title: Napalm

text: The most well-known method of using napalm for war is from air-dropped incendiary bombs. A lesser-known method is the flame throwers used by combat infantry. Flamethrowers use a thinner version of the same fuel to destroy prepared locations of guns, bunkers and cave hideouts. U.S. Marines fighting on Guadalcanal found them very effective against Japanese positions. The Marines used fire as both a weapon to cause damage as well as a psychological weapon. Men have a natural fear of fire. They found that Japanese soldiers would abandon positions when napalm was used. Prisoners of war confirmed that they were scared of napalm more than any other weapon thrown at them.


title: Napalm

text: Napalm became one of the more used weapons of the Korean War. Pilots returning from the war zone often said that they would rather have a couple of gasoline tanks full of napalm to drop than any other weapon, bombs, rockets or guns. The U.S. Air Force and Navy used napalm with great effect against all types of targets to include troops, tanks, buildings and even rail road tunnels. The fear napalm had on the enemy became obvious when North Korean troops began to surrender to aircraft flying overhead. Pilots noted they saw surviving enemy troops waving white flags on following passes after dropping napalm. The pilots radioed to ground troops and the North Koreans were captured.


title: Napalm

text: Napalm has been used recently in wartime by or against: Iran (1980–88), Israel (1967, 1982), Nigeria (1969), Brazil (1972), Egypt (1973), Cyprus (1964, 1974), Argentina (1982), Iraq (1980–88, 1991, 20th March 2003 – 15th December 2011), Serbia (1994), Turkey (1963, 1974, 1997), Angola, United States.


title: Napalm

text: In some cases, napalm disables and kills its victims very quickly. Those who do survive suffer up to 5th degree burns. These damage parts of the skin which do not have pain receptors. However, victims who suffer 2nd degree burns from splashed napalm will be in a lot of pain.


title: Napalm

text: Phuc had third-degree burns to half her body and was not expected to live. Thanks to assistance from South Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut, and after surviving a 14-month hospital stay and 17 operations, she became an outspoken peace activist.


title: Napalm

text: International law does not prohibit the use of napalm or other incendiaries against military targets, but use against civilian populations was banned by the United Nations' inhumane weapons convention (often referred to as the CCW) in 1981. Protocol III of the CCW restricts the use of incendiary weapons (not only napalm), but a number of states have not acceded to all of the protocols of the CCW. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), states are considered a party to the convention, which entered into force as international law in December 1983, if they ratify at least two of the five protocols. The United States, for example, is a party to the CCW but did not sign Protocol III.


title: Napalm

text: Reports by the "Sydney Morning Herald" suggested that "napalm" has been used in the Iraq War by US forces. The U.S. Department of Defense denied this. In August 2003, the San Diego Union Tribune said that U.S. Marine pilots and their commanders confirmed the use of Mark 77 firebombs on Iraqi Republican Guards during the start of combat. Official denials of the use of 'napalm' were, however, disingenuous, as the Mk 77 bomb that is currently in service at this time, the Mk 77 Mod 5, does not use actual napalm (e.g. napalm-B). The last U.S. bomb to use actual napalm was the Mark 77 Mod 4, the last of which were destroyed in March 2001. The substance used now is a different incendiary mixture. It is sufficiently analogous in its effects that it is still a controversial incendiary, and can still be referred to colloquially as 'napalm.'


title: Napalm

text: "We napalmed both those (bridge) approaches," said Col. Randolph Alles in a recent interview. "Unfortunately, there were people there because you could see them in the (cockpit) video." (...) "They were Iraqi soldiers there. It's no great way to die," he added. (...) The generals love napalm. ... It has a big psychological effect." - "San Diego Union-Tribune, August 2003"


title: Napalm

text: These bombs did not actually have napalm in them. The napalm-B (super napalm) used in Vietnam was gasoline based. The Mk-77 firebombs used in the Gulf were kerosene based. It is, however, a napalm-like liquid in its effect.


title: Napalm

text: Recipes how to make napalm-like substances can be found on the Internet. Very often, the recipes say that they will make a thick substance using gasoline, with soap or polystyrene as a thickening agent. However, inexperienced people following these instructions often handle the substance improperly and cause accidents. In addition, making incendiary devices is illegal in many countries.


