist between elliptic curves and modular forms. These were mathematical objects with no known connection between them. Taniyama and Shimura posed the question whether, unknown to mathematicians, the two kinds of object were actually identical mathematical objects, just seen in different ways.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: They conjectured that every rational elliptic curve is also modular. This became known as the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture. In the West, this conjecture became well known through a 1967 paper by André Weil, who gave conceptual evidence for it; thus, it is sometimes called the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: By around 1980, much evidence had been accumulated to form conjectures about elliptic curves, and many papers had been written which examined the consequences if the conjecture were true, but the actual conjecture itself was unproven and generally considered inaccessible—meaning that mathematicians believed a proof of the conjecture was probably impossible using current knowledge.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: For decades, the conjecture remained an important but unsolved problem in mathematics. Around 50 years after first being proposed, the conjecture was finally proven and renamed the modularity theorem, largely as a result of Andrew Wiles's work described below.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: On yet another separate branch of development, in the late 1960s, Yves Hellegouarch came up with the idea of associating hypothetical solutions ("a", "b", "c") of Fermat's equation with a completely different mathematical object: an elliptic curve. The curve consists of all points in the plane whose coordinates ("x", "y") satisfy the relation


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Such an elliptic curve would enjoy very special properties due to the appearance of high powers of integers in its equation and the fact that "a" + "b" = "c" would be an "n"th power as well.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: In 1982–1985, Gerhard Frey called attention to the unusual properties of this same curve, now called a Frey curve. He showed that it was likely that the curve could link Fermat and Taniyama, since any counterexample to Fermat's Last Theorem would probably also imply that an elliptic curve existed that was not modular. Frey showed that there were good reasons to believe that any set of numbers ("a", "b", "c", "n") capable of disproving Fermat's Last Theorem could also probably be used to disprove the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture. Therefore, if the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture were true, no set of numbers capable of disproving Fermat could exist, so Fermat's Last Theorem would have to be true as well.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Mathematically, the conjecture says that each elliptic curve with rational coefficients can be constructed in an entirely different way, not by giving its equation but by using modular functions to parametrise coordinates "x" and "y" of the points on it. Thus, according to the conjecture, any elliptic curve over Q would have to be a modular elliptic curve, yet if a solution to Fermat's equation with non-zero "a", "b", "c" and "n" greater than 2 existed, the corresponding curve would not be modular, resulting in a contradiction. If the link identified by Frey could be proven, then in turn, it would mean that a proof or disproof of either Fermat's Last Theorem or the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture would simultaneously prove or disprove the other.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: To complete this link, it was necessary to show that Frey's intuition was correct: that a Frey curve, if it existed, could not be modular. In 1985, Jean-Pierre Serre provided a partial proof that a Frey curve could not be modular. Serre did not provide a complete proof of his proposal; the missing part (which Serre had noticed early on) became known as the epsilon conjecture (sometimes written ε-conjecture; now known as Ribet's theorem). Serre's main interest was in an even more ambitious conjecture, Serre's conjecture on modular Galois representations, which would imply the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture. However his partial proof came close to confirming the link between Fermat and Taniyama.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: In the summer of 1986, Ken Ribet succeeded in proving the epsilon conjecture, now known as Ribet's theorem. His article was published in 1990. In doing so, Ribet finally proved the link between the two theorems by confirming, as Frey had suggested, that a proof of the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture for the kinds of elliptic curves Frey had identified, together with Ribet's theorem, would also prove Fermat's Last Theorem.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: In mathematical terms, Ribet's theorem showed that if the Galois representation associated with an elliptic curve has certain properties (which Frey's curve has), then that curve cannot be modular, in the sense that there cannot exist a modular form which gives rise to the same Galois representation.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Following the developments related to the Frey curve, and its link to both Fermat and Taniyama, a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem would follow from a proof of the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture—or at least a proof of the conjecture for the kinds of elliptic curves that included Frey's equation (known as semistable elliptic curves).


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: However, despite the progress made by Serre and Ribet, this approach to Fermat was widely considered unusable as well, since almost all mathematicians saw the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture itself as completely inaccessible to proof with current knowledge. For example, Wiles's ex-supervisor John Coates stated that it seemed "impossible to actually prove", and Ken Ribet considered himself "one of the vast majority of people who believed [it] was completely inaccessible".


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Hearing of Ribet's 1986 proof of the epsilon conjecture, English mathematician Andrew Wiles, who had studied elliptic curves and had a childhood fascination with Fermat, decided to begin working in secret towards a proof of the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture, since it was now professionally justifiable, as well as because of the enticing goal of proving such a long-standing problem.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Ribet later commented that "Andrew Wiles was probably one of the few people on earth who had the audacity to dream that you can actually go and prove [it]."


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles initially presented his proof in 1993. It was finally accepted as correct, and published, in 1995, following the correction of a subtle error in one part of his original paper. His work was extended to a full proof of the modularity theorem over the following six years by others, who built on Wiles's work.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: During 21–23 June 1993, Wiles announced and presented his proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, and hence of Fermat's Last Theorem, over the course of three lectures delivered at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England. There was a relatively large amount of press coverage afterwards.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: After the announcement, Nick Katz was appointed as one of the referees to review Wiles's manuscript. In the course of his review, he asked Wiles a series of clarifying questions that led Wiles to recognise that the proof contained a gap. There was an error in one critical portion of the proof which gave a bound for the order of a particular group: the Euler system used to extend Kolyvagin and Flach's method was incomplete. The error would not have rendered his work worthless—each part of Wiles's work was highly significant and innovative by itself, as were the many developments and techniques he had created in the course of his work, and only one part was affected. Without this part proved, however, there was no actual proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles spent almost a year trying to repair his proof, initially by himself and then in collaboration with his former student Richard Taylor, without success. By the end of 1993, rumours had spread that under scrutiny, Wiles's proof had failed, but how seriously was not known. Mathematicians were beginning to pressure Wiles to disclose his work whether or not complete, so that the wider community could explore and use whatever he had managed to accomplish. Instead of being fixed, the problem, which had originally seemed minor, now seemed very significant, far more serious, and less easy to resolve.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles states that on the morning of 19 September 1994, he was on the verge of giving up and was almost resigned to accepting that he had failed, and to publishing his work so that others could build on it and find the error. He states that he was having a final look to try to understand the fundamental reasons why his approach could not be made to work, when he had a sudden insight that the specific reason why the Kolyvagin–Flach approach would not work directly also meant that his original attempt using Iwasawa theory could be made to work if he strengthened it using experience gained from the Kolyvagin–Flach approach since then. Each was inadequate by itself, but fixing one approach with tools from the other would resolve the issue and produce a class number formula (CNF) valid for all cases that were not already proven by his refereed paper:


