title: ASCII

text: ASCII does not have diacritics (marks that are added to a letter, like the dots (umlauts) above vowels in German, or the tilde (~) above the 'n' for the 'ñ' used in Spanish). It was only meant for English and doesn't work well for most other languages. Some English words borrowed from other languages use these marks as well, like "resumé" (see Appendix:English words with diacritics).


title: ASCII

text: This led to some systems using 8 bits (a full byte) instead of 7 bits. The proper name for systems that use 8 bits is called "extended ASCII". Eight bits allows for 256 characters. The first 128 characters must be the same as for ASCII and the rest are usually used for alphabetic letters with accents, for example like É, È, Î and Ü. This solves the problem for a few languages that are based on the Latin alphabet, although not all extended ASCII systems are the same. Other alphabets, like the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet need a different set of characters. And some systems like those using Chinese characters still do not work, as they use thousands of characters. So Unicode was created to have one common system for all languages.


title: Facebook

text: Facebook (sometimes shortened to FB) is a social networking service and website started in February 2004. It was built by Mark Zuckerberg. It is owned by Meta, Inc. , Facebook has over one billion active users. Users may make a personal profile, add other users as friends, and send messages. Facebook users must register before using the site. The name of the service comes from the name for the book given to students at the start of the school year by some universities in the United States. These books help students get to know each other better. Facebook allows any users who are at least 13 years old to become users of the website.


title: Facebook

text: Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was only for Harvard students at first. Later it included other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It eventually opened for students at other universities. After that, it opened to high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. Based on ConsumersReports.org in May 2011, there are 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts. This breaks the website's rules.


title: Facebook

text: A January 2009 Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users. "Entertainment Weekly" put the site on its end-of-the-decade "best-of" list. It said, "How on earth did we stalk our exes, remember our co-workers birthdays, bug our friends, and play a rousing game of Scrabulous before Facebook?" Quantcast estimates Facebook had 138.9 million monthly different U.S. visitors in May 2011. According to "Social Media Today", in April 2010 about 41.6% of the U.S. population had a Facebook account. Facebook's growth started to slow down in some areas. The site lost 7 million active users in the United States and Canada in May 2011 relative to previous statistics.


title: Facebook

text: Facebook has been involved in many controversies over privacy. Some of these controversies have been about people being able to see personal information that other people post, and others are about companies and advertisers being able to see users' personal information. Facebook has sent ads to people based on the persons gender, age, income, national origin and sexual orientation.


title: Facebook

text: Research published in the journal "PLOS ONE" has shown that Facebook may be responsible for spreading unhappiness through society as well as keeping people connected. Scientists found that the more time people spent on Facebook over a two-week period, the worse they subsequently felt. "On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it."


title: Facebook

text: In 2018, Facebook launched Facebook Gaming officially on June 1, 2018 with a pool of gaming streamers including Darkness429, Stonemountain64, ThePoolshark, and Alodia Gosiengfiao.


title: Facebook

text: Facebook Gaming or fb.gg is Facebook's take on gaming livestreams where gamers and fans interact. Facebook launched it as a tab on the Facebook app and a standalone app. It also has an In-stream Rewards feature where viewers are gifted in-game rewards while watching streams with "" being a part of pioneering the feature as mentioned by Jack Li, a Facebook Gaming representative, on Moonton Epicon held last July 18, 2019.


title: Facebook

text: In 2019, Jeremy "DisguisedToast" Wang was signed to Facebook Gaming in a surprise move from Twitch. Soon after, Facebook signed "Super Smash Bros." star streamer Gonzalo "ZerO" Barrios.


title: Facebook

text: On February 18, 2020 Ronda Rousey performed her first live stream on Facebook Gaming, announcing that she will stream once per week. The details of her contract were not disclosed.


title: Facebook

text: On April 20, 2020 Facebook launched its gaming app in Playstore, named as Facebook Gaming. This app was actually planned to release in June 2020, but Facebook preponed on witnessing the community demand.


title: 42 (answer)

text: 42 is the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books. It was computed by


title: 42 (answer)

text: Deep Thought, the second greatest computer ever. The descendants of Deep Thought's creators are upset by the numeric nature of the answer, not understanding what to do with it or what to tell the people who had commissioned the 7.5-million year project.


title: 42 (answer)

text: When asked to produce The Ultimate Question to go with the answer "42", Deep Thought admits it is not capable of computing that itself, but that it can help to design an even more powerful computer, which can. This new computer will incorporate living beings into the "computational matrix" and will run for ten million years. It is the planet Earth.


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), ( (GRC)), is the national police force of Canada. The force is also called the "Mounties".


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: RCMP is unique in the world because it is a national, federal, provincial and municipal policing organization:


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: The Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP), was founded 1873. The Mounties were created to establish authority and to make accommodations with the native population in the west before settlers began to arrive. The smaller Dominion Police was founded in 1868 to protect federal government buildings.


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: The Mounties were given the right to use the term "Royal" by King Edward VII in 1904. Their name was changed to the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP).


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: The word "mounted" suggests that the police ride horses. Before 1920, horses were their main method of travel. However, today the RCMP do not ride horses except at special events.


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: The RCMP are famous for their uniform. The "Review Order" (also "Red Serge") uniform is worn mostly at special events, such as parades. The uniform consists of a red tunic with a large brown belt,(formally known as a “Sam Browne”), a light brown hat, dark blue breeches (trousers) with a yellow stripe and riding boots.


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: On an ordinary day at work, RCMP officers instead wear a grey shirt, dark blue trousers, ankle boots and a peaked cap (the type worn by most police officers elsewhere). In the winter they may wear a thicker coat, heavier boots and a fur cap.


title: Royal Canadian Mounted Police

text: Ranks marked with an asterisk (*) are only found in a few parts of the RCMP and are usually not part of the chain of command. For most staff sergeants, their superior is an inspector and not a staff sergeant major. While "Cadet" is a term used for RCMP trainees at depot it is not an official rank.


title: Allah

text: Allah () is the common name for God in the Arabic language. It is similar to "Eloah", the name for God in the Hebrew language, and "Elaha," the name for God in the Aramaic language.


title: Allah

text: Muslims commonly use the word "Allah" for God. Sometimes, people who speak Arabic still use the word Allah when they speak English. In Islam, Allah is Merciful and Allah is the one who loves his followers.


title: Allah

text: The word "Allah" is also used with other human feelings that describe God, such as "sabur" (very patient), "halim" (does not get angry quickly), or "wedud" (loving).


title: Allah

text: Around 2000 BC (4000 years ago) there was a group of people called the Canaanites, who lived in the Middle East. They had many gods, and the ruling god was called "El" or "Il." El had power and ruled over everything, and he lived forever. He made the earth and everything else. Later, the word "El" became "Eloh" or "Elaha" in the Aramaic language. Another language, Hebrew, changed the Aramaic word to "Eloah". In the New Testament (the second book in the Christian Bible), the words "Eli" and "Elohi" were used to mean god. "El" is also in some people's names: Gabri-el, Mika-el, Azrael, Israel, Israel, Yishmael, Emanuel etc.


title: Allah

text: In Arabic, the general word for a god is "ilaah". It can mean a specific god, or any god at all, depending on how it is used.


title: Allah

text: As a proper noun, "Allah" is a name for one God. In Arabic, the word "al" is an article (a word for "the"), so "al-ILaah" means ""The" God".


title: Allah

text: The name "Allah" is made of four letters in Arabic, (or Alif Lam Lam Ha, from right to left, A-L-L-H, 2111), which when brought together make الله


title: Allah

text: If we write the above letters together it will resemble the calligraphy of the word nowadays pronounced as Allah.


title: Allah

text: In Islam, God is usually called "Allah." There are many different names for God in Islam. However, "Allah" is the most common. It means the same thing as any of the other names.


title: Allah

text: For Muslims, "Allah" describes a single God who is all-powerful and never makes mistakes. Muslims believe that Allah created everything, including the heavens and the Earth, simply by saying "Kun Faya Kun (""Be and it is"). Muslims often repeat the word "Allah" many times when they are praying.


title: Allah

text: In Judaism, God is usually called YHWH and Eloah. Both names are mentioned in the Old Testament and are one of the seven names of God in Judaism. It can also be noted that in Judaism, Elohim is a name for God and in Islam, Allahuma is a name for God. Since Jewish and Muslim names of God are very similar, Jews and Muslims say that they believe in the same God.