title: Napalm

text: Napalm usually has gasoline with correct thickening agents. The first thickeners were soaps, aluminum, and magnesium palmitates and stearates. Depending on how much thickener is added, the resulting viscosity may range between syrupy liquid and thick rubbery gel. The content of long hydrocarbon chains makes the material highly hydrophobic (resistant to wetting with water), making it more difficult to extinguish(remove fire). Thickened fuel also bounce better, so it is better for missions in urban places.


title: Napalm

text: There are two types of napalm: oil-based with aluminium soap thickener, and oil-based with polymeric thickener ("napalm-B").


title: Napalm

text: A later type of napalm, napalm-B, also called "super napalm", has low-octane gasoline, benzene and polystyrene in it. It was used in the Vietnam War. Napalm B burns for up to 10 minutes with fewer fireballs. This is different conventional napalm, which burns for only 15–30 seconds. It also sticks better to surfaces, and can destroy things better. It is not as easy to light on fire. This lowers the number of accidents caused by soldiers smoking. It gives a unique smell when it burns.


title: Napalm

text: Starting in the early 1990s, various websites including The Anarchist Cookbook advertised recipes for homemade napalm. These recipes were predominantly equal parts gasoline and styrofoam. This mixture closely resembles that of napalm-B, but lacks a percentage of benzene.


title: Napalm

text: Napalm reaches burning temperatures of approximately 1,200 °C (2,200 °F). Other additives can be added, e.g. powdered aluminium or magnesium, or white phosphorus.


title: Napalm

text: In the early 1950s, Norway developed its own napalm, based on fatty acids in whale oil. The reason for this development was that the American-produced thickening agent performed rather poorly in the cold Norwegian climate. The product was known as Northick II.


title: Napalm

text: Napalm itself became well known by the American public after its use in the Vietnam war. Since then, it has been mentioned in the media and arts multiple times. Some of the examples are:


title: Bridge

text: A bridge is a structure to cross an open space or gap. Bridges are mostly made for crossing rivers, valleys, or roads. Nowadays most big bridges are made to carry vehicles but people have also walked across bridges for thousands of years. Bridges called highway overpasses carry a road over another road.


title: Bridge

text: Military bridges are portable, so that they may be easily moved to where they are needed. This makes them much more complex than most civilian bridges.


title: Bridge

text: The first man-made bridges were probably made from cut wood or stones. Some stone bridges have lasted thousands of years. In recent centuries large bridges are made mostly of steel. They do not last as long. Many bridges are in a state of disrepair.


title: Onion

text: Onions are vegetables. They are plants in the genus "Allium". When people talk about onions, they usually mean "garden onions". Most species of onions have bulbs that people can eat. They have a strong flavour and a very distinctive smell.


title: Onion

text: Onions have been grown for a very long time. They were probably first grown in Ancient Egypt, together with leek and garlic, but maybe earlier. Now, most of the world's cultures eat onions.


title: Onion

text: Farmers and gardeners can grow onions from seeds or from bulbs. If they plant seeds, they must later pull out most of the young plants so the rest can grow better. This is called 'thinning.' A different way to plant onions is to plant young bulbs. This is faster, but the onions that grow this way are weaker than the onions that started as seeds.


title: Onion

text: When you cut an onion, you open some cells of the onion. Then, some chemicals react. When one chemical floats through the air and reaches your eyes, they sting.


title: Bigotry

text: A bigot is a person who is intolerant of opinions, lifestyles, or identities that are different from their own. Mostly, the person's opinions are based on prejudice.


title: Bigotry

text: The origin of the word "bigot" in English dates back to at least 1598, via French. It started with the sense of "religious hypocrite", especially a woman.


title: Bigotry

text: The word "bigot" is often used as a pejorative term against a person who is obstinately devoted to negative prejudices, even when those prejudices are proven to be false.


title: Bigotry

text: The exact origin of the word is unknown, but may have come from the German "bei" and "gott", or the English "by God". William Camden wrote that the Normans were first called bigots, when their Duke Rollo, who receiving Gisla, daughter of King Charles, in marriage, and with her the investiture of the dukedom, refused to kiss the king's foot in token of subjection, unless the king would hold it out for that purpose. And being urged to it by those present, Rollo answered hastily, "No by God", whereupon the king turning about, called him "bigot"; which name passed from him to his people. This is likely fictional, however, as Gisla is unknown in Frankish sources.