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: On 6 October Wiles asked three colleagues (including Faltings) to review his new proof, and on 24 October 1994 Wiles submitted two manuscripts, "Modular elliptic curves and Fermat's Last Theorem" and "Ring theoretic properties of certain Hecke algebras", the second of which Wiles had written with Taylor and proved that certain conditions were met which were needed to justify the corrected step in the main paper.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: The two papers were vetted and finally published as the entirety of the May 1995 issue of the "Annals of Mathematics". The new proof was widely analysed, and became accepted as likely correct in its major components. These papers established the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves, the last step in proving Fermat's Last Theorem, 358 years after it was conjectured.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Fermat claimed to "...have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain". Wiles's proof is very complex, and incorporates the work of so many other specialists that it was suggested in 1994 that only a small number of people were capable of fully understanding at that time all the details of what he had done. The complexity of Wiles's proof motivated a 10-day conference at Boston University; the resulting book of conference proceedings aimed to make the full range of required topics accessible to graduate students in number theory.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: As noted above, Wiles proved the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture for the special case of semistable elliptic curves, rather than for all elliptic curves. Over the following years, Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, and Richard Taylor (sometimes abbreviated as "BCDT") carried the work further, ultimately proving the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture for all elliptic curves in a 2001 paper. Now proved, the conjecture became known as the modularity theorem.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: In 2005, Dutch computer scientist Jan Bergstra posed the problem of formalizing Wiles's proof in such a way that it could be verified by computer.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles used proof by contradiction, in which one assumes the opposite of what is to be proved, and shows if that were true, it would create a contradiction. The contradiction shows that the assumption must have been incorrect.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: The proof falls roughly in two parts. In the first part, Wiles proves a general result about "lifts", known as the "modularity lifting theorem". This first part allows him to prove results about elliptic curves by converting them to problems about Galois representations of elliptic curves. He then uses this result to prove that all semistable curves are modular, by proving that the "Galois representations" of these curves are modular.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles opted to attempt to match elliptic curves to a countable set of modular forms. He found that this direct approach was not working, so he transformed the problem by instead matching the Galois representations of the elliptic curves to modular forms. Wiles denotes this matching (or mapping) that, more specifically, is a ring homomorphism:


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles had the insight that in many cases this ring homomorphism could be a ring isomorphism (Conjecture 2.16 in Chapter 2, §3 of the 1995 paper). He realised that the map between formula_4 and formula_5 is an isomorphism if and only if two abelian groups occurring in the theory are finite and have the same cardinality. This is sometimes referred to as the "numerical criterion". Given this result, Fermat's Last Theorem is reduced to the statement that two groups have the same order. Much of the text of the proof leads into topics and theorems related to ring theory and commutation theory. Wiles's goal was to verify that the map formula_8 is an isomorphism and ultimately that formula_9. In treating deformations, Wiles defined four cases, with the flat deformation case requiring more effort to prove and treated in a separate article in the same volume entitled "Ring-theoretic properties of certain Hecke algebras".


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: or ultimately that formula_9, indicating a complete intersection. Since Wiles could not show that formula_9 directly, he did so through formula_12 and formula_13 via lifts.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: In order to perform this matching, Wiles had to create a class number formula (CNF). He first attempted to use horizontal Iwasawa theory but that part of his work had an unresolved issue such that he could not create a CNF. At the end of the summer of 1991, he learned about an Euler system recently developed by Victor Kolyvagin and Matthias Flach that seemed "tailor made" for the inductive part of his proof, which could be used to create a CNF, and so Wiles set his Iwasawa work aside and began working to extend Kolyvagin and Flach's work instead, in order to create the CNF his proof would require. By the spring of 1993, his work had covered all but a few families of elliptic curves, and in early 1993, Wiles was confident enough of his nearing success to let one trusted colleague into his secret. Since his work relied extensively on using the Kolyvagin–Flach approach, which was new to mathematics and to Wiles, and which he had also extended, in January 1993 he asked his Princeton colleague, Nick Katz, to help him review his work for subtle errors. Their conclusion at the time was that the techniques Wiles used seemed to work correctly.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles's use of Kolyvagin–Flach would later be found to be the point of failure in the original proof submission, and he eventually had to revert to Iwasawa theory and a collaboration with Richard Taylor to fix it. In May 1993, while reading a paper by Mazur, Wiles had the insight that the 3/5 switch would resolve the final issues and would then cover all elliptic curves.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Given an elliptic curve "E" over the field Q of rational numbers formula_14, for every prime power formula_15, there exists a homomorphism from the absolute Galois group


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: the group of invertible 2 by 2 matrices whose entries are integers modulo formula_15. This is because formula_19, the points of "E" over formula_20, form an abelian group, on which formula_21 acts; the subgroup of elements "x" such that formula_22 is just formula_23, and an automorphism of this group is a matrix of the type described.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Less obvious is that given a modular form of a certain special type, a Hecke eigenform with eigenvalues in Q, one also gets a homomorphism from the absolute Galois group


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: This goes back to Eichler and Shimura. The idea is that the Galois group acts first on the modular curve on which the modular form is defined, thence on the Jacobian variety of the curve, and finally on the points of formula_15 power order on that Jacobian. The resulting representation is not usually 2-dimensional, but the Hecke operators cut out a 2-dimensional piece. It is easy to demonstrate that these representations come from some elliptic curve but the converse is the difficult part to prove.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Instead of trying to go directly from the elliptic curve to the modular form, one can first pass to the formula_26 representation for some "ℓ" and "n", and from that to the modular form. In the case "ℓ" = 3 and "n" = 1, results of the Langlands–Tunnell theorem show that the formula_27 representation of any elliptic curve over Q comes from a modular form. The basic strategy is to use induction on "n" to show that this is true for "ℓ" = 3 and any "n", that ultimately there is a single modular form that works for all n. To do this, one uses a counting argument, comparing the number of ways in which one can lift a formula_26 Galois representation to formula_29 and the number of ways in which one can lift a formula_26 modular form. An essential point is to impose a sufficient set of conditions on the Galois representation; otherwise, there will be too many lifts and most will not be modular. These conditions should be satisfied for the representations coming from modular forms and those coming from elliptic curves.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: If the original formula_27 representation has an image which is too small, one runs into trouble with the lifting argument, and in this case, there is a final trick which has since been studied in greater generality in the subsequent work on the Serre modularity conjecture. The idea involves the interplay between the formula_27 and formula_33 representations. In particular, if the mod-5 Galois representation formula_34 associated to an semistable elliptic curve "E" over Q is irreducible, then there is another semistable elliptic curve E' over Q such that its associated mod-5 Galois representation formula_35 is isomorphic to formula_34 "and" such that its associated mod-3 Galois representation formula_37 is irreducible (and therefore modular by Langlands–Tunnell).