title: Allah

text: Arab Christians call their God "Allah" due to Arabic language. In the Arabic translation of the Christian Bible, God is referred to by "Allah". The word "Allah" was also used in the old Turkish translations of the Bible, e.g. 1941 version, due to Islamic culture being common in Turkey, and because the Turkish language was influenced by the Arabic Language.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: The Buddha is a title used to refer to a man named "Siddhartha Gautama". It means Fully Awakened One. He was born in a region of what is now known as the country Nepal as Prince Siddhartha Gautama in a Shakya Kingdom in Lumbini and was the person who created the religion of Buddhism. He lived from about 563 BC to about 483 BC.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: He is also called Shakyamuni Buddha because he was a member of the Śākyan clan, the ruling class of an aristocratic republic in Lumbini in that region.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: Siddhartha Gautama was born just outside the city in Lumbini as Prince Siddhartha Gautama in a Shakya clan. His father was a ruler named Shuddhodana, and his mother was named Maya. Maya died when Siddhartha was about 7 days old. His father controlled him in a very peaceful and nice way. There were home tutors for him as he was not interested in the outward things that took place at that time. Siddhartha lived in luxury; his father kept trouble and hard work far from him. A seer predicted that if Siddhartha stayed inside his palace his whole life, then he would become a great king. However, if he left the palace, then he would become a great religious leader. The king did not want his son to become a religious leader. He kept Siddhartha in the palace for his entire childhood.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: When Siddhartha turned 16 years old, his father found a woman for him to marry. He married a woman named Yashodhara, and they had a son named Rahula. Although Siddhartha had everything he could want, he was still not happy. He wanted to learn about life outside his palace.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: Legend says that he got out of the castle against his father's orders. He saw the ""Four Great Sights"": an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a holy man with no home.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: Siddhartha left his family, his land and everything else at the age of 29. He left everything to travel to neighbouring country India to be a mendicant (a wandering ascetic); eventually he became a religious leader for the people.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: Many holy men at this time were "ascetics". They hurt their bodies for religious reasons. They abstain from certain pleasures so they can get rid of desire. One group of ascetics were called the Jains. They practiced self-denial and made themselves suffer very much. They believed this would free the ātman (soul) from pain and sadness. There were many types of ascetic mendicants (wanderers) throughout the region which would become known as India. Siddhartha tried these ascetic practices and meditation techniques, and eventually became better than his teachers. He still found no answer, so he left his teachers and friends to discover another way. He decided to eat only six grains of rice a day. He tried holding his breath. His body became very thin, like skin and bones, and he nearly died. Still, he had no answer.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: Siddhartha began to think again about this path. He recalled sitting under a roseapple tree as a boy, and reaching a profound happy peaceful state. He thought this memory might point to a better way than hurting himself. He accepted a meal of milk-rice so he would have strength to make focussed effort. He found a fig tree (now called the "Bodhi tree") and decided to meditate beneath it. He promised himself that he would not leave this spot until he had found "enlightenment". He meditated under the tree (some say for 49 days). His mind is said to have become pure, and then--after a total of six years practicing--he became enlightened. He was now the Buddha the Fully Awakened


title: Gautama Buddha

text: When the Buddha became "enlightened", he found the answer to "suffering", and he knew how to defeat "suffering". This answer was called the Four Noble Truths. He was not sure if he should teach his new ideas or not. He asked himself if the world was ready for such a deep teaching. But in the end, he decided to travel to a town called Sarnath to teach the people his new way. He taught about the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. The people listened to him.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: When he taught, he did not pretend to be a god. He said he was just a man who had found the meaning of life (enlightenment), and that any person can also find the meaning of life. For the rest of his life, he walked all over what is now Southern Nepal and parts of India to teach people what he believed. He started a "Sangha", which is a group of Buddhist monks and nuns. Many people became enlightened because of him. At the age of 80, after 45 years teaching the Four Noble Truths, Gautama Buddha died.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: The teachings of the Buddha are known as "Buddhism". Buddhism is mostly about ending the feeling of pain that all people feel inside. Gautama Buddha taught that old age, sickness, death and suffering is a part of everyone's life. He taught that pain is caused by craving. And he showed that there is a way to end craving and end suffering by doing good things, not doing bad things, and training one's mind. When a person is able to perfect these qualities, they will gain "enlightenment".


title: Gautama Buddha

text: Buddhism teaches non-harm and balance – not going too far one way or the other. The Buddha taught people to meditate while sitting in the lotus position or when standing, sitting, walking, or lying down. The Buddha urged his followers to remember the Teachings, and ask questions. Some Buddhists chant (which was a way to remember and preserve the Teachings). Buddhists sometimes do these things to understand the human heart and mind. Sometimes they do these things to understand the way the world works. Sometimes they do these things to find peace.


title: Gautama Buddha

text: The Buddha taught that people should not look to gods to save them or bring them enlightenment. The gods may have power over world events and they might help people, or they might not. But Buddha believed that it is up to each person to become enlightened.


title: Natural disaster

text: A natural disaster is a major event caused by the natural processes of the Earth, consisting of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis and other geologic processes. A natural disaster causes loss of life or property damage, and leaves some economic damage afterwards costing millions.


title: Natural disaster

text: And often human activities also make causes of natural disasters, such as climate change and deforestation.


title: Natural disaster

text: It is the damage to humans and their property which counts most. Therefore, one can say: "disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability". If a strong earthquake happens in uninhabited areas, it is usually not seen as a disaster or a loss.


title: Natural disaster

text: An adverse event will not rise to the level of a disaster if it occurs in an area without vulnerable population. In a vulnerable area, however, such as , an earthquake can have disastrous consequences and leave lasting damage, which can require years to repair.


title: Natural disaster

text: A volcanic eruption occurs when hot materials from the Earth's interior are thrown out of a volcano. Lava, rocks, dust, and gas compounds are some of the ejected materials.


title: Natural disaster

text: Eruptions can come from side branches or from the top of the volcano. Some eruptions are terrible explosions that throw out huge amounts of rock and volcanic ash and kill many people. Some are quiet outflows of hot lava. Several more complex types of volcanic eruptions have been described by volcanologists. These are often named after famous volcanoes where that type of eruption has been seen. Some volcanoes may show only one type of eruption during a period of activity, while others may show a range of types in a series.


title: Mohs scale of mineral hardness

text: Mohs' scale of mineral hardness is named after Friedrich Mohs, a mineralogist. Mohs scale is ordered by hardness, determined by which minerals can scratch other minerals.


title: Mohs scale of mineral hardness

text: Rocks are made up of one or more minerals. According to the scale, Talc is the softest: it can be scratched by all other materials. Gypsum is harder: it can scratch talc but not calcite, which is even harder. The hardness of a mineral is mainly controlled by the strength of the bonding between the atoms and partly by the size of the atoms. It is a measure of the resistance of the mineral to scratching, the Mohs scale is for natural minerals. For manufactured products other measures of hardness are better.


title: Mohs scale of mineral hardness

text: Diamond is always at the top of the scale, being the hardest mineral. There are ten minerals in Mohs scale, talc, gypsum, calcite, fluorite, apatite, feldspar, quartz, topaz, corundum, and for last and hardest, diamond. Because the Mohs scale was made long ago, it is not exactly correct - for example, several minerals are now known to be harder than the diamond. The Mohs scale may not be perfect, but field geologists still find it very useful.


title: Banana

text: A banana is the common name for a type of fruit and also the name for the herbaceous plants that grow it. These plants belong to the genus "Musa". They are native to the tropical region of southeast Asia.


title: Banana

text: It is thought that bananas were grown for food for the first time in Papua New Guinea. Today, they are cultivated in tropical regions around the world. Most banana plants are grown for their fruits, which botanically are a type of berry. Some are grown as ornamental plants, or for their fibres.


title: Banana

text: There are about 110 different species of banana. In popular culture and commerce, "banana" usually refers to the soft and sweet kind, also known as "dessert bananas". Other kinds, or cultivars, of banana have a firmer, starchier fruit. Those are usually called plantains. Plantains are mostly used for cooking or fibre.


title: Banana

text: Other than being used as food, beer can be made by fermenting the juice of certain cultivars in Africa, known as "beer bananas". The ash of bananas can be used to make soap. In Asia, bananas are often planted to provide shade to plants that like shade, for example coffee, cocoa, nutmeg or black pepper. Because of this, banana plants can often be found in plantations of other crops.


title: Banana

text: The banana plant is the largest herbaceous flowering plant. Banana plants are often mistaken for trees. Bananas have a "false stem" (called "pseudostem"), which is made by the lower part of the leaves. This pseudostem can grow to be two to eight meters tall. Each pseudostem grows from a corm. A pseudostem is able to produce a single bunch of bananas. After fruiting, the pseudostem dies and is replaced. When most bananas are ripe, they turn yellow or, sometimes, red. Unripe bananas are green.


title: Banana

text: Banana leaves grow in a spiral and may grow long and wide. They are easily torn by the wind, which results in a familiar, frayed look.


title: Banana

text: The banana fruits grow from a banana blossom in hanging clusters, also called a "bunch" or "banana stem". The fruits grow in rows called "tiers" or "hands". There can be as many as twenty fruits to a hand, and as many as twenty tiers in a bunch. A bunch usually weighs between 30 and 50 kilograms (65 to 110 pounds).


title: Banana

text: A single fruit weighs about 125 grams (4.4 ounces) on average; about three quarters of this is water.


title: Banana

text: Each banana (or "finger") has a protective outer layer (called "peel" or "skin"). There is a fleshy part inside that readily spilts into three segments. It is the only known tri-segmented fruit in the world. Both the skin and inner part can be eaten. Western cultures generally eat the inside raw and throw away the skin. Some Asian cultures eat both the skin and the inside cooked. Each fruit has many "strings" that run between the skin and the inner part.