title: Leonor, Princess of Asturias

text: Leonor, Princess of Asturias (born 31 October 2005) is an Infanta of Spain. She is the present heiress to the Spanish throne.


title: Leonor, Princess of Asturias

text: Leonor was born at Ruber International Hospital in Madrid, She is the elder daughter of King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain. She became heiress on her father's accession to the throne, 19 June 2014. Her younger sister, Infanta Sofía, follows her in the line of succession.


title: Leonor, Princess of Asturias

text: Infanta Leonor's full official title is: Her Royal Highness The Most Serene Infanta Doña Leonor de Todos los Santos de Borbón y Ortiz, Princess of Asturias, Princess of Viana, Princess of Girona, Duchess of Montblanc, Countess of Cervera and Lady of Balaguer.


title: Donetsk People's Republic

text: Donetsk People’s Republic is an partially recognised country in the Donbas region of Ukraine. When the War in Donbas started in 2014, a few hundred pro-Russian separatists proclaimed it in part of Donetsk Oblast. Donetsk Oblast is all to the east of Ukraine, at the border with Russia. Approximately at the same time, other people started Luhansk People's Republic in Luhansk Oblast. In both parts, there are many ethnic Russians. Russia aided the start of these non-recognised states.


title: Donetsk People's Republic

text: In 2022 Russia, Syria and DPRK officially recognised the state along with the Luhansk People's Republic, Abkhazia and South Ossetia.


title: Means of production

text: Means of production (abbreviated MoP; German: "Produktionsmittel"), also called means of labour are the materials, tools and other instruments used by workers to make products. This includes: machines, tools materials, plant and equipment, land, raw materials, money, energy, and anything else labor needs to make things.


title: Means of production

text: The means of production can be owned by different people in different ways in different societies. Capitalism is when the means of production are owned privately. A capitalist society has a market, where things can be sold and bought. Capitalism also has wage labor. Other societies can be socialist, meaning the means of production are owned in common, either by the workers themselves or by the state. A socialist society may also have a market, depending on the variation of socialism.


title: Traffic collision

text: A traffic collision, or motor vehicle collision, is when a vehicle hits another vehicle, person or object. Pedestrians, animals, road debris or other objects may be involved. Sometimes a trial occurs, in order to determine fault in a traffic collision.


title: Traffic collision

text: Traffic collisions often result in injury, death, and property damage. They injure tens of millions of people every year, and kill usually a little more than a million.


title: Traffic collision

text: Road safety is partly a matter of design. Ideally, roads should be designed for the safety of all road users. This would mean providing adequate facilities for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists. Infrastructure measures such as footpaths, cycling lanes, safe crossing points, and other traffic calming measures can help reduce the risk of injury.


title: Mesut Özil

text: Mesut Özil (born 15 October 1988) is a German football player of Turkish descent. He plays for Fenerbahçe and the German national team.


title: Mesut Özil

text: Özil is often praised for his skill at being an attacking midfielder. He is known for making plenty of assists. In 2011, he made the second most assists with Real Madrid in La Liga with 17 and the most assists in major European competitions with 25.


title: Mesut Özil

text: In 2005, he went to the youth department of FC Schalke 04. He was a midfielder, and his number was 17. He soon played in the Ligapokal, against teams such as FC Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen. He was thought to be the "next big thing," but soon left the club.


title: Mesut Özil

text: In 2008, Mesut Özil moved to Werder Bremen for a reported amount of €4.3 million, signing a contract with the German club until June 30, 2011. He soon became popular in the club, leading them to the 2009 DFB-Pokal final with the winning goal against Bayer Leverkusen. He helped the team make it to the UEFA Cup, but lost to Shakhtar Donetsk.