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: In his 108-page article published in 1995, Wiles divides the subject matter up into the following chapters (preceded here by page numbers):


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Gerd Faltings subsequently provided some simplifications to the 1995 proof, primarily in switching from geometric constructions to rather simpler algebraic ones. The book of the Cornell conference also contained simplifications to the original proof.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Wiles's paper is over 100 pages long and often uses the specialised symbols and notations of group theory, algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, and Galois theory. The mathematicians who helped to lay the groundwork for Wiles often created new specialised concepts and technical jargon.


title: Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

text: Among the introductory presentations are an email which Ribet sent in 1993; Hesselink's quick review of top-level issues, which gives just the elementary algebra and avoids abstract algebra; or Daney's web page, which provides a set of his own notes and lists the current books available on the subject. Weston attempts to provide a handy map of some of the relationships between the subjects. F. Q. Gouvêa's 1994 article "A Marvelous Proof", which reviews some of the required topics, won a Lester R. Ford award from the Mathematical Association of America. Faltings' 5-page technical bulletin on the matter is a quick and technical review of the proof for the non-specialist. For those in search of a commercially available book to guide them, he recommended that those familiar with abstract algebra read Hellegouarch, then read the Cornell book, which is claimed to be accessible to "a graduate student in number theory". The Cornell book does not cover the entirety of the Wiles proof.


title: Gaokao

text: The National College Entrance Examination (NCEE), commonly known as the gaokao (), is a standardized college entrance exam held annually in mainland China. It is required for entrance into almost all higher education institutions at the undergraduate level, including for short cycle (2 year) and long cycle (4 year) degree programs. It is usually taken by students in their third and last year of senior high school, but the age requirement was abolished in 2001.


title: Gaokao

text: The exams last about nine hours over a period of two or three days, depending on the province in which it is held. The Standard Chinese language and mathematics are included in all tests. Candidates can choose one subject from English, French, Japanese, Russian, German or Spanish for the foreign language portion of the test, with most students selecting English. In most regions, students must also choose between either the liberal-arts-oriented concentration () or the natural-science-oriented concentration (). Students who choose the liberal arts receive further testing in history, political science, and geography (), while those who choose natural sciences are tested in physics, chemistry, and biology ().


title: Gaokao

text: The overall mark received by the student is generally a weighted sum of their subject marks. The maximum possible mark varies widely from year to year and from province to province.


title: Gaokao

text: Generally, the modern College Entrance Examination takes place from June 7 to 8 every year, though in some provinces it can last for an extra day. On rare occasions, it has been delayed, most notably due to COVID-19.


title: Gaokao

text: The unified national tertiary entrance examination marked the start of reform of National Matriculation Tests Policies (NMTP) in the newly established People's Republic of China. With the implementation of the first Five Year Plan in 1953, the NMTP was further enhanced. After repeated discussions and experiments, the NMTP was eventually set as a fundamental policy system in 1959. From 1958, the tertiary entrance examination system was affected by the Great Leap Forward Movement. Unified recruitment was soon replaced by separate recruitment by individual or allied tertiary education institutions. Meanwhile, political censorship on candidate students was enhanced. Since 1962, criticism of the NMTP system due to its negative impact on the working class. On July 1966, the NMTP was officially canceled and substituted with a new admission policy of recommending workers, farmers and soldiers to college. During the next ten years, the Down to the Countryside Movement, initiated by Mao Zedong, forced both senior and junior secondary school graduates, the so-called "intellectual youths", to work as farmers in countryside villages. Against the backdrop of world revolution, millions of such young people joined the ranks of farmers, working and living alongside them.


title: Gaokao

text: In the early 1970s, Mao Zedong resumed the operation of universities. However, new students were selected through evaluation by a revolutionary committee rather than through formal academic scores. This practice continued until the death of Mao in September 1976. In late 1977, Deng Xiaoping, then under Hua Guofeng, the heir apparent of Mao, officially resumed traditional examinations based on academics, the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, which has continued to the present day.


title: Gaokao

text: The first such examination after the Cultural Revolution took place in late 1977. There was no limit on the age or official educational background of examinees. Consequently, most of the hopefuls who had accumulated during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution and many others who simply wanted to try their luck took the examination. The youngest were in their early teens and the oldest were in their late thirties. Exam questions were designed by individual provinces. In 1977, the total number of candidate students for the national college entrance exam was as many as 5.7 million. Although the Ministry of Education eventually expanded enrollment, adding 63,000 more to the admission quota, the admission rate of 4.8% was the lowest in the history of the PRC, with only 272,971 students being admitted.


title: Gaokao

text: Starting from 1978, the examination was uniformly designed by the Ministry of Education and all the students across the country took identical examinations.


title: Gaokao

text: However, reforms on the content and structure of the exam persisted, with one of the most salient issues being agency for individual provinces to customize their own exams. The Ministry of Education allowed the College Enrollment Office of Shanghai to employ an independent exam in 1985, which was the beginning of provincial proposition. In the same year, Guangdong was permitted to adopt independent proposition. Beginning from 2003, Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were allowed to adopt independent propositions. Since then, 16 provinces and municipalities have adopted customized exams.


title: Gaokao

text: Although today's admission rate is much higher than in 1977, 1978 and before the 1990s, it is still fairly low compared to the availability of higher education in the Western world. Consequently, the examination is highly competitive, causing prospective examinees and their families to experience enormous pressure. For the majority of examinees, the exam is a watershed that divides two dramatically different lives.


title: Gaokao

text: In 1970, less than 1% of Chinese people had attended higher education, and less than 1/1000 of the population of China was admitted to universities. In the 1970s, 70% of students who were recommended to attend university had political backgrounds reflecting the political nature of university selection at the time. At the same time, the undergraduate course system reduced the time from 4 years to 3 years. According to incomplete statistics, from 1966 to 1977, institutions of higher learning recruited 940,000 people who belonged to the worker-peasant-soldier group.


title: Gaokao

text: For most provinces, the National Higher Education Entrance Examination is held once a year; however, some provinces hold examinations twice a year, with the additional exam referred to as the Spring Entrance Examination. Prior to 2003, the National Higher Education Entrance Examination took place in July every year. It now takes place every June. Partial Provincial administrative units determine the schedule of the exams on the 7th and 8 June. Prior to 2003, the examination was held in July, but has since been moved to the month of June. This move was made in consideration of the adverse effects of hot weather on students living in southern China and possible flooding during the rainy season in July.


title: Gaokao

text: In 2006, a record high of 9.5 million people applied for tertiary education entry in China. Of these, 8.8 million (93%) took the national entrance exam and 27,600 (0.28%) were exempted () if the students demonstrate exceptional merit in the quality of their work and understanding of the academic subject. Everyone else (700,000 students) took other standardized entrance exams, such as those designed for adult education students.


title: Gaokao

text: In 2017, 9.40 million students took the gaokao, 7 million of whom were admitted into colleges and/or universities. The percentage of first-class admission (Yi Ben (一本), deemed as good universities in China) varied from 9.48% to 30.5%, with the lowest admission rates in Henan province and Shanxi province, at less than 10%.


title: Gaokao

text: Below are the changes of the exam scope in 2017 (in most areas of China, where the students use the Nationwide Exam Papers in gaokao):


title: Gaokao

text: The number of higher education institutes in the People's Republic of China has risen annually since 1977. From 1999 to 2020, the number of institutes increased dramatically from 1,071 to 2,740, which significantly contributed to the rapid growth in the number of NCEE examinees and accepted students.