title: Banana

text: Bananas are grown in at least 107 countries. The banana species growing in the wild have fruits with many hard, large seeds, but almost all bananas grown to be eaten have seedless fruits. Bananas are classified either as dessert bananas or as green cooking bananas. Almost all export bananas are of the dessert types. Only about ten to fifteen percent of all production is for export. Dessert bananas change their color and usually turn yellow, when they are ripe; plantains and bananas generally used for cooking stay green. Certain bananas have other colors when ripe.


title: Banana

text: The countries that produce the most bananas include India, Brazil, China, Ecuador and the Philippines. The top five countries that exported bananas were Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Colombia and Guatemala. The United States, the European Union and Japan buy the most bananas. Bananas are among the most valuable agricultural export products; They provided about sixty percent of export earnings of Saint Lucia and about twelve percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the country, between 1994 and 1996.


title: Banana

text: Some people are allergic to bananas. There are two basic forms of these allergies. The first is known as oral allergy syndrome. Within an hour of eating a banana, swelling starts inside the mouth or throat. This allergy is related to allergies caused by pollen, like that of the birch tree. The other is similar to latex allergies. It causes urticaria and potentially serious upper gastrointestinal symptoms.


title: Banana

text: The fibre gained from the banana plant has been used to make textiles for a long time. In Japan, bananas have been grown to be used for clothing and in the house since at least the 13th century. In the Japanese system, the leaves and shoots are cut from the plant periodically to make sure they are soft. The harvested shoots must first be boiled in lye to prepare the fibres for the making of the yarn. These banana shoots produce fibres of varying degrees of softness. They can be used for yarns and textiles of different qualties, and for specific uses. For example, the outermost fibres of the shoots are the coarsest - they are good for tablecloths. The softest innermost fibres are desirable for kimono and kamishimo. This traditional Japanese banana cloth making process has many steps, all performed by hand.


title: Banana

text: Another system is used in Nepal. There the trunk of the banana plant is harvested instead. Small pieces of this trunk are then softened. The fibres are extracted mechanically, bleached, and dried. They are then sent to the Kathmandu Valley, where high-end rugs are produced. These rugs have a texture and general qualities similar to that of silk. These banana fibre rugs are woven by traditional Nepalese hand-knotted methods.


title: Banana

text: Banana fiber is also used to make "banana paper". There are two different kinds of banana paper: paper made from the bark, and paper made from the fibre and from unused fruits.


title: Government

text: A government is a group of people that have the power to rule in a territory, according to the administrative law. This territory may be a country, a state or province within a country, or a region. There are many types of government, such as democratic, parliamentary, presidential, federal or unitary.


title: Government

text: The most common type of government in the Western world is called democracy. In democracies, people in a country can vote during elections for representatives or political parties that they prefer. The people in democracies can elect representatives who will sit on legislatures such as the Parliament or Congress. Political parties are organizations of people with similar ideas about how a country or region should be governed. Different political parties have different ideas about how the government should handle different problems. Democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.


title: Government

text: However, many countries have forms of democracy which limit freedom of choice by the voters. One of the most common ways is to limit which parties can stand for parliament, or limit the parties' access to mass media such as television. Another way is to rig (unfairly manipulate or interfere with) the voting system by removing votes from opposition voters and substituting votes for the party in power. Few countries are textbook (classic, paradigmatic) democracies, and the differences between them has been much studied.


title: Government

text: A monarchy is a government ruled by a king or a queen who inherits their position from their family, which is often called the "royal family." There are two types of monarchies: absolute monarchies and constitutional monarchies. In an absolute monarchy, the ruler has no limits on their wishes or powers. In a constitutional monarchy a ruler's powers are limited by a document called a constitution.


title: Government

text: In modern times, monarchies still exist in Great Britain and the Commonwealth, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, along with several other countries. A monarch may have one of several titles: King or Queen, Emperor or Empress, or Emir.


title: Government

text: An aristocracy is a government run by the people of a ruling class, usually people who come from wealthy families, families with a particular set of values, or people who come from a particular place. A person who rules in an aristocracy is an aristocrat. Aristocracy is different from nobility, in that nobility means that one bloodline would rule, whereas an aristocracy would mean that a few or many bloodlines would rule, or that rulers be chosen in a different manner.


title: Government

text: Under a dictatorship, the government is run by one person who has all the power over the people in a country. Originally, the Roman Republic made dictators to lead during time of war. The Roman dictators (and Greek tyrants) were not always cruel or unkind, but they did hold on to power all by themselves, rather than sharing power with the people. The Roman dictators only held power for a short period of time.


title: Government

text: In modern times, a dictator's rule is not stopped by any laws, constitutions, or other social and political institutions, and can last many years or even decades. After leaving the Spanish Empire, many countries in Latin America were dictatorships. World War II was partly a war between dictators, and later new countries in Asia and Africa also were ruled by dictators. Examples of dictators include Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Gamal Abdul Nasser. These men ruled from when they took power until when they died, because they would not let anyone else take power from them. There is no evidence of a woman serving as a dictator in modern times.


title: Government

text: An oligarchy is a government ruled by a small group of powerful people. These people may spread power equally or not equally. More so a different version of a monarchy, where everyone makes decisions together instead of one person making them all or telling people what to do, such as in a Dictatorship. An oligarchy is different from a true democracy because very few people are given the chance to change things. An oligarchy does not have to be hereditary or passed down from father to son. An oligarchy does not have one clear ruler, but several powerful people. Some past examples of oligarchy are the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Apartheid South Africa. A fictional example is the dystopian society of "Oceania" in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some critics of representative democracy think of the United States as an oligarchy. This view is shared by anarchists. An oligarchy may have a leader in the ruling group.


title: Government

text: The simplest idea of government is those who rule over people and land. This may be as small as a community or village or as big as a continent (like Australia and India).


title: Government

text: The people who rule can allow others to own land. It is a deed by government that gives this right in the way that laws describe. Some think they have the right to hold land without government permission. This view is called libertarianism. Others think they can do without government. This view is called anarchism.


title: Government

text: Almost every place on Earth is connected to one and only one government. Places without government are where people follow traditions instead of government rules, small border disputed areas and the continent of Antarctica, because almost no people live there. For every other place on Earth there is a government that claims 'sovereign control' over it. The word "sovereign" is old and means "control by a King" (sovereign). Governments of villages, cities, counties and other communities are subordinate to the government of the state or province where they exist, and then to that of the country.


title: Government

text: It is from Kings and feudalism that modern governments and nation states came. The capital of a country, for instance, is where the King kept his assets. From this we get the modern idea of capital in economics. A government may regulate trade as well as to rule over land.


title: Government

text: Governments also control people and decide things about what morality to accept or punish. In many countries, there are strict rules about sexual intercourse and drugs which are part of law and offenders are punished for disobeying them.


title: Government

text: Tax is how government is paid for in most countries. People who buy, sell, import, invest, own a house or land, or earn money are made to pay some of the money to a government.


title: Government

text: There are many theories of how to organize government better. These are called theories of civics. Many people think leaders must be elected by some kind of democracy. That way, they can be replaced at election. Many governments are not a democracy but other forms in which only a few people have power.


title: Government

text: There are many theories of how to run a government better, and keep people from hurting each other. These theories are part of politics.


title: Forest

text: A forest is a piece of land with many trees. Forests are important and grow in many places around the world. They are an ecosystem which includes many plants and animals. Many animals live in forests and need them to survive.


title: Forest

text: Temperature and rainfall are the two most important things for forests. Many places are too cold or too dry for them. Forests can exist from the equator to near the polar regions, but different climates have different kinds of forests. In cold climates conifers dominate, but in temperate zone and tropical climates forests are mainly made up of flowering plants. Different rainfall also makes different kinds of forest. No forests exist in deserts, just a few trees in places where their roots can get at some underground water.


title: Forest

text: Forests contain 80% of the Earth's plant biomass. The total live biomass on Earth is about 550–560 billion tonnes C.


title: Forest

text: The three major forest biomes are coniferous forests, deciduous forests, and tropical rain forests. More than half of the world's forests are found in only five countries (Brazil, Canada, China, the Russian Federation, and the United States of America). More forests (45 percent) are in the tropics than any other climates.


title: Forest

text: Coniferous forests stretch across Canada, Alaska, Northern Asia, and Northern Europe. Their main trees are evergreen conifers which produce seeds in cones.


title: Forest

text: The weather during the winter is cold, but when snow melts in the spring, some parts of the forest become swamps. There are not many different types of trees in coniferous forests because of the cold weather, and the poor soil. Fallen branches, needles, and dead animals do not decay as fast as in warmer regions. This is why the soil in coniferous forests is not very fertile. Also, only those trees that have adapted to cold weather and poor soil can survive. These trees have flexible branches that support heavy snowfalls. Less water evaporates from their leaves because of the shape of their needles.


title: Forest

text: Many coniferous trees shade large parts of the soil below them, which keeps many plants from growing on the forest ground. Some animals that live in the coniferous forests are pine martens, deer, bears, caribou, moose, several owls, crossbills, and red squirrels.