title: Mesut Özil

text: Because of his impressive performance in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, he made his place as one of the best young football athletes in Europe. Teams such as FC Barcelona, Manchester United. and Arsenal wanted him in their squad. Werder Bremen made an agreement with Real Madrid. The transfer amount was believed to be near €15 million. After signing, Özil said, "When the offer came in to join Real Madrid, there is no decision to make. Let's be honest – you don't refuse this club. I was in no rush to leave Werder Bremen, but this is one club you say yes to. They are an institution, a club with a fantastic history, stadium and squad full of world-class players. The prospect of performing at the Bernabeu is so awesome you jump straight in."


title: Mesut Özil

text: His first game was against Hércules, which the team won the game 3-1. His first goal was against Deportivo de La Coruña, which the team won 6-1.


title: Mesut Özil

text: Mesut Özil performed many assists, and in the 2011-12 season he was nominated for the FIFA Ballon d'Or award. Real Madrid maintained its success, and finished in 1st place in the 2011-12 La Liga.


title: Mesut Özil

text: Ozil joined Arsenal in September 2013 at a transfer fee believed to be around €50 million. His first game for Arsenal was against Sunderland in which the team won 3-1, with him making an assist. He was a top performer in his first season, however his form has went down since then.


title: Currency

text: Currency is the unit of money used by the people of a country or Union for buying and selling goods and services.


title: Currency

text: Certain currencies are said to be "pegged" or "fixed" to something, usually another currency. A fixed or pegged currency is one that has a constant value compared to what it is pegged to. For example, the Cape Verdian escudo is pegged to the Euro. If the value of the Euro goes up 1% compared to another form of currency, the value of the escudo also goes up 1% compared to that same currency.


title: Currency

text: Many countries have used systems where their currency was pegged to a commodity rather than to another currency. Most used either gold or silver. When they did this, as the value of gold increased, so did the value of their money. This was called the "gold standard" or "silver standard". Most countries stopped using silver and gold standards in the 20th century.


title: Domestic sheep

text: A domestic sheep ("Ovis aries") is a domesticated mammal related to wild sheep and goats. Sheep are owned and looked after by a sheep farmer. Female sheep are called "ewes". Male sheep are called "rams". Young sheep are called "lambs".


title: Domestic sheep

text: They are kept for their wool and their meat. The wool of sheep, after cleaning and treating, is used to make woollen clothes. The meat of young sheep is called "lamb", and the meat from adult sheep is called "mutton". Both are economically important products which have been used since prehistoric times.


title: Domestic sheep

text: Sheep are domesticated animals which have been bred by man. There are breeds which specialise in wool or meat.


title: Domestic sheep

text: A group of sheep is called a flock. Sheep follow each other in basically the same way all the time, so there are special names for the different roles sheep play in a flock. The sheep that is farthest away from the others is called the outlier, a word that is also used in statistics. This sheep is willing to go out farther away from the safety of the flock to graze, but takes a chance that a predator like a wolf will attack it first, because it is alone. Another sheep, the bellwether, which never goes first but always follows an outlier, is the one that signals to the others that it is safe to go that way. When it moves, the others will also move. Tendency to be outliers or to be bellwethers, or stick in the middle of the flock, seems to stay with a sheep its whole life. There might be genes that make them repeat this role behaviour.


title: Domestic sheep

text: Probably the most famous sheep was Dolly the Sheep. She was named after Dolly Parton, and was the first large mammal clone. She did not live as long as a regular sheep, because clones have health problems. This is only known because of Dolly.


title: Domestic sheep

text: These sheep are so named because they can store large amounts of fat in the tail and the region of the rump. They are kept mainly because they make more milk than other types of sheep; but their wool is rough and long, and is mostly used for making carpets. Fat-tailed sheep are found mainly in the very dry parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and they represent about 25 percent of the sheep in the world. The major breeds are the Awassi, Bakhtiari, Karakul, Ghashghai, and Kermani.


title: Domestic sheep

text: People may be called "sheep" if they follow a leader without thinking or people can be called "Sheepish" if they are showing or feeling embarrassment from shame or a lack of self-confidence. This is what is called a "figurative" meaning: it's a figure of speech.