title: Gaokao

text: The subjects tested in the National Higher Education Entrance Examination have changed over time. Traditionally, students would undertake either a set of "liberal-art" subjects or a set of "science" subjects, with some shared compulsory subjects which were Chinese, mathematics and a foreign language. The subjects taken in the Examination affected the degree Examination, or implemented flexible systems for selecting the subjects to be tested, resulting in a number of different systems. But things are changing. A reform was announced in and begun from 2014 and will be completed by 2025.


title: Gaokao

text: As a pilot examination system used in order to promote education system reform, this examination system has been implemented in most parts of the country, including Beijing City, Tianjin City, Hebei Province, Liaoning Province, Jilin Province, Heilongjiang Province, Anhui Province, Fujian Province, Guangdong Province, Jiangxi Province, Henan Province, Shandong Province, Hubei Province, Shaanxi Province, Sichuan Province, Guizhou Province, Yunnan Province, Shanxi Province, Chongqing City, Gansu Province, Qinghai Province, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi, Ningxia, Xinjiang and Tibet. In the context of the reform of the National College Entrance Examination, this program will be suspended in Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong and Hainan provinces from 2020, and will be suspended in most provinces and cities in China from 2021. It will cease across Mainland China by 2022.


title: Gaokao

text: The system was used in Zhejiang Province, with the last exam offered in 2016 to "Class-of-2013" (Chinese: 2013级, meaning admitted to senior high school in 2013, i.e., being Grade 10 in 2013) while "Class-of-2014" students have been taking the reformed version of Gaokao since 2017.


title: Gaokao

text: The "3" and "X" are the same as the national "3+X" system, weighed 750 points. The "Y" part consists of 18 problems, covering 9 subjects (Chinese, Maths, English, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, History, Politics, and Geography), from which students need to choose 6 problems to answer, weighed 60 points. The total score is 810 points.


title: Gaokao

text: This system used to be employed in Jiangsu Province, but is being replaced by another system in 2020. The total score was 480 points.


title: Gaokao

text: This system was used after the New Curriculum Reform being employed in Guangdong province, and now it has been abandoned.


title: Gaokao

text: This system has been implemented in Shanghai since the employment of comprehensive courses, now abandoned.


title: Gaokao

text: This is a pilot college entrance examination system implemented by the Jiangsu Province in 2003 after examining other testing systems, but it was replaced by "3+2" system in 2008. Subject tests will take turns into the embrace of National Standard. A new policy substituted the old one in 2021.


title: Gaokao

text: This system was first introduced in 2019, when Hebei Province, Liaoning Province, Jiangsu Province, Fujian Province, Hubei Province, Hunan Province, Guangdong Province, Chongqing City announced their examination reform plan, and performed on the 2018 students. This system gives students a wider choice on what subjects they are being tested on comparing to "3+X" system, but limits students' choice against the "3+3" system. By 2024, most regions of the country would implement the system as the successor of their "3+X" system.


title: Gaokao

text: To promise the legitimacy of the Grading Exam courses, the final scores of the four courses were transferred to band scores before they were counted into the total score. Example below is Guangdong's algorithm.


title: Gaokao

text: When weighing the score, the candidate's score of one course are sorted from high to low, and divided into five group according to rank distribution. A grade from A to E was given to these groups. The band score is then calculated after confirming the grade.


title: Gaokao

text: The band score has a range from 100 to 30, each grade has a typical range of 10pts to 17pts. According to each candidate's actual score, the score's belonging grade, and the grade's scoring range, the score was transferred in proportion by the following formula:


title: Gaokao

text: formula_2, formula_3represents the lower and higher limit of the actual score of each grade; formula_4, formula_5represents the lower and higher limits of the band score of each grade. formula_6represents the candidate's actual score, formula_7represents the candidate's band score.


title: Gaokao

text: This system has been implemented in Shanghai and Zhejiang since the employment of comprehensive courses since September 2014. Since 2017, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Hainan have begun to use this program.


title: Gaokao

text: The National Higher Education Entrance Examination is not uniform across the country, but administered uniformly within each province of China or each direct-controlled municipality. The National Higher Education Entrance Examination is graded variously across the country.


title: Gaokao

text: In the winter of the year before the examination year, students are required to register for the examination. The registration is usually completed on the official website of the provincal academy of educational recruitment and examination, and examinees are required to fill out an online form, which includes name, gender, date of birth, identification number, address, domicile, political status, school, phone number, and other informations about the examination and admission. The form requires students to choose elective-mandatory subjects they elected. Three subjects are universally mandatory: Chinese, Mathematics, and a foreign language — usually English, but this may be substituted by Russian, Japanese, German, French or Spanish, less than 1% students substitute by other languages. The other six standard subjects are three natural-science subjects - physics, chemistry, biology, and three liberal-art subjects - history, geography, and political science; applicants can elect 3 subjects to take tests from them. Six subjects students take test in Gaokao consist of three universally mandatory subjects and three elective-mandatory subjects which was chosen by applicants.


title: Gaokao

text: In the spring before Gaokao, examinees participate in school-organized medical examinations, in order to find diseases affect future majors. For example, students with myopia are not allowed to apply for military schools, and colorblind students won't be admitted by medical professions. It is also noting that "have a high school diploma or equivalent" requires students to firstly take Qualifying Examination of the Academic Proficiency Examination for Senior High School Students (普通高中学业水平合格性考试), unofficially called "Huikao (会考)", including 12 subjects students learned in senior high school. The examination are always very simple to pass. Their results are credited as "qualified" and "failed", "qualified" accounts for 97% of the total number of examination and "failed" accounts 3% of the total, in the end hand in a Comprehensive Qualification Report based on the student's performance and social activity. The result of the Qualifying Examination and the Report would be given to the college as a reference when admitting. Failed students have three chances to take makeup examinations. Chemistry, biology, geography and history examinations are held in the summer of senior one; Chinese, mathematics, English, physics, politics examinations took places in the winter of senior two; and information technology and general technology examinations took up in the summer of senior two; physical education test is in the spring of senior three-months before Gaokao. Elective subjects they failed in Huikao are not available for applicants when signing upto Gaokao.


title: Gaokao

text: It is arranged at the end of the spring semester and secondary school graduates across the country take the examination simultaneously over a two to four-day period.


title: Gaokao

text: Applicants to some specialist programs are also screened by additional criteria: some art departments (e.g. audition), military and police schools (political screening and physical exam), and some sports programs (tryout).


title: Gaokao

text: Exam scores can be used to apply to universities outside mainland China. Across the globe, Hong Kong is on their top list. In 2007, 7 students with the overall highest score in their provinces entered Hong Kong's universities rather than the two major universities in mainland China. In 2010, over 1,200 students entered the 12 local institutions which provide tertiary education courses through this examination. In addition, City University of Hong Kong and Chinese University of Hong Kong directly participate in the application procedure like other mainland universities.


title: Gaokao

text: The examination is essentially the only criterion for tertiary education admissions. Poor test performance almost always means giving up on that goal. Students hoping to attend university will spend most of their waking moments studying prior to the exam. If they fail in their first attempt, some students repeat the last year of high school to retake the exam during the following year.