title: Forest

text: Deciduous forests mostly grow in the temperate zone of North America, Europe and Asia. They have a moderate climate during the spring, summer, autumn (fall) and winter, with rainfall of at least 500mm a year. Summers are warm and winters are cold, but not as cold as the northern coniferous forests. In the winter, snow covers the ground and the deciduous trees and plants lose their leaves. The decaying leaves help make the soil rich in nutrients. Many insects, spiders, snails, and worms make their homes in this rich soil. Wild flowers and ferns grow almost everywhere in the spring. New leaves capture the energy of the sun and sprout before the tall trees shadow them.


title: Forest

text: During the winter, many birds migrate to warmer climates. Many small animals hibernate or aestivate, in other words, they slow down their metabolism and sleep or stay in their burrows. Some of the other animals just slow down their metabolism and eat food they stored during the summer and fall months. The trees in winter are bare, but with the coming of spring, leaves sprout, birds return, animals are born, and all the forest animals get busy with their lives. Animals that we may see or hear in this biome include bears, deer, raccoons, otters, beavers, foxes, frogs, squirrels, snakes, salamanders, and birds such as woodpeckers, robins (European or American), owls, blue jays and the small birds usually called tits (family Paridae).


title: Forest

text: Some deciduous forests grow in tropical places that do not have a winter but do have a wet season and a dry season.


title: Forest

text: Tropical rainforests grow in South America, the Congo, Indonesia and some nearby countries, Hawaii, and north eastern Australia. Tropical rainforests are well named, as it rains here on about half the days. The only season in a tropical rain forest is summer, so plants grow for all 12 months of the year. Trees are tall and thick in the rain forest and they grow so close together that they form a big umbrella of greenery called a canopy. This blocks out most of the sunlight. The air is muggy as it filters through the dense canopy cover of the trees. The light that filters through this tree cover is dim and green. Only along river banks and in places that have been cleared does enough sunlight allow plants to grow on the forest ground.


title: Forest

text: Millions of species of plants and animals live in the world's tropical forests. Life in the rain forest exists at different levels or layers in the trees. Each layer has a name, such as 'emergent', 'canopy', 'understory', and 'forest floor'. Animal life is found on all levels.


title: Forest

text: The first forests on Earth were about 380 million years ago), in the later Devonian period. The fern-like "Archaeopteris" grew to about 10 meters tall (33 feet). The plant was rather fern-like, with deciduous fronds which dropped onto the forest floor. Streams running through the forest picked up fronds, which perhaps stimulated freshwater fishes. "Wattieza" was an even earlier plant which has been claimed as the "first tree". They were also fern-like, reproduced with spores and grew in groups together.


title: Central processing unit

text: A central processing unit (CPU) is an important part of every computer. The CPU sends signals to control the other parts of the computer, almost like how a brain controls a body.


title: Central processing unit

text: The CPU is an electronic machine that works on a list of computer things to do, called "instructions". It reads the list of instructions and runs ("executes") each one in order. A list of instructions that a CPU can run is a computer program.


title: Central processing unit

text: The clock rate, or speed of a CPU's internal parts, is measured in hertz (Hz). Modern processors often run so fast that gigahertz (GHz) is used instead. One GHz is 1,000,000,000 cycles per second.


title: Central processing unit

text: Most CPUs used in desktop (home) computers are microprocessors made by either Intel or Advanced Micro Devices (usually shortened to AMD). Some other companies that make CPUs are ARM (recently bought by Nvidia), IBM, and AMD under ATI Technologies, which is the leader right now. Most of their CPUs are used in embedded systems for more specialized things, like in mobile phones, cars, video game consoles, or in the military.


title: Central processing unit

text: In the 20th century engineers invented many different computer architectures. Nowadays most desktop computers use either 32-bit CPUs or 64-bit CPUs. The instructions in a 32-bit CPU are good at handling data that is 32 bits in size (most instructions "think" in 32 bits in a 32-bit CPU). Likewise, a 64-bit CPU is good at handling data that is 64 bits in size (and often good at handling 32-bit data too). The size of data that a CPU handles best is often called the "word size" of the CPU. Many old CPUs from the 70s, 80s and early 90s (and many modern embedded systems) have an 8-bit or 16-bit word size. When CPUs were invented in the middle 20th century they had many different word sizes. Some had different word sizes for instructions and data. The less popular word sizes later stopped being used.


title: Central processing unit

text: Most CPUs are microprocessors. This means that the CPU is just a single chip. Some chips with microprocessors inside them also contain other components, and are complete single-chip "computers". This is called a microcontroller.


title: Central processing unit

text: When the CPU runs a computer program, it needs somewhere to store the data that the instructions operate on (the data that they read and write). This storage is called a "register." A CPU usually has many registers. Registers must be very fast to access (to read and write). Therefore, they are part of the CPU chip itself.


title: Central processing unit

text: Storing all data in registers would make most CPUs too complicated (and very expensive). Therefore, registers usually only store the data that the CPU is working on "right now". The rest of the data used by the program is stored in RAM (Random Access Memory). Except in microcontrollers, RAM is usually stored outside the CPU in separate chips.


title: Central processing unit

text: When the CPU wants to read or write data in RAM, it outputs an "address" to that data. Each byte in RAM has a memory address. The size of addresses is often the same as the word size: A 32-bit CPU uses 32-bit addresses, etc. However, smaller CPUs, like 8-bit CPUs, often use addresses that are larger than the word size. Otherwise the maximum program length would be too short.


title: Central processing unit

text: Because the size of addresses is limited, the maximum amount of memory is also limited. 32-bit processors can usually only handle up to 4 GB of RAM. This is the number of different bytes that can be selected using a 32-bit address (each bit can have two values—0 and 1—and 2 bytes is 4 GB). A 64-bit processor might be able to handle up to 16 EB of RAM (16 exabytes, around 16 billion GB, or 16 billion billion bytes). The operating system may limit it to using smaller amounts.


title: Central processing unit

text: The information that is stored in RAM is usually volatile. This means that it will disappear if the computer is turned off.


title: Central processing unit

text: Modern CPUs often use a memory management unit (MMU). An MMU is a component that translates addresses from the CPU to (usually) different RAM addresses. When using an MMU, the addresses used in a program are (usually) not the "real" addresses where the data is stored. This is called "virtual" (the opposite of "real") memory. A few of the reasons why it is good to have an MMU are listed here:


title: Central processing unit

text: On modern computers, RAM is much slower than registers, so accessing RAM slows down programs. To speed up memory accesses, a faster type of memory called a "cache" is often put between the RAM and the main parts of the CPU. The cache is usually a part of the CPU chip itself, and is much more expensive per byte than RAM. The cache stores the same data as RAM, but is usually much smaller. Therefore, all the data used by the program might not fit in the cache. The cache tries to store data that is likely to be used a lot. Examples include recently used data and data close in memory to recently used data.


title: Central processing unit

text: Often it makes sense to have a "cache for the cache", just as it makes sense to have a cache for RAM. In "multi-level caching", there are many caches, called the L1 cache, the L2 cache, and so on. The L1 cache is the fastest (and most expensive per byte) cache and is "closest" to the CPU. The L2 cache is one step away and is slower than the L1 cache, etc. The L1 cache can often be viewed as a cache for the L2 cache, etc.


title: Central processing unit

text: Computer buses are the wires used by the CPU to communicate with RAM and other components in the computer. Almost all CPUs have at least a "data bus" - used to read and write data - and an "address bus" - used to output addresses. Other buses inside the CPU carry data to different parts of the CPU.


title: Central processing unit

text: An instruction set (also called an ISA - Instruction Set Architecture) is a language understood directly by a particular CPU. These languages are also called machine code or binary. They say how you tell the CPU to do different things, like loading data from memory into a register, or adding the values from two registers. Each instruction in an instruction set has an encoding, which is how the instruction is written as a sequence of bits.


title: Central processing unit

text: Programs written in programming languages like C and C++ can't be run directly by the CPU. They must be translated into machine code before the CPU can run them. A compiler is a computer program that does this translation.


title: Central processing unit

text: Machine code is just a sequence of 0s and 1s, which makes it difficult for humans to read it. To make it more readable, machine code programs are usually written in "assembly language". Assembly language uses text instead of 0s and 1s: You might write "LD A,0" to load the value 0 into register A for example. A program that translates assembly language into machine code is called an "assembler".


title: Central processing unit

text: Even very complicated programs can be made by combining many simple instructions like these. This is possible because each instruction takes a very short time to happen. Many CPUs today can do more than 1 billion (1,000,000,000) instructions in a single second. In general, the more a CPU can do in a given time, the faster it is. One way to measure a processor's speed is MIPS (Million Instructions Per Second). Flops (Floating-point operations per second) and CPU clock speed (usually measured in gigahertz) are also ways to measure how much work a processor can do in a certain time.


title: Central processing unit

text: A CPU is built out of logic gates; it has no moving parts. The CPU of a computer is connected electronically to other parts of the computer, like the video card, or the BIOS. A computer program can control these peripherals by reading or writing numbers to special places in the computer's memory.