title: Domestic sheep

text: Domesticated sheep are one species known to show exclusive homosexuality, like we see in humans. The biologist Charles Roselli has found that 6 to 8% of rams (male sheep) only show interest in other rams over a long period of time, instead of ewes. He has cut open the brains of homosexual rams and found that a region of the brain in the hypothalamus called the SDN was the same size of the SDN in a ewe (female sheep). The size of this brain region appears to determine whether a ram likes females or males, and is determined by sex hormones while it was growing during its mothers pregnancy.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: American Airlines Flight 587 was a scheduled commercial flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Las Américas International Airport in the Dominican Republic. The aircraft used was a Airbus A300-600. On November 12, 2001, the aircraft crashed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, New York. All 260 people on the flight were killed. Five people on the ground were also killed. The crash was caused by the failure of the plane's tail because of pilot error in wake turbulence (turbulence that forms behind an airplane as it flies through the air). It is the second-deadliest plane crash in the United States after American Airlines Flight 191, which occurred on May 25, 1979.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: Since the accident took place two months and one day after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan, it led people to believe that the crash was caused by terrorism.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300B4-605R registration (N14053) was piloted by Captain Edward States, (42) and First Officer Sten Molin, (34). The First Officer was flying the plane. Most of the passengers on-board (159) were Americans, but 68 were Dominicans as well, there were also five Indonesians, three Taiwanese, two Canadians, two Australians, two Brazilians, one French, one German, one Haitian, one Italian, one Japanese, one Dutch, one Israeli, one Mexican, one British, and one Swiss passenger on board.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: Flight 587 was scheduled to leave John F Kennedy at 08:00 for a flight to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The boarding process at gate 22 took a little longer than planned due to additional security procedures that delayed boarding. The gate was closed at 08:38 and push-back from the gate was accomplished at 9:00. The crew taxied to runway 31L behind Japan Airlines Flight 047, a Boeing 747-400 bound for Tokyo, Narita. Japan Airlines Flight 047 was cleared for takeoff at 9:11am, as the 747 climbed, the tower contacted Flight 587’s pilots and warned them about potential wake turbulence from the 747.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: At 9:13:28 Flight 587 was cleared for takeoff from Runway 31L. The aircraft left the runway at 9:14:29, about 1 minute and 40 seconds after the JAL flight. From takeoff, the plane climbed to an altitude of 500 ft above mean sea level (msl) and then entered a climbing left turn to heading of 220. At 9:15:00, the pilot made initial contact with the departure controller informing him that the airplane was at 1,300 ft and climbing to 5,000 ft. The departure controller instructed the aircraft to maintain 13,000 ft.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: At 9:15:36, the aircraft hit wake turbulence from the JAL flight just in front of it. The first officer attempted to stabilise the aircraft with alternating aggressive rudder inputs from left to right. This continued for at least 20 seconds, until 9:15:56, when the stress of the first officer’s repeated rudder movements caused the lugs that attached the vertical stabilizer and rudder to break. The stabilizer separated from the aircraft and fell into Jamaica Bay, about one mile north of the main wreckage site.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: Eight seconds later, the stall warning sounded on the cockpit voice recorder. At the moment the stabilizer separated from the aircraft the plane pitched downwards. As the pilots struggled to control the aircraft, it went into a flat spin. The resulting aerodynamic loads sheared both engines from the aircraft seconds before impact. The engines landed several blocks north and east of the main wreckage site. Losing the engines cut off power to the FDR at 9:16:00, while the CVR cut off at 9:16:15 moments before impact.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: The fuselage slammed onto the ground in Belle Harbor on Newport Avenue and Beach 131st Street, instantly destroying three houses. All 260 people aboard the plane and five people on the ground were killed, and one person on the ground is injured and the impact forces and post-crash fire destroyed the wreckage.


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: The investigation into the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was led by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).


title: American Airlines Flight 587

text: They concluded that the probable cause of the in-flight separation of the vertical stabilizer was the result of the loads beyond ultimate design that were created by the first officer’s unnecessary and excessive rudder pedal inputs. Contributing to these rudder pedal inputs were characteristics of the A300-600 rudder system design and elements of the American Airlines Aircraft Manoeuvring Program.


title: Nilgai

text: The Nilgai ("Boselaphus tragocamelus") is an antelope found in Asia. It commonly seen in India, Nepal and eastern Pakistan. The mature males appear ox-like and are also known as blue bulls. The nilgai is the biggest Asian antelope.