title: Gaokao

text: In different places and across different time periods in history, students were required to apply for their intended university or college "prior" to the exam, "after" the exam, or more recently, "after" they receive their scores, by filling a list of ranked preferences. The application list is classified into several tiers (including at least early admissions, key universities, regular universities, vocational colleges), each of which can contain around 4-6 choices for institutions and programs. Typically, an institution or program would only admit students who apply to it as their first choice in each tier. In some regions, students are allowed to apply for different tiers at different times. For example, in Shanghai, students apply for early admission, key universities and regular universities prior to the exam, but can apply for other colleges after they receive their scores.


title: Gaokao

text: Chinese students are required to choose either Social Sciences (political science, geography, and history) or Natural Sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology). This occurs at the end of students' first or second year of high school, when students are mostly 15–17 years old. Once they make their decisions, they start preparing for the subject tests, and no longer take classes for the other three subjects. This decision determines which college entrance test they take at the age of 18 and influences their college majors and future career path.


title: Gaokao

text: A university usually sets a fixed admission quota for each province, with a higher number of students coming from its home province. As the advanced educational resources (number and quality of universities) are distributed unevenly across China, it is argued that people are being discriminated against during the admission process based on their geographic region. For example, compared to Beijing, Jiangxi province has fewer universities per capita. Therefore, Jiangxi usually receives fewer admission quotas compared with Beijing, which makes a significantly higher position among applicants necessary for a Jiangxi candidate to be admitted by the same university than their Beijing counterpart. The unequal admission schemes for different provinces and regions might intensify competition among examinees from provinces with fewer advanced education resources. For example, Peking University planned to admit 800 science students from Beijing (with 80,000 candidates in total), but only 38 from Shandong (with 660,000 candidates in total). This is not similar to the practice of regional universities in other countries which receive subsidies from regional governments in addition to or in place of those received from central governments, as universities in China largely depend on state budget rather than local budget. However, this regionally preferential policy does provide subsidies to minority students from under-developed regions that enjoy limited educational resources, such as Tibet and Xinjiang.


title: Gaokao

text: The regional discrimination can be proved by the disparities between ratios of a province's enrollment of students to the total number of candidate students of the province. In 2010, the acceptance rates for students from Beijing, Shanghai, Shandong and Henan who applied for universities of the first-ranking category were 20.1%, 18%, 7.1% and 3.5% respectively. High acceptance rates are likely to appear in the most and least developed cities and provinces, such as Beijing, Shanghai or Qinghai. In contrast, acceptance rates remain relatively equal among provinces of the average developmental level.


title: Gaokao

text: In recent years, varied admission standards have led some families to relocate for the sole purpose of advancing their children's chances of entering university.


title: Gaokao

text: In addition, regional discrimination is not only restricted to the ratio for admission. This is best illustrated with an example of the Hubei Province, where students' exam scores have been higher than other provinces for a long time. A score for a Hubei student to just reach the admission cut-off line for a key university may be enough for a student from another province to be admitted by a much better university, and even enough for a Beijing student to be admitted by top universities like Tsinghua University and Peking University.


title: Gaokao

text: Some local students in Hong Kong complained that it was unfair that the increasing intake of Mainland students who have performed at a high level in this examination increases the admission grades of universities, making it harder for local students to get admission. In 2010, more than 5,000 out of the 17,000 students who achieved the minimum university entry requirement were not offered places in any degree courses in the UGC-funded universities.


title: Gaokao

text: As a student is required to take exams in the region where their household registration (under the Hukou system) is located, the qualification of migrant children becomes controversial. Since 2012, some regions began to relax the requirements and allow some children of migrants to take their College Entrance Exam in regions outside of their household registration. As of 2016, Guangdong's policies are the most relaxed. A child of migrants can take their Entrance Exam in Guangdong if they have attended 3 years of highschool in the province, and if the parent(s) have legal jobs and have paid for 3 years of social insurance in the province.


title: Gaokao

text: There are special concessions for members of ethnic minorities, foreign nationals, persons with family origin in Taiwan, and children of military casualties. Students can also receive bonus marks by achieving high results in academic Olympiads, other science and technology competitions, sporting competitions, as well as "political or moral" distinction. In the 2018 National People's Congress, the government passed legislation abolishing all bonus scores from competitions.


title: Gaokao

text: Because gaokao is one of the most influential examinations in China and students can only take the test once a year, both teachers and students undergo tremendous pressure in preparing for and taking the exam. For teachers, because the society heavily focuses on the rate of admission into universities, they have to work harder to prepare every student for the exam. Because of this, teachers give students more and more practice for exams. This teaching methodology, colloquially referred to as "cramming", involves students memorizing large volumes of information fed to them by teachers and undertaking many practice exercises in order to optimize exam writing ability. One of the disadvantages of this method is the lack of focus on teaching critical thinking and ignoring students' emotions, values and personalities. Many examinees suffer from severe anxiety during the test. In some cases, examinees may faint in the examination room.


title: Gaokao

text: Further and deeper stemming criticisms have been leveled that the testing system is the "most pressure packed examination in the world". Behaviors surrounding the testing period have been extreme under some reports, with doctors in Tianjin purportedly prescribing birth control pills to female students whose parents wanted to ensure the girls were not menstruating at the time of examination. Testing pressure, for some critics, has been linked to faintings, increased drop out rates, and even increasing rates of teenage clinical depression.


title: Gaokao

text: Pressure caused as a result of the gaokao has been linked to a rise in student suicides. A school in Hebei province installed suicide barriers to prevent students from jumping to their deaths in response to two suicides in the facility related to the exam.


title: Gaokao

text: The gaokao tends to impact the lives of most Chinese teenagers and their parents. In Zhengzhou, Henan, the local bus company parked a 985 number bus outside a gaokao center for parents to wait in, the number reflects a popular enrollment program number for university entrances.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: Disraeli Gears is the second studio album by the British rock band Cream. It was released in November 1967 and reached No. 5 on the UK Albums Chart., and No. 1 on the Swedish and Finnish charts. The album was also No. 1 for two weeks on the Australian album chart and was listed as the No. 1 album of 1968 by "Cash Box" in the year-end album chart in the United States. The album features the singles "Strange Brew" and "Sunshine of Your Love", as well as their respective B-sides "Tales of Brave Ulysses" and "SWLABR".