title: Central processing unit

text: Each instruction executed by a CPU is usually done in many steps. For example, the steps to run an instruction "INC A" (increase the value stored in register A by one) on a simple CPU could be this:


title: Central processing unit

text: Different parts of the CPU do these different things. Often it is possible to run some steps from different instructions at the same time, which makes the CPU faster. For example, we can read an instruction from memory at the same time that we decode another instruction, since those steps use different modules. This can be thought of as having many instructions "inside the pipeline" at once. In the best case, all of the modules are working on different instructions at once, but this is not always possible.


title: Central processing unit

text: Multi-core processors became much more common in the early 21st century. This means that they have many processors built on to the same chip so that they can run many instructions at once. Some processors may have up to sixty-four cores, like the upcoming AMD Epyc "Milan" series. Even processors for consumers have many cores, such as the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950x.


title: Central processing unit

text: Some processors have a technology known as multithreading. This is the task of running more than one "thread" of instructions in an operating system. Many modern processors use this to boost performance with heavy multi-threaded programs, such as benchmark programs.


title: Programming language

text: A programming language is a type of written language that tells computers what to do. Examples are: Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and C#. Programming languages are used to write all computer programs and computer software. A programming language is like a set of instructions that the computer follows to do something.


title: Programming language

text: A programmer writes text in the source code of a programming language to make programs. Usually, the programming language uses real words for some of the commands (e.g. "if... then... else...", "and", "or"), so that the language is easier for a human to understand. Like any normal language, many programming languages use punctuation. Many programs are then compiled, which means that the computer changes, or translates, the source code into another language (such as assembly language or machine language) that a computer can read, but which is much harder for a person to read.


title: Programming language

text: Computer programs must be written very carefully. If a programmer makes mistakes, or a program tries to do something the programmer did not design it to do, then the program might then stop working, which is called "crashing". When a program has a problem because of how the code was written, this is called a "bug". A very small mistake can cause a very big problem.


title: Programming language

text: There are many types of programming languages. Most programming languages do not follow one type alone, so it is difficult to assign a type for each language. The examples of each type are given in each section below because they are the best well-known examples of that type.


title: Programming language

text: High-level programming languages require less knowledge about the hardware compared to low-level programming languages. This is because high-level programming languages abstract away the hardware the program is running on. Many high-level languages require an interpreter to run the source code on the hardware in real time. On the other hand, low-level languages usually convert the whole source code to machine code before running, because the source code is so close to the hardware that it is easy to do so.


title: Programming language

text: "Declarative" programming languages describe a "problem" but they usually do not say how the problem should be solved. The problem description uses logic, and "solving" the problem often looks like automatically proving a system of logical axioms. Examples for such programming languages are Prolog, XSLT, LISP and SQL.


title: Programming language

text: "Imperative" programming languages describe a system of state changes. At the start, the program is in a certain "state", and the computer is given steps to follow, in order to perform an action. Following the steps causes the program to "change state".


title: Programming language

text: In general, declarative programming languages are safer and shorter. Imperative programming languages are more common, because they are easier to use.


title: Programming language

text: Functional programming looks at programming like a function in mathematics. The program receives "input", together with some information, and uses this information to create "output". It will not have a state in between, and it will also not change things that are not related to the computation.


title: Programming language

text: Stack-based languages look at some of the program's memory like a stack of cards. There are very few things that can be done with a stack. A data item can be put on the top of the stack. This operation is generally called "push". A data item can be removed from the top of the stack. This is called a "pop". You can look at the item at the top of the stack without removing it. This is called a "peek".


title: Programming language

text: If a program is written as "push 5; push 3; add; pop;" it will put 5 on the top of the stack, put 3 on top of the 5, add the top two values (3 + 5 = 8), replace the 3 and 5 with the 8, and print the top (8). Examples for programming languages that are stack-based are the languages Postscript and Forth.


title: Programming language

text: Object-oriented programming languages place data and "functions" that change data into a single unit. This unit is called an "object". Objects can interact with each other and change another object's data. This is usually called encapsulation or information hiding. Most modern programming languages are object-oriented, or at least allow this style of programming. Examples of this are Java, Python, Ruby, C++, C# and other C languages.


title: Programming language

text: Flow-oriented programming sees programming as connecting different components. These components send messages back and forth. A single component can be part of different "programs", without the need to be changed internally.


title: Programming language

text: Some of the languages above can be used for scientific computing. For example, C++ and Python are also used in this way. On the other hand, there are some languages that has scientific computing as their main purpose. The following are some examples:


title: Programming language

text: Most languages have official standards that define the rules of how to write the source code. Some programming languages have two or more standards. This can happen when a new standard replaces an old one. For example, the Perl 5 standard replaced Perl 4 in 1993. It can happen because two people made two standards at the same time. For example, there are several standards for APL.


title: Programming language

text: Object-Oriented Programming (sometimes shortened to OOP) is a form of programming where all parts of the program are objects. Objects are pieces of memory with the same structure that can be used again and again. A bank account, bitmap, or hero from a video game could all be objects within a program. Objects are made up of properties (pieces of information the object stores) and methods which are things the object can do. A Dog object might have properties like height and hairColor. Its methods might include bark() and wagTail().


title: Programming language

text: All objects are created from templates called classes. You can think of a class as a mold from which objects are made. The class defines all the properties and methods that its objects will have. Objects created from a class are called instances of the class. A class can "extend" another class, which means that it takes all the properties and methods of the class but can add its own.


title: Programming language

text: Notice that the Dog class extends the Mammal class, so all dogs will have the properties of a mammal, like hairLength, and methods, like eat() or sleep().


title: Programming language

text: Object-oriented programming is used in many of today's most popular programming languages, such as Java, C#, Objective-C, C++, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and ActionScript.


title: Programming language

text: This program asks the user his or her age and responds based on what the user typed. If the user typed something that is not a number, the program says so. If the user typed a number less than zero, the program says so. If the user says he or she is older than 100 years old, the program says "That's old!". If the user typed a correct age, the program says back to the user how old he or she is.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer program or a machine to think and learn. It is also a field of study which tries to make computers "smart". They work on their own without being encoded with commands. John McCarthy came up with the name "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: In general use, the term "artificial intelligence" means a programme which mimics human cognition. At least some of the things we associate with other minds, such as learning and problem solving can be done by computers, though not in the same way as we do. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define AI as a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: An ideal (perfect) intelligent machine is a flexible agent which perceives its environment and takes actions to maximize its chance of success at some goal or objective. As machines become increasingly capable, mental faculties once thought to require intelligence are removed from the definition. For example, optical character recognition is no longer perceived as an example of "artificial intelligence": it is just a routine technology.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: At present we use the term AI for successfully understanding human speech, competing at a high level in strategic game systems (such as Chess and Go), self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data. Some people also consider AI a danger to humanity if it continues to progress at its current pace.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: An extreme goal of AI research is to create computer programs that can learn, solve problems, and think logically. In practice, however, most applications have picked on problems which computers can do well. Searching databases and doing calculations are things computers do better than people. On the other hand, "perceiving its environment" in any real sense is way beyond present-day computing.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: AI involves many different fields like computer science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. Eventually researchers hope to create a "general artificial intelligence" which can solve many problems instead of focusing on just one. Researchers are also trying to create creative and emotional AI which can possibly empathize or create art. Many approaches and tools have been tried.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: Borrowing from the management literature, Kaplan and Haenlein classify artificial intelligence into three different types of AI systems: analytical, human-inspired, and humanized artificial intelligence. Analytical AI has only characteristics consistent with cognitive intelligence generating cognitive representation of the world and using learning based on past experience to inform future decisions. Human-inspired AI has elements from cognitive as well as emotional intelligence, understanding, in addition to cognitive elements, also human emotions considering them in their decision making. Humanized AI shows characteristics of all types of competencies (i.e., cognitive, emotional, and social intelligence), able to be self-conscious and self-aware in interactions with others.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: AI research really started with a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956. It was a month-long brainstorming session attended by many people with interests in AI. At the conference they wrote programs that were amazing at the time, beating people at checkers or solving word problems. The Department of Defense started giving a lot of money to AI research and labs were created all over the world.


title: Artificial intelligence

text: Unfortunately, researchers seriously undervalued how challenging several issues were. They still couldn't offer computers things like emotions or common sense using the techniques they had employed. In a paper on AI, mathematician James Lighthill stated that "no aspect of the discipline has so far seen discoveries generated the huge influence that was previously anticipated." The governments of the US and UK desired to support more profitable initiatives. A "AI winter" in which little research was conducted was brought on by cuts


title: Artificial intelligence

text: AI revived again in the 90s and early 2000s with its use in data mining and medical diagnosis. This was possible because of faster computers and focusing on solving more specific problems. In 1997, became the first computer program to beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov. Faster computers, advances in deep learning, and access to more data have made AI popular throughout the world. In 2011 IBM Watson beat the top two Jeopardy! players Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, and in 2016 Google's AlphaGo beat top Go player 4 out of 5 times.


title: Oral sex

text: Oral sex is when one partner uses the tongue, mouth or throat to excite the other partner's sex organs. For males it can include placing the penis in one's mouth and for females licking the vaginal area.


title: Oral sex

text: Sometimes oral sex is performed as a way of getting ready for intercourse, but it may be done as an alternative to intercourse.


title: Oral sex

text: If someone is performing oral sex on a male, he or she may decide to swallow the semen if the male ejaculates in the mouth. There is no risk of pregnancy from swallowing semen.