title: Alexander Fleming

text: Sir Alexander Fleming (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. His father Hugh, died at 59 when Alexander was only seven. He is best known for discovering the antibiotic substance penicillin in 1928. He shared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 for this discovery with Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. His accidental finding of penicillin in the year 1928 marked the start of today's antibiotics.


title: Alexander Fleming

text: Fleming was a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I. He saw many soldiers die of infection after being wounded, and after the war did research in bacteriology. After accidentally finding penicillin he studied ways to use it.


title: Passover

text: Passover () is a religious holiday or festival noted by ceremonies each year, mostly by Jewish people. They celebrate it to remember when God used Moses to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, as told in the book of Exodus in the Bible. God told Moses to set aside this special week originally called "the feast of unleavened bread". During this time, the people eat special foods, do special rituals and sing songs. Passover is around the time of Easter (March/April) each year.


title: Passover

text: The "Second Passover" (Pesach Sheni) on the 14th of Iyar in the Hebrew Calendar is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as a make-up day for people who were unable to offer the Passover sacrifice at the appropriate time.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and he created a new computer language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) which most web pages are written in. The first web page was available on 6 August 1991.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Berners-Lee now leads the World Wide Web Consortium. That is an organization that looks after the World Wide Web.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: He is the author of the book "Weaving the Web". He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In April 2009, he was elected as a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington, D.C. In 1999, Time Magazine named Berners-Lee one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In March 2000 he was awarded an honorary degree from the Open University as Doctor of the university.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, on 8 June 1955. He is the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. First, he attended Sheen Mount primary school. Then he went on to Emanuel School in London, from 1969 to 1973. After that, he studied at Queen's College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976. While he was there, he received a first-class degree in Physics.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: For those who want details for some reason. This is more or less a collection of everything which has been asked for to date.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In 1989, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, ""httpd"", and the first client, ""WorldWideWeb"" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976. Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six-month stint (Jun-Dec 1980) as consultant software engineer at CERN. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using random associations. Named "Enquire" and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's "Image Computer Systems Ltd", with technical design responsibility. Work here included real time control firmware, graphics and communications software, and a generic macro language. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the then Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) which merged with the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003 to become the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium a Web standards organization which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. The Consortium has host sites located at MIT, at ERCIM in Europe, and at Keio University in Japan as well as Offices around the world.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In 1999, he became the first holder of 3Com Founders chair at MIT. In 2008 he was named 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at CSAIL where he also leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). Co-Chaired by Dr. Lalana Kagal, the DIG Research Group works on projects including: how to re-decentralize the Web and help radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership; working to ensure the rights of users in big data and analytics and systems; as well as harnessing mobile technologies to aid during disaster relief and help society. In 2016, Sir Tim joined the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford as a Professor.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In 2008 he founded and became Director of the World Wide Web Foundation. The Web Foundation is a non-profit organisation devoted to achieving a world in which all people can use the Web to communicate, collaborate and innovate freely. The Web Foundation words to fund and coordinate efforts to defend the Open Web and further its potential to benefit humanity.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In June 2009 then Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that he would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Sir Tim was a member of The Public Sector Transparency Board tasked to drive forward the UK Government's transparency agenda. He has promoted open government data globally, is a member of the UK's Transparency Board.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: In 2011 he was named to the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation, a globally oriented private foundation with the mission of advancing human welfare. He is President of the UK's Open Data Institute which was formed in 2012 to catalyse open data for economic, environmental, and social value.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: He is the author, with Mark Fischetti, of the 1999 book "Weaving the Web" on the past, present and future of the Web.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: On March 18 2013, Sir Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: On 4 April 2017, Sir Tim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. The Turing Prize, called the "Nobel Prize of Computing" is considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: James Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Miller, <nowiki>"</nowiki>, Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan,


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Hendler, J., Berners-Lee, T.J., and Miller, E., ' ', Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, Vol 122(10), October, 2002, p. 676-680.