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The original 11-track album was remastered in 1998, and then subsequently released as a two-disc "Deluxe Edition" in 2004.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The album was recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York between 11 and 15 May 1967, following the band's nine shows as part of Murray the K's "Music in the 5th Dimension" concert series. Cream's American label, ATCO, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Atlantic Records.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The sessions were produced by future Mountain bassist Felix Pappalardi – who co-wrote the tracks "Strange Brew" and "World of Pain" with wife Gail Collins – and were engineered by Tom Dowd – who would later work with Clapton on projects such as "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" and "461 Ocean Boulevard". Atlantic Records owner Ahmet Ertegun was also present during the sessions.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: According to Dowd the recording sessions took only three-and-a-half days. The band's visas expired on the very last day of recording.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: Drummer Ginger Baker recalled how the album's title was based on a malapropism which alluded to 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli:


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The cover art was created by Australian artist Martin Sharp who lived in the same building as Clapton, The Pheasantry in Chelsea. Sharp would go on to create the artwork to Cream's next album "Wheels of Fire" and co-wrote the songs "Tales of Brave Ulysses" and "The Savage Seven" movie theme "Anyone for Tennis" with Clapton. The photography was by Bob Whitaker, known for his work for the Beatles, including the controversial "Yesterday and Today" "butcher" cover. Most of the photographs were taken in July 1967, with shoots in London's Hyde Park as well as in the Scottish Highlands. Some of the images were shot on Ben Nevis, the tallest mountain in the British isles. The photos show a clean-shaven Clapton with a bouffant, permed hairstyle. By the time of the album's release in November, however, he was letting his hair grow out straight and had grown a moustache.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The front cover consists of a psychedelic collage with the title centred and band name below, surrounded by a floral arrangement. Martin Sharp was attempting to capture the sound of the music in the cover, which he describes as a "warm fluorescent sound":


title: Disraeli Gears

text: "Disraeli Gears" features the group veering away, quite heavily, from their blues roots and indulging in more psychedelic sounds, in particular on tracks such as "Tales of Brave Ulysses", "SWLABR", "World of Pain" and "Dance the Night Away", the last of which features a 12-string guitar (the only time the instrument would be used on a Cream recording). The most blues-like tunes on the album are Clapton's arrangement of "Outside Woman Blues", the Bruce-Brown composition "Take It Back" which had been inspired by the contemporary media images of American students burning their draft cards which featured harmonica work by Jack Bruce, and the opening track "Strange Brew", which was based on a 12-bar blues song called "Lawdy Mama" and features an Albert King guitar solo, copied note for note.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: Unlike the previous "Fresh Cream", which was vocally dominated by Bruce, the vocals on "Disraeli Gears" were a more democratic affair. Clapton sings lead on "Strange Brew" and "Outside Woman Blues", and co-lead on "World of Pain", "Dance the Night Away" and "Sunshine of Your Love". Baker, meanwhile, performs lead vocals on his composition "Blue Condition". All three band members sing together on "Mother's Lament".


title: Disraeli Gears

text: In contrast to much of the band's other work, "Disraeli Gears" comprises mainly short, self-contained songs, with none of the improvisation and jamming for which the band was known onstage.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The original 11-track album was remastered by Joseph M. Palmaccio at PolyGram Studios for a 1998 release, including bonus photographs accompanying the original album artwork.


title: Disraeli Gears

text: The "Disraeli Gears Deluxe Edition" includes the complete album in both mono and stereo, demos, alternative takes and tracks taken from the band's live sessions on BBC radio. Included is an outtake of "Blue Condition" with Eric Clapton on lead vocals, and demos of the songs "Weird of Hermiston" and "The Clearout" which were not released until Jack Bruce's first solo album "Songs for a Tailor".


title: Disraeli Gears

text: Writing for the BBC, Chris Jones described the album as "a perfect encapsulation of the point where the blues got psychedelic and in turn got heavy". Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic describes the album as "a quintessential heavy rock album of the '60s". Dave Swanson of Ultimate Classic Rock believes the album to be "their masterpiece".


title: Disraeli Gears

text: It was voted number 182 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's "All Time Top 1000 Albums" (2000). In 2003 the album was ranked number 112 on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, then was re-ranked at number 114 in a 2012 revised list, and at number 170 in a 2020 revised list. VH1 named it 87th-greatest album of all time in 2001. In 2008, the album won a Classic Rock Roll of Honours Award for Classic Album.


title: Andre Rison

text: Andre Previn Rison (born March 18, 1967) is a former American football wide receiver who played professionally for the National Football League's Indianapolis Colts, Atlanta Falcons, Cleveland Browns, Jacksonville Jaguars, Green Bay Packers, Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, and the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts. Rison was selected to the Pro Bowl five times, from 1990 to 1993 and once again in 1997.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison won a Super Bowl championship with the Packers in 1997 over the New England Patriots, scoring the first points of the game on a 54-yard touchdown catch from quarterback Brett Favre. He also won a Grey Cup championship with the Toronto Argonauts in 2004. He is one of the few players to win professional football championships in both the United States and Canada. He was released by the Argonauts during the 2005 CFL season. He holds an NFL record for scoring a touchdown with 7 teams.


title: Andre Rison

text: He was a star player at Flint Northwestern High School and in college at Michigan State University. As a senior at Michigan State, Rison had 30 receptions for 709 yards and 5 touchdowns; he was a prominent contributor to the 1987 Michigan State squad that won the Rose Bowl on January 1, 1988.


title: Andre Rison

text: During the early portion of his career, he received the nickname "Bad Moon" Rison, a reference to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Bad Moon Rising". Michael Adler is credited with giving the nickname to Chris Berman. When he played for the Chiefs, he had the nickname "Spiderman".


title: Andre Rison

text: The Indianapolis Colts selected Rison in the first round (22nd overall) of the 1989 NFL Draft. In his rookie season, he caught 52 passes for 820 yards with four touchdown receptions.


title: Andre Rison

text: On April 20, 1990, the Indianapolis Colts traded Rison, Chris Hinton, a fifth round pick in the 1990 NFL Draft, and their first round pick on the 1991 NFL Draft to the Atlanta Falcons for their first overall pick and their fourth round pick in the 1990 NFL Draft. The Indianapolis Colts used the trade to move up to select Jeff George first overall in the 1990 NFL Draft. His next season marked the first of five very productive campaigns with the Falcons. During these years, Rison finished near the top of most receiving categories, and led all NFL players with 15 receiving touchdowns in 1993. Andre Rison was only the 5th Receiver in NFL history to score 60 touchdowns in his first six seasons. Rison led the NFL in most receptions in his first four and first five seasons. Rison was second in the NFL for most receptions in six seasons. During his final season in Atlanta, on June 9, 1994, his girlfriend at the time Lisa Left Eye Lopes from TLC burned Rison's house down.


title: Andre Rison

text: After the 1994 season, Rison signed a lucrative free agent contract with Cleveland, where he was expected to become the featured receiving threat for the Browns, who had made the playoffs the year before. Rison, who had been named to the Pro Bowl in four of his previous six seasons, had career lows in receptions (47), yards (701), touchdowns (3), receptions per game (2.9), and yards per game (43.8). Rison also developed a feud with the Cleveland fans, who were angered over the announcement that the team would be relocating to Baltimore. After a home loss to the Packers, Rison, who had been booed by the fans throughout the game, lashed out, stating, "We didn't make the fucking move. So, for all the booers, fuck you too. I'll be glad when we get to Baltimore, if that's the case. We don't have any home-field advantage. I've never been booed at home. Baltimore's our home. Baltimore, here we come." Rison, however, did not make the move with the team to Baltimore as he joined the Jacksonville Jaguars in the offseason.