title: Oral sex

text: One can get sexually transmitted diseases from oral sex, such as herpes simplex (which can be passed between mouth and groin or the other way). Some STDs, like HIV, are much harder to pass through oral sex, but it is still possible.


title: Oral sex

text: The technical term for oral sex is fellatio if performed on a male and cunnilingus if performed on a female. Slang for oral sex is common in Western cultures, for example: "going down on" or "giving a blowjob" or "giving head."


title: Electricity

text: Electricity is the presence and flow of electric current. Using electricity, we can transfer energy in ways that allow us to do simple chores. Its best-known form is the flow of electrons through conductors such as copper wires.


title: Electricity

text: The word "electricity" is sometimes used to mean "electrical energy". They are not the same thing: electricity is a transmission medium for electrical energy, like sea water is a transmission medium for wave energy. An item which allows electricity to move through it is called a conductor. Copper wires and other metal items are good conductors, allowing electricity to move through them and transmit electrical energy. Plastics are a poor conductor (they are insulators) and don’t allow much electricity to move through them. They stop the transmission of electrical energy.


title: Electricity

text: Electrical energy can be made naturally (such as lightning), or by people (such as in a generator). It can be used to power machines and electrical devices. When electrical charges are not moving, electricity is called static electricity. When the charges are moving they are an electric current, sometimes called 'dynamic electricity'. Lightning is the most known - and dangerous - kind of electric current in nature, but sometimes static electricity causes things to stick together in nature as well.


title: Electricity

text: Electricity can be dangerous, especially around water because water is a form of good conductor as it has impurities like salt in it. Salt can help electricity flow. Since the nineteenth century, electricity has been used in every part of our lives. Until then, it was just a curiosity seen in the lightning of a thunderstorm.


title: Electricity

text: Electrical energy can be created if a magnet passes close to a metal wire. This is the method used by a generator. The biggest generators are in power stations. Electrical energy can also be released by combining chemicals in a jar with two different kinds of metal rods. This is the method used in a battery. Static electricity can be created through the friction between two materials - for instance a wool cap and a plastic ruler. This may make a spark. Electrical energy can also be created using energy from the sun, as in photovoltaic cells.


title: Electricity

text: Electrical energy arrives at homes through wires from the places where it is made. It is used by electric lamps, electric heaters, etc. Many appliances such as washing machines and electric cookers use electricity. In factories, electrical energy powers machines. People who work with electricity and electrical devices in homes and factories are called "electricians".


title: Electricity

text: The idea of electricity, or the fact that amber acquires the power to attract light objects when rubbed, may have been known to the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, who lived about 600 B.C.


title: Electricity

text: Another Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, stated in a treatise that this power is possessed by other substances.


title: Electricity

text: The first scientific study of electrical and magnetic happenings, however, did not appear until A.D. 1600, from research done by the English physician William Gilbert. Gilbert was the first to apply the term "electric" (Greek, "elektron", "amber") to the force that substances exerted after being rubbed. He also distinguished between magnetic and electric action.


title: Electricity

text: Ben Franklin spent much time in electrical research. His famous kite experiment proved that the atmospheric electricity (that causes the phenomena of lightning and thunder) is identical with the electrostatic charge on a Leyden jar. Franklin developed his theory that electricity is a single "fluid" existing in all matter, and that its effects can be explained by excesses and shortages of this fluid.


title: Electricity

text: There are two types of electric charges that push and pull on each other: positive charges and negative charges. Electric charges push or pull on each other if they are not touching. This is possible because each charge makes an electric field around itself. An electric field is an area that surrounds a charge. At each point near a charge, the electric field points in a certain direction. If a positive charge is put at that point, it will be pushed in that direction. If a negative charge is put at that point, it will be pushed in the exact opposite direction.


title: Electricity

text: It works like magnets, and in fact, electricity creates a magnetic field, in which similar charges repel each other and opposite charges attract. This means that if you put two negatives close together and let them go, they would move apart. The same is true for two positive charges. But if you put a positive charge and a negative charge close together, they would pull towards each other. A short way to remember this is the phrase opposites attract, likes repel.


title: Electricity

text: All the matter in the universe is made of tiny particles with positive, negative or neutral charges. The positive charges are called protons, and the negative charges are called electrons. Protons are much heavier than electrons, but they both have the same amount of electric charge, except that protons are positive and electrons are negative. Because "opposites attract," protons and electrons stick together. A few protons and electrons can form bigger particles called atoms and molecules. Atoms and molecules are still very tiny. They are too small to see. Any large object, like your finger, has more atoms and molecules in it than anyone can count. We can only estimate how many there are.


title: Electricity

text: Because negative electrons and positive protons stick together to make big objects, all big objects that we can see and feel are electrically neutral. "Electrically" is a word meaning "describing electricity", and "neutral" is a word meaning "balanced." That is why we do not feel objects pushing and pulling on us from a distance, as they would if everything was electrically charged. All big objects are electrically neutral because there is the same amount of positive and negative charge in the world. We could say that the world is exactly balanced, or neutral. Scientists still do not know why this is so.


title: Electricity

text: The electrons can move all around the material. Protons never move around a solid object because they are so heavy, at least compared to the electrons. A material that lets electrons move around is called a conductor. A material that keeps each electron tightly in place is called an insulator. Examples of conductors are copper, aluminum, silver, and gold. Examples of insulators are rubber, plastic, and wood. Copper is used very often as a conductor because it is a very good conductor and there is so much of it in the world. Copper is found in electrical wires. But sometimes, other materials are used.


title: Electricity

text: Inside a conductor, electrons bounce around, but they do not keep going in one direction for long. If an electric field is set up inside the conductor, the electrons will all start to move in the direction opposite to the direction the field is pointing (because electrons are negatively charged). A battery can make an electric field inside a conductor. If both ends of a piece of wire are connected to the two ends of a battery (called the "electrodes"), the loop that was made is called an electrical circuit. Electrons will flow around and around the circuit as long as the battery is making an electric field inside the wire. This flow of electrons around the circuit is called electric current.


title: Electricity

text: A conducting wire used to carry electric current is often wrapped in an insulator such as rubber. This is because wires that carry current are very dangerous. If a person or an animal touched a bare wire carrying current, they could get hurt or even die depending on how strong the current was and how much electrical energy the current is transmitting. You should be careful around electrical sockets and bare wires that might be carrying current.


title: Electricity

text: It is possible to connect an electrical device to a circuit so that electrical current will flow through a device. This current will transmit electrical energy to make the device do something that we want it to do. Electrical devices can be very simple. For example, in a light bulb, current carries energy through a special wire called a filament, which makes it glow. Electrical devices can also be very complicated. Electrical energy can be used to drive an electric motor inside a tool like a drill or a pencil sharpener. Electrical energy is also used to power modern electronic devices, including telephones, computers, and televisions.


title: Electricity

text: Here are a few terms that a person can come across when studying how electricity works. The study of electricity and how it makes electrical circuits possible is called electronics. There is a field of engineering called electrical engineering, where people come up with new things using electricity. All of these terms are important for them to know.


title: Electricity

text: Electrical energy is mostly generated in places called power stations. Most power stations use heat to boil water into steam which turns a steam engine. The steam engine's turbine turns a machine called a 'generator'. Coiled wires inside the generator are made to spin in a magnetic field. This causes electricity to flow through the wires, carrying electrical energy. This process is called electromagnetic induction. Michael Faraday discovered how to do this.


title: Electricity

text: Many sources of heat can be used to boil water for generators. Heat sources may use renewable energy resources in which the supply of heat energy never runs out and non-renewable energy resources in which the supply will be eventually used up.


title: Electricity

text: Sometimes a natural flow, such as wind power or water power, can be used directly to turn a generator so no heat is needed.


title: Binary number

text: The binary numeral system is a way to write numbers using only two digits: 0 and 1. These are used in computers as a series of "off" and "on" switches. In binary, each digit's place value is twice as much as that of the next digit to the right (since each digit holds two values). In decimal - the system that humans normally use - each digit holds ten values, and the place value increases by a power of ten (ones, tens, hundreds, etc.). The place value of the rightmost digit, in either case, is 1.


title: Binary number

text: Adding together all the place values that have 1s, it would be 1+2+16+32+128 = 179. For convenience, binary digits (bits, for short) are usually grouped together in two groups of 4 bits. This is 8 bits, or a byte, and is written using the hexadecimal numeral system. This would be shown as 1011 0011 = B3.


title: Binary number

text: Arithmetic is a way of adding together two or more binary numbers. There are four rules in binary arithmetic. They are:


title: Binary number

text: This is because in binary there are only two digits; 0 and 1. Because of this, the number two and three have to be represented in some other way. This is how the binary value for three is calculated:


title: Binary number

text: Binary is a numbering system that is a series of 1s and 0s meaning (to the computers) on and off. It is base 2 and our number system (decimal) is base 10, where 10 numerals are used rather than 2.