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee, "", IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal, May/June 2006, pp 96-101


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Daniel J. Weitzner, Science Vol. 313, 11 August 2006, pp. 769-771


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Tim-Berners Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O'Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, Foundations and Trends in Web Science, Volume 1, Issue 1 (also available as a book: 144pp September 2006)


title: Tim Berners-Lee

text: Christian Bizer, Tom Heath, Tim Berners-Lee, "" (pdf), International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS), 5(3): 1-22. DOI: 10.4018/jswis.2009081901, 2009


title: Dionysus

text: Dionysus (also spelt Dionysos, Dionysius) is the Greek god of frenzies, festivities, spiritual ecstasy, wine, and alcohol in general.


title: Dionysus

text: Amongst the Orphists (who are a select group of followers of the Ancient Greek Religion) Dionysus is considered a saviour.


title: Dionysus

text: There are two stories on how Dionysus was born. One describes that he was the son of Zeus and Semele, and the other describes that he was the son of Zeus and Persephone, queen of the Underworld. Either way, in both stories Dionysus is sent to the Underworld by Zeus' jealous wife Hera and then saved and brought to life afterwards. He was the God of celebrations.


title: Dionysus

text: Dionysus was also the god of wine. According to a myth, the Titans lured Dionysus with toys and wanted to eat him. When Zeus found out it was too late and they had eaten everything except his heart. With that Zeus put the heart in the womb of Semele and he was born again.


title: Linebacker

text: A linebacker is a defensive position in the game of American football. There are two kinds of linebackers. One is the outside linebacker (OLB), whose job is to tackle players, rush the passer, and sometimes drop back in coverage to prevent catches. The middle linebacker (MLB) is often called the "quarterback of the defense," as they direct many formations and are often looked up to as leaders and very good players, mostly handling the job of tackling as well.


title: Linebacker

text: Linebackers can appear in different formations, or looks. In a 4-3 defense, there are three linebackers; usually two OLBs and a MLB in the middle.


title: Digital

text: A digital system is a something that represents information by using digits. Each digit represents a small amount of information because each digit comes from a small set of choices. A digit can be decimal (one of the ten choices from "0" through "9"), as in the display of a digital clock. A digit can be binary (either "0" or "1"). A binary digit is called a "bit". Digital computers and digital communication like the internet usually use binary. The meaning of each "bit" depends on the place where it is used. For example, a "bit" can represent 'Yes' or 'No', or it can represent 'True' or 'False'. A large amount of information, like a picture, can be represented by using a list of many "bits".


title: Digital

text: A digital system is different than an analogue (US- analog) system, which represents information in a continuous way.


title: Titanoboa

text: Titanoboa cerrejonensis is the largest known snake. Now extinct, the snake was a relative of the "anaconda" and the "boa constrictor". It was about 43 feet long (13 m), and weighed over a ton (about 1135 kg or 2,500 pounds). The snake lived in the Palaeocene epoch, about 58 million years ago. It ate crocodiles.


title: Titanoboa

text: The fossil was found in an open-cast coal mine in Colombia, in 2009. Plant fossils at the site proved the climate at the time was a tropical rainforest. The site was in the Cerrejón Formation in La Guajira, Colombia. Other large reptile fossils have been found at this site.


title: Titanoboa

text: Researchers found three skulls of the snake in 2002. A life-size replica is on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. It was sent on a world tour to be shown at various museums.


title: Titanoboa

text: "Titanoboa" lived in the first recorded tropical forest in South America. It shared the ecosystem with large Crocodylomorpha and large turtles. The paleogeography of the late Paleocene was a sheltered paralic (coastal) swamp, with an open connection to the proto-Caribbean in the north. In this environment tropical aquatic ferns like "Salvinia" flourished. The ferns were found as fossils in the Bogotá Formation and the Palermo Formation.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan is the second largest Muslim country in terms of population (behind Indonesia). Pakistan is the only Muslim country known to have nuclear weapons. Pakistan is also an important member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan is an active member of the United Nations. Pakistan had some problems with its Foreign relations. Pakistan's relations with its neighbor, India is not good. Both countries have been fighting over the disputed territory of Kashmir,over which they have fought two wars. Pakistan has also had difficult relations with neighbors Afghanistan and Iran. Pakistan has had a long and good relationship with the China. Pakistan has interest over the Persian Gulf and has wide-ranging bilateral relations with the United States and other Western countries.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan distrusted the Soviet Union during much of the Cold War. Because of this Pakistan had strong relations with both the United States of America and the People's Republic of China.