title: Andre Rison

text: In 1996, Rison would have a somewhat eventful season. He started with the Jacksonville Jaguars, where he spent the first ten games. He caught 34 passes for 458 yards and two touchdowns. Rison had a miscommunication with quarterback Mark Brunell in week 12 that resulted in an interception in a 28-3 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers. This mistake caused tempers to flare between the two and Rison was subsequently released. The Green Bay Packers claimed Rison off of waivers November 20, 1996. He would play five of the remaining games, where he caught 13 passes for 135 yards and one touchdown. For the first time in five years, Rison got to play in a playoff game, with the Packers making a run to the Super Bowl. In three games, he caught seven total passes for 143 yards and two touchdowns.


title: Andre Rison

text: He signed with the Chiefs prior to the 1997 season. For the second time in his career (1993 being the only other time), Rison started in all 16 games of the season. He caught 72 passes for 1,092 yards and seven touchdowns as the Chiefs went on to become the #1 seed that year. In the Divisional round playoff game, Rison caught eight passes for 110 yards, but the Chiefs would lose 14–10 to division rival and eventual Super Bowl champion in the Denver Broncos. In the following year, he caught 40 passes in 14 total games for 542 yards and five touchdowns in a down season overall for Rison and team. For 1999, he played 15 games and regressed further, catching 21 passes for 218 yards with no touchdowns.


title: Andre Rison

text: 2000 proved to be his last year and he spent it with his seventh team in the Oakland Raiders. He played in all of the games without starting, and he caught 41 passes for 606 yards for six touchdowns. The Raiders made a run in the playoffs, and Rison made small contribution, having caught three combined passes for 44 yards.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison finished his NFL career with 743 receptions for 10,205 yards and 84 touchdowns, along with 8 kickoff returns for 150 yards and 9 carries for 23 yards.


title: Andre Rison

text: He signed with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League in August 2004, who went on to win the 92nd Grey Cup championship that year. He was released by the team in August 2005.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison is also remembered for his life off the football field, which garnered him the nickname "Bad Moon" Rison from ESPN sportscaster Chris Berman, alluding to the song "Bad Moon Rising" by Creedence Clearwater Revival.


title: Andre Rison

text: During his three-season stint with Kansas City, Rison was nicknamed Spider-Man and would often fake shooting a web, like Spider-Man after scoring a touchdown. Rison gave himself the nickname in part because he viewed Spider-Man as a positive character and wanted to be thought of as less of a headache and problem. His "Spider-Man" nickname has been named one of the best nicknames in sports history by "Bleacher Report".


title: Andre Rison

text: In the 2006–2008 high school football seasons, Rison was assistant coach at Beecher High School in Flint, Michigan. The head coach was Courtney Hawkins, Rison's former teammate at Michigan State.


title: Andre Rison

text: In March 2010, Rison was named the new head coach for Flint Northwestern High School's football team.


title: Andre Rison

text: For the opening week of the 2010 and 2011 high school football seasons, Rison and Flint Northwestern faced off against Courtney Hawkins and Flint Beecher. Not only did these games showcase two former NFL players coaching at their alma maters, but the schools are so close geographically that it made for an intriguing and intense rivalry. The crowds came in large numbers for both games, which forced each game to Flint's 11,000 seat Atwood Stadium, instead of Flint Beecher's Russ Reynolds Field or Flint Northwestern's Guy V. Houston Stadium. Beecher won the 2010 opener, 28–18, spoiling Rison's head coaching debut. The 2011 opener was a thriller, with Northwestern holding on for a 46-44 double overtime victory. In two years at Flint Northwestern, Rison's coaching the team showed noticeable improvement in his second season, nearly doubling their offensive output, and losing four of their games by a combined total of only nine points. In May 2012, Rison announced that he was leaving Flint Northwestern in order to complete his degree at Michigan State and join the football team as an assistant coach.


title: Andre Rison

text: Andre Rison coached in 2014 for Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the offensive coordinator, where he recorded an 0–9 record. He also coached his son Hunter Rison, who committed to Michigan State on April 1, 2016.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison also trains wide receivers at the Andre Rison Football Academy, and he coached in the 2008 Hawaii All-Star Classic. Rison appeared on an episode of the MTV reality show "Made". He worked to help a student become a high school varsity quarterback.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison was a featured Pro on the second season of the reality show "Pros vs. Joes" on Spike TV, and also appeared in an episode of TNA Impact (now called Impact Wrestling). He was at the center of the hexagonal ring, and then Abyss came out and Black Hole slammed Rison.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison appears prominently in the 2012 ESPN 30-30 documentary "Broke" about former professional athletes who squander their wealth. The film, directed and written by Billy Corben of Rakontur, was featured at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival as part of its TFF/ESPN Sports Festival, and is included in the second season (styled as "Volume II") of ESPN's "30 for 30" documentary series.


title: Andre Rison

text: On May 30, 2017, Rison was one of eight new inductees announced for the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in Detroit. The induction ceremony took place on September 15, 2017.


title: Andre Rison

text: Rison dated Lisa Lopes of TLC on and off from 1993 to 2001. Their relationship was rocky, with domestic violence allegations. During one altercation in 1994, Lopes lit his shoes on fire in the bathtub resulting in his house burning down and her being charged with first-degree arson.


title: Andre Rison

text: Andre's son, Hunter Rison, played as a true freshman wide receiver for Michigan State University in 2017, before transferring to Kansas State University in 2018. However, while at Kansas State he was charged with battery of a young woman in June 2019 which prevented him from ever playing with the team. Accepting the charges in July of the same year, he shortly after pledged to attend a junior college team at Fullerton College in 2020. After waiting out part of the COVID-19 pandemic in Arizona with his mother Racquel Banks, Hunter enrolled and played at Grand Valley State University in 2021.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: The GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) is a precision-guided, "bunker buster" bomb used by the United States Air Force. This is substantially larger than the deepest-penetrating bunker busters previously available, the GBU-28 and GBU-37.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: It is designed to accomplish a difficult, complicated mission of reaching and destroying an adversary's weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: In 2002, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin were working on the development of a earth-penetrating weapon, but funding and technical difficulties resulted in the development work being abandoned. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, analysis of sites that had been attacked with bunker buster bombs revealed poor penetration and inadequate levels of destruction. This renewed interest in the development of a larger bunker buster, and the MOP project was initiated by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to fulfill a long-standing Air Force requirement.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: The U.S. Air Force has not officially communicated a specific military requirement for an ultra-large bomb, but it does have a concept for a collection of very large penetrator and blast weapons: the so-called "Big BLU" collection, which includes the MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) bomb. Development of the MOP was performed at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida with design and testing work performed by Boeing. It is intended that the bomb will be deployed on the B-2 bomber, and will be guided using GPS. It is also planned to be deployed on the B-21 bomber.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: Northrop Grumman announced a $2.5-million stealth-bomber refit contract on 19 July 2007. Each of the U.S. Air Force's B-2s is to be able to carry two 14-ton MOPs.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: The initial explosive test of MOP took place on 14 March 2007 in a tunnel belonging to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: On 6 October 2009, ABC News reported that the Pentagon had requested and obtained permission from the U.S. Congress to shift funding in order to accelerate the project. It was later announced by the U.S. military that funding delays and enhancements to the planned test schedule meant the bomb would not be deployable until December 2010, six months later than the original availability date.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: The Air Force took delivery of 20 bombs, designed to be delivered by the B-2 bomber, in September 2011. In February 2012, Congress approved $81.6 million to further develop and improve the weapon.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: On 14 November 2011, Bloomberg reported that the Air Force Global Strike Command started receiving the Massive Ordnance Penetrator and that the deliveries "will meet requirements for the current operational need". The Air Force now has received delivery of 16 MOPs as of November 2011. And as of March 2012, there is an "operational stockpile" at Whiteman Air Force Base.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: In 2012, the Pentagon requested $82 million to develop greater penetration power for the existing weapon. A 2013 report stated that the development had been a success, and B-2 integration testing began that year.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: On 25 June 2010, USAF Lt. Gen. Philip M. Breedlove said that the Next Generation Penetrator (NGP) munition should be about a third the size of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator so it could be carried by affordable aircraft. In December 2010, the USAF had a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the Next Generation Penetrator.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: Global Strike Command has indicated that one of the objectives for the Next-Generation Bomber is for it to carry a weapon with the effects of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This would either be with the same weapon or a smaller weapon that uses rocket power, not unlike the WW II British/American Disney bomb used, to reach sufficient speed to match the penetrating power of the larger weapon.