title: Binary number

text: In 1817 John Leslie (a Scottish mathematician) suggested that primitive societies may have evolved counting with objects (like pebbles) before they had even words to describe the total number of objects involved. The next step in the evolution of counting would have been the discovery that this pile of objects could be reduced into two piles of equal measures (leaving either 0 objects left over or just a remainder of 1). This remainder (odd = 1 or even = 0) would then be recorded and one of the piles removed whilst the second pile was then further divided into two sub piles. If you record the remainder left over after the original pile has been divided in two and continue repeating this process; of sub dividing one of the remaining piles into half and then removing one of those piles and continue by subdividing the remaining pile into two piles you will ultimately be left with just either 2 or 3 objects. If you record the remainder left over (odd = 1 or even = 0) at the end of each reduction you will eventually be left with a tally record of 1's and 0's which will be the binary representation of your original pile of objects. So instead of representing your original pile of objects with a repeating number or marks or tokens (which for large numbers could be quite long) you have reduced your pile of objects into more compact binary number. If you need to recover the original number of objects from this summarised binary number it is easy enough to do; by simply starting with the first tally mark and then doubling it and adding one if the next binary number contains a 1 and then continuing the process until the end of the binary number is reached. So binary counting may be both the oldest and the most modern method of counting.


title: Binary number

text: Binary was invented by many people but the modern binary number system is credited to Gottfried Leibniz in 1679, a German mathematician. Binary has been used in nearly everything electronic; from calculators to supercomputers. Machine code is binary digits.


title: Human

text: A human is a member of the species "Homo sapiens", which means 'wise man' in Latin. Carolus Linnaeus put humans in the mammalian order of primates. Humans are a species of hominid, and chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans are their closest living relatives.


title: Human

text: Humans are mammals. They are also social animals. They usually live in groups. They help and protect each other. They care for their children. Humans are bipedal, which means they walk on two legs.


title: Human

text: Humans have a complex brain, which is much larger than that of the other living apes. They use language, make ideas, and feel emotions. This brain, and the fact that arms are not needed for walking, lets humans use tools. Humans use tools far more than any other species.


title: Human

text: Humans first came from Africa. There are humans living on every continent. As of 2022, there were over 7900 million people living on Earth. Overpopulation is a problem.


title: Human

text: Humans have a long period of development after birth. Their life depends less on instinct than other animals, and more on learning. Humans are also born with their brains not so well developed as those of other mammals. This makes for an unusually long childhood, and so makes family life important. If their brains were better developed at birth, their head would be larger, and this would make birth more difficult. In birth, the baby's head has to get through the 'birth canal', the passageway through the mother's pelvis.


title: Human

text: Many animals use signs and sounds to communicate with each other. But humans have language. It lets them express ideas by using words. Humans are capable of making abstract ideas and communicating them to others. Human language can express things which are not present, or talk about events that are not happening at that time. The things might be elsewhere, and the events may also have occurred at another place or time.


title: Human

text: No known animals have a system of communication that is as elaborate as human language. By using words to communicate with each other, humans make complex communities with laws, traditions and customs. Humans like to understand the world around them. They try to explain things through myth, science and philosophy. Wanting to understand things has helped humans make important discoveries.


title: Human

text: Humans are the only species living today known to build fires, to cook their food and wear clothes. Humans use more technology than any other animal on Earth ever has. Humans like things that are beautiful and like to make art, literature and music. Humans use education and teaching to pass on skills, ideas and customs to the next generations.


title: Human

text: Humans are part of the animal kingdom. They are mammals, which means that they give birth to their young, and females feed their babies with breast milk. Humans belong to the order of primates. Apes like gorillas, orangutans, chimps, and gibbons are also primates.


title: Human

text: The closest living relatives of humans are the two chimpanzee species: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo. Scientists have examined the genes of humans and chimpanzees, and compared their DNA. The studies showed that 95% to 99% of the DNA of humans and chimpanzees is the same.


title: Human

text: Biologists explain the similarity between humans and other hominoids by their descent from a common ancestor. In 2001, a hominid skull was discovered in Chad. The skull is about 7 million years old, and has been classified as "Sahelanthropus tchadensis". This skull may show that the date at which humans started to evolve (develop differently) from other primates is 2 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought.


title: Human

text: Humans are part of a subfamily called the Homininae (or hominins), inside the hominids or great apes.


title: Human

text: Long ago, there used to be other types of hominins on Earth. They were like modern humans, but not the same. "Homo sapiens" are the only type of hominins who are alive today. The earliest known fossils of genus "Homo" have been called "Homo habilis" (handy man). The first fossils of "Homo habilis" were found in Tanzania. "Homo hablilis" is thought to have lived about 2.2 to 1.7 million years ago. Another human species thought to be an ancestor of the modern human is "Homo erectus". There are other extinct species of "Homo" known today. Many of them were likely our 'cousins', as they developed differently than our ancestors. Different species of plants and animals moved from Africa to the Middle East, and then elsewhere. Early humans may have moved from Africa to other parts of the world in the same way.


title: Human

text: The first truly modern humans seem to have appeared between 300,000, and 200,000 years ago in East Africa. In paleontology, 200,000 years is a "short" time. So, scientists speak of a "recent single origin" of humans. Some of these early humans later moved out from Africa. By about 90,000 years ago they had moved into Eurasia. This was the area where Neanderthals, "Homo neanderthalensis", had been living for a long time (at least 350,000 years).


title: Human

text: By about 42 to 44,000 years ago "Homo sapiens" had reached western Europe, including Britain. In Europe and western Asia, "Homo sapiens" replaced the neanderthals by about 35,000 years ago. The details of this event are not known.


title: Human

text: At roughly the same time "Homo sapiens" arrived in Australia. Their arrival in the Americas was much later, about 15,000 years ago. All these earlier groups of modern man were hunter-gatherers.


title: Human

text: Early human history is commonly divided into three ages. The time periods are labeled with the material used for tools.


title: Human

text: Up to about 10 thousand years ago most humans were hunter-gatherers. They did not live in one place, but moved around as the seasons changed. The start of planting crops for food, called farming made the Neolithic revolution. Some people chose to live in settlements. This also led to the invention of metal tools and the training of animals. About 6000 years ago the first proper civilizations began in places like Egypt, India, and Syria. The people formed governments and armies for protection. They competed for area to live and resources and sometimes they fought with each other. About 4000 years ago some states took over or conquered other states and made empires. Examples include ancient Greece and the Roman Empire.


title: Human

text: Some modern day religions also began at this time such as Judaism and Hinduism. From the Middle Ages and beyond humanity saw an explosion of new technology and inventions. The printing press, the car, the train, and electricity are all examples of this kind of invention. As a result of the developments in technology, modern humans live in a world where everyone is connected, for example by telephone or by internet. People now control and change the environment around them in many different ways.


title: Human

text: In early times, humans usually settled near to water and other natural resources. In modern times if people need things they can transport them from somewhere else. So basing a settlement close to resources is no longer as important as it once was. Since 1800, the number of humans, or population, has increased by six billion. Most humans (61%) live in Asia. The rest live in the Americas (14%), Africa (14%), Europe (11%), and Oceania (0.5%).


title: Human

text: Most people live in towns and cities. This number is expected to get higher. In 2005 the United Nations said that by the end of that year, over half the world would be living in cities. This is an important change in human settlement patterns: a century earlier in 1900 only 14% of people lived in cities, in 2000 47% of the world's population lived in cities. In developed countries, like the United States, 80% of the population live in cities.


title: Human

text: Humans have a large effect on the world. Humans are at the top of the food chain and are generally not eaten by any animals. Humans have been described as super predators because of this. Because of industry and other reasons humans are said to be a big cause of global climate change.


title: Human

text: Human body measurements differ. The worldwide average height for an adult human male is about , and the worldwide average height for adult human females is about . The average weight of an adult human is for females and for males. Body weight and body type is influenced by genetics and environment. It varies greatly among individuals.


title: Human

text: Human hair grows on the underarms, the genitals, legs, arms, and on the top of the head in adults of both genders. Hair will usually grow on the face of most adult males, and on the chest and back of many adult males. In human children of both genders, long hair grows only on the top of the head. Although it might look like humans have fewer hairs than most primates, they actually do not. The average human has more hair "follicles", where hair grows from, than most chimpanzees have. Human hair can be black, brown, red or blond. When humans get older hair can turn grey or white.


title: Human

text: Human skin colors vary greatly. They can be a very pale pink all the way to dark brown. There is a reason why people in tropical areas have dark skins. The dark pigment (melanin) in the skin protects them against ultraviolet rays in sunlight. The damage caused by UV rays can and does cause skin cancer in some people. Therefore, in more sunny areas, natural selection favors darker skin color. Sun tanning has nothing to do with this issue, because it is just a temporary process which is not inherited. In colder climates the advantage of light-coloured skin is two-fold. It radiates less heat, and it absorbs more sunlight. In weaker sunlight a darker body produces less vitamin D than a lighter body. The selection for lighter skin is driven by these two reasons. Therefore, in less sunny areas, natural selection favours lighter skin colour.


title: Human

text: Humans are not as strong as other primates of the same size. An average female orangutan is at least three times as strong as an average human.


title: Human

text: The average human male needs 7 to 8 hours sleep a day. People who sleep less than this are generally not as healthy. A child needs more sleep, 9 to 10 hours on average.