title: Foreign relations of Pakistan

text: Pakistan was a member of the American-sponsored CENTO and SEATO military alliances. Pakistans' alliance with the United States was especially close after the Soviets invaded the neighboring country of Afghanistan. In 1964, Pakistan signed the Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD) Pact with Turkey and Iran, when all three countries were closely allied with the U.S., and as neighbors of the Soviet Union, wary of perceived Soviet expansionism. To this day, Pakistan has had a close relationship with Turkey. RCD became defunct after the Iranian Revolution, and a Pakistani-Turkish initiative led to the founding of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) in 1985. For several years, Pakistan's relations with the Republic of India had been gradually improving, which opened up Pakistan's foreign policy to issues beyond security.


title: Network topology

text: The names used - such as ring or star - are only rough descriptions. The computers on a home network can be arranged in a circle but it does not necessarily mean that it represents a ring network.


title: Network topology

text: Which of these is chosen depends on what devices need to be connected, how reliable it has to be, and the cost associated with cabling.


title: Network topology

text: The shape of the cabling layout used to link devices is called the physical topology of the network. This refers to how the cables are laid out to connect many computers to one network. The physical topology you choose for your network depends on:


title: Network topology

text: The mapping of the nodes of the network and the physical connections between them – the layout of wiring, cables, the locations of nodes, and the interconnections between the nodes and the cabling or wiring system.


title: Network topology

text: The simplest topology is a permanent link between two endpoints (the line in the illustration above). Switched point-to-point topologies are the basic model of conventional telephony. The value of a permanent point-to-point network is the value of guaranteed, or nearly so, communications between the two endpoints. The value of an on-demand point-to-point connection is proportional to the number of potential pairs of subscribers, and has been expressed as Metcalfe's Law.


title: Network topology

text: In most practical networks that are based upon the partially connected mesh topology, all of the data that is transmitted between nodes in the network takes the shortest path between nodes. The network used a longer alternative path in the case of a failure or break in one of the links. This requires that the nodes of the network possess some type of logical 'routing' algorithm to determine the correct path to use at any particular time.


title: Network topology

text: The type of network topology in which a central 'root' node (the top level of the hierarchy) is connected to one or more other nodes that are one level lower in the hierarchy (i.e., the second level) with a point-to-point link between each of the second level nodes and the top level central 'root' node. Each of the second level nodes that are connected to the top level central 'root' node will also have one or more other nodes that are one level lower in the hierarchy (i.e., the third level) connected to it, also with a point-to-point link, the top level central 'root' node being the only node that has no other node above it in the hierarchy (The hierarchy of the tree is symmetrical.)


title: Network topology

text: Each node in the network having a specific fixed number, of nodes connected to it at the next lower level in the hierarchy, the number, being referred to as the 'branching factor' of the hierarchical tree. This tree has individual peripheral nodes.


title: Network topology

text: Logical topology describes the way in which a network transmits information from network/computer to another and not the way the network looks or how it is laid out. The logical layout also describes the different speeds of the cables being used from one network to another.


title: Network topology

text: The logical topology, in contrast to the "physical", is the signals act on the network media, or the way that the data passes through the network from one device to the next without regard to the physical interconnection of the devices. A network's logical topology is not necessarily the same as its physical topology. For example, twisted pair Ethernet is a logical bus topology in a physical star topology layout. While IBM's Token Ring is a logical ring topology, it is physically set up in a star topology.


title: Network topology

text: The logical classification of network topologies generally follows the same classifications as those in the physical classifications of network topologies but describes the path that the "data" takes between nodes being used as opposed to the actual "physical" connections between nodes.


title: Network topology

text: Except for star-based networks, the easiest way to add more computers into a network is by daisy-chaining, or connecting each computer in series to the next. If a message is intended for a computer partway down the line, each system bounces it along in sequence until it reaches the destination. A daisy-chained network can take two basic forms: linear and ring.


title: Network topology

text: The star topology reduces the probability of a network failure by connecting all of the peripheral nodes (computers, etc.) to a central node. When the physical star topology is applied to a logical bus network such as Ethernet, this central node (traditionally a hub) rebroadcasts all transmissions received from any peripheral node to all peripheral nodes on the network, sometimes including the originating node. All peripheral