title: Massive Ordnance Penetrator

text: One of the current limitations of the MOP is that it lacks a void-sensing fuze and will therefore detonate only after it has come to a stop, even if it has passed the target area.


title: Bank of India

text: Bank of India (BOI) is an Indian public sector bank headquartered in Bandra Kurla Complex, Mumbai. Founded in 1906, it has been government-owned since nationalisation in 1969. BoI is a founder member of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Inter Bank Financial Telecommunications), which facilitates provision of cost-effective financial processing and communication services.


title: Bank of India

text: As on 31 March 2021, Bank of India's total business stands at , has 5,108 branches and 5,551 ATMs around the world (including 24 overseas branches).


title: Bank of India

text: Bank of India was founded on 7 September 1906 by a group of eminent businessmen from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The Bank was under private ownership and control till 19 July 1969 when it was nationalised along with 13 other banks.


title: Bank of India

text: Beginning with one office in Mumbai, with a paid-up capital of and 50 employees, the Bank has made a rapid growth over the years and blossomed into a mighty institution with a strong national presence and sizable international operations. In business volume, the Bank occupies a premier position among the nationalised banks.


title: Bank of India

text: The bank has over 5,084 branches in India spread over all states and union territories including specialized branches. These branches are controlled through 54 zonal offices. There are 60 branches, 5 subsidiaries, and 1 joint venture abroad.


title: Bank of India

text: The Bank came out with its maiden public issue in 1997 and follow on Qualified Institutions Placement in February 2008.


title: Bank of India

text: The earlier holders of the Bank of India name had failed and were no longer in existence by the time a diverse group of Hindus, Muslims, Parsees, and Jews helped establish the present Bank of India in 1906 in Bombay. At the time, banks in India were either owned by Europeans and served mainly the interests of the European merchant houses, or by different communities and served the banking needs of their own community.


title: Bank of India

text: The promoters incorporated the Bank of India on 7 September 1906 under Act VI of 1882, with an authorised capital of divided into 100,000 shares each of . The promoters placed 55,000 shares privately, and issued 45,000 to the public by way of IPO on 3 October 1906; the bank commenced operations on 1 November 1906.


title: Bank of India

text: The lead promoter of the Bank of India was Sir Sassoon J. David (1849–1926). He was a member of the Sassoon family, who in turn were part of a Bombay community of Baghdadi Jews that was notable for its history of social service. Sir David was a prudent banker and remained the bank's chief executive from its founding in 1906 until his death in 1926.


title: Bank of India

text: The first board of directors of the bank consisted of Sir Sassoon David, Sir Cowasjee Jehangir, J. Cowasjee Jehangir, Sir Frederick Leigh Croft, Ratanjee Dadabhoy Tata, Gordhandas Khattau, Lalubhai Samaldas, Khetsety Khiasey, Ramnarain Hurnundrai, Jenarrayen Hindoomull Dani, and Noordin Ebrahim Noordin.


title: Bank of India

text: BoI's international expansion began in 1946 when the bank BoI opened a branch in London, the first Indian bank to do so. This was also the first post-World War II overseas branch of any Indian bank.


title: Bank of India

text: The 1950s saw BoI open numerous branches abroad: Tokyo and Osaka in 1950, Singapore in 1951, Kenya and Uganda in 1953, Aden in 1953 or 1954, and Tanganyika in 1955.


title: Bank of India

text: After a brief hiatus, BoI returned to international expansion, opening a branch in Hong Kong in 1960. A branch in Nigeria followed in 1962.


title: Bank of India

text: Then came nationalizations abroad, and at home. The Government of Tanzania nationalised BoI's operations in Tanzania in 1967 and folded them into the government-owned National Commercial Bank, together with those of Bank of Baroda and several other foreign banks. Two years later, in 1969, the Government of India nationalised the 14 top banks, including Bank of India. In the same year, the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen nationalised BoI's branch in Aden, and the Nigerian and Ugandan governments forced BoI to incorporate its branches in those countries. The next year, National Bank of Southern Yemen incorporated BoI's branch in Yemen, together with those of all the other banks in the country; this is now National Bank of Yemen. BoI was the only Indian bank in the country.


title: Bank of India

text: In 1972 BoI sold its Uganda operation to Bank of Baroda. The next year BoI opened a representative office in Jakarta.


title: Bank of India

text: In 1980 Bank of India (Nigeria), changed its name to Allied Bank of Nigeria to reflect the fact that it was no longer a subsidiary of Bank of India.


title: Bank of India

text: In 1986 BoI acquired Parur Central Bank in (Ernakulam District, Kerala State) in a rescue. Parur Central Bank had been founded in 1930, and at the time of its failure had 51 branches. BoI amalgamated Parur Central Bank in 1990.


title: Bank of India

text: The next year, 1987, BoI took over the three UK branches of Central Bank of India (CBI). CBI had been caught up in the Sethia fraud and default and the Reserve Bank of India required it to transfer its branches.


title: Bank of India

text: BoI established a wholly owned subsidiary, Bank of India (New Zealand) Ltd., in Auckland, New Zealand on 6 October 2011. Then BoI established a wholly owned subsidiary, Bank of India (Uganda) Ltd., on 18 June 2012. Most recently, BoI opened its wholly owned subsidiary Bank of India (Botswana) Ltd., on 9 August 2013.


title: Bowel obstruction

text: Bowel obstruction, also known as intestinal obstruction, is a mechanical or functional obstruction of the intestines which prevents the normal movement of the products of digestion. Either the small bowel or large bowel may be affected. Signs and symptoms include abdominal pain, vomiting, bloating and not passing gas. Mechanical obstruction is the cause of about 5 to 15% of cases of severe abdominal pain of sudden onset requiring admission to hospital.