title: Human

text: The human life cycle is similar in some ways to most other mammals. However, there are some differences. The young grow inside the female mother for nine months. After this time the baby is pushed out of the woman's vagina, with its brain only half developed.


title: Human

text: Unlike most other mammals, human childbirth is somewhat dangerous. Babies' heads are large, and the mothers pelvis bones are not very wide. Since people walk on two legs, their hips are fairly narrow. This means that birth can be difficult. Rarely, mother or baby may die in childbirth. The number of mothers dying in childbirth is less in the 21st century. This is because of better medication and treatment. In many poor countries the number of mothers dying is higher. Sometimes it is up to 10 times as many as richer countries.


title: Human

text: In the human female, her fertile period in the oestrous cycle is hidden, and mating can take place at any time. That is quite unusual. In mammals generally the fertile period is very noticeable. Mating only takes place when the female signals her fertility. Think about cats, for example. The human cycle is unusual, and it is thought that there is a reason. Humans band together in tribes which have many people. It helps the tribe if the father of a child is not known for certainty. Men live together and work together in "much" larger groups than do chimpanzees (our nearest living relatives). They have a collective interest in the tribe. It is thought that the human mating system helps this.


title: Human

text: The average human baby weighs 3–4 kg at birth and is 50–60 cm tall. Babies are often smaller in poorer countries, and may die early because of this.


title: Human

text: Life expectancy is how long you are expected to live. This depends on many things including where you live. The highest life expectancy is for people from Monaco, 89.52 years. The lowest is for people from Chad where life expectancy is only 49.81 years.


title: Human

text: Psychology is the study of how the human mind works. The human brain is the main controller of what a person does. Everything from moving and breathing to thinking is done by the brain. The human neocortex is huge compared with other mammals, and gives us our thinking ability, and the ability to speak and understand language.


title: Human

text: Neurology is the study of how the brain works, psychology is the study of how and why people think and feel. Many aspects of life are also influenced by the hormone system, including growth and sexual development. The hormonal system (especially the pituitary gland) is partly controlled by the brain.


title: Human

text: Human behaviour is hard to understand, so sometimes psychologists study animals because they may be simpler and easier to know. Psychology overlaps with many other sciences including medicine, biology, computer science and linguistics.


title: Human

text: Language at its most basic is talking, reading and writing. The study of language is called linguistics. Humans have the most complicated languages on Earth. Although almost all animals communicate, human language is unique. Its use of syntax, and its huge learnt vocabulary are its main features. There are over 7,300 languages spoken around the world. The world's most spoken first language is Mandarin Chinese, and the most spoken language is English. This includes speakers of English as a second language.


title: Human

text: Art has existed almost as long as humans. People have been doing some types of art for thousands of years as the picture on the right shows. Art represents how someone feels in the form of a painting, a sculpture or a photograph.


title: Human

text: Music has also been around for thousands of years. Music can be made with only your voice but most of the time people use instruments. Music can be made using simple instruments only such as simple drums all the way up to electric guitars, keyboards and violins. Music can be loud, fast, quiet, slow or many different styles. Music represents how the people who are playing the music feel.


title: Human

text: Literature is anything made or written using language. This includes books, poetry, legends, myths and fairy tales. Literature is important as without it many of the things we use today, such as Wikipedia, would not exist.


title: Human

text: Humans often categorize themselves by race or ethnicity. Modern biologists know that human gene sequences are very similar compared to many other animals. This is because of the "recent single origin" of modern humans. That is one reason why there is only one human race.


title: Human

text: Ethnic groups are often linked by linguistic, cultural, ancestral, and national or regional ties. Race and ethnicity can lead to different social treatment called racism.


title: Human

text: Religion is a belief of faith in a higher being, spirit, or any system of ideas that a group of people believe in. To have faith in a belief is to have the belief without proof that it is true. Faith can bring people together because they all believe in the same thing. Some of the things religions talk about are what happens after death, why humans exist, how humans came to exist (creation), and what is good to do and not to do (morality). Some people are very religious. Many people believe in one all-powerful god; some people believe in more than one god; some people are atheists, who do not believe in a god; and some people are agnostics, who are not sure if there is a god.


title: Human

text: Technology are the things and methods which humans use to make tasks easier. Science is understanding how the universe and the things in it work. Technology used to be quite simple. It was passed on by people telling others, until writing was invented. This allowed technology to develop much quicker. Now people understand more and more about the world and the universe. The use of the telescope by Galileo, Einstein's theory of relativity, lasers, and computing are all scientific discoveries. Technology is of great importance to science, to medicine, and to everyday life.


title: Human

text: A war is a lethal fight between large groups of people, usually countries or states. A war involves the use of lethal weapons as both sides try to kill the other. It is estimated that during the 20th century, between 167 and 188 million humans died because of war. The people who fight for a state in wars are called soldiers. The people who fight in wars, but not for a state, are usually called "fighters".


title: Human

text: Modern wars are very different from wars a thousand or even a hundred years ago. Modern war involves sabotage, terrorism, propaganda, and guerrilla warfare. In modern-day wars, civilians (people who are not soldiers) are often targets. An example of this is the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, about half on the days of the bombings. Since then, thousands more have died from wounds or illness because of exposure to radiation released by the bombs. In both cities, the overwhelming majority of the dead were civilians. In Germany, Austria, and Great Britain, conventional bombs were used. About 60,595 British, and 550,000 German, civilians were killed by planes bombing cities.


title: Pollution

text: Pollution is when harmful substances are added to the environment and then change it in a bad way. There are five kinds of pollution of the environment: water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, soil pollution and thermal pollution.


title: Pollution

text: As pollution grows, ways to combat it have been in demand. Solar energy and wind energy give people clean opportunities to power their homes. But these may also have environmental issues depending on the situation. When people use these alternative forms of energy, they put less carbon dioxide into the environment.


title: Pollution

text: Water pollution is the presence of harmful materials in water, such as sewage, dissolved metal, waste from farms, factories and crude oil spilled from oil tankers. The three main substances that pollute water are nitrates from fertilizers, sewage and detergents.


title: Pollution

text: Activities such as bathing and washing clothes near lakes, ponds or rivers add nutrients like nitrate and phosphate into the water bodies.This leads to excessive growth of algae on the surface of water. It blocks the penetration of sunlight and air, thus reducing oxygen.


title: Pollution

text: It causes harm to organisms living in water and can also harm people's health. In extreme cases, it may cause diseases like cancer. It also leads to loss of a large amount of aquatic life.


title: Pollution

text: Water pollution has been a problem from the time human population increased, and live in cities. Cities have been prone to cholera and typhoid fever and other infectious diseases since Roman times. Existing water systems put in place in the 19th century are overwhelmed by the rapid growth of population in cities.


title: Pollution

text: Air can be polluted by many things. Examples include poisonous gases, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and very small particulates. Smoke and harmful gases released by fires, industries, and thermal power plants cause air pollution. Using coal and wood as fuels for fire causes a lot of air pollution. Petroleum produces less pollution per ton, but it causes a lot of pollution since a lot of it is burned globally. Air pollution may cause health problems such as asthma or other breathing problems.


title: Pollution

text: Air pollution causes global warming and acid rain. This makes it difficult for some living things to survive.


title: Pollution

text: Noise pollution, also known as sound pollution, is harmful to the brain and hearing of all animals and humans. This includes the sound of vehicles, loud speakers, airplanes, jets, train horns etc. Noise pollution can cause ear problems or even permanent deafness, especially to older people. The schools which are beside the roads suffer from noise pollution. Students cannot concentrate in their studies. People in hospitals near main roads also suffer.


title: Pollution

text: Thermal pollution is the harmful release of heated liquid into a body of water or heat released into the air as a waste product of an industry.


title: Pollution

text: A common cause of thermal pollution is using water as a coolant by power stations and industrial manufacturers. This puts back warm water, and so raises the temperature and decreases how much oxygen is in the water. The heat released into the air will make the air warmer which increase global warming.


title: Names of God in Islam

text: The 99 Names of Allah (, translit: ) also known as the 99 attributes of Allah, according to Islamic tradition, are the names of Allah revealed by the Creator (الله) (Allah) in the Qur'an. These are considered to be the attributes of Allah.


title: Names of God in Islam

text: The 99 Names of Allah are very important to Muslims and in Islamic tradition which are taken from different verses of the Holy Qur'an.


title: Names of God in Islam

text: According to Islamic tradition, whoever memorizes and acts upon the 99 names of Allah, will enter Paradise.


title: Names of God in Islam

text: ‘Allah’ is a title for All-Mighty Allah. The word Allah means One and only Allah in Arabic. It is a combination of ‘Ilah’ in Arabic which means Allah, and ‘al’ the alif and laam letters of the Arabic alphabet which denote the definite article, meaning the,Allah the only one.


title: Sex

text: Sex is a type of reproduction common among living things. Sex is used by plants and animals, and also by fungi and various single-celled organisms. It usually needs two individuals which are different sexes from the same species. It works by combining genes from more than one source.


title: Sex

text: Asexual reproduction is easier than sexual reproduction, but there are benefits and drawbacks to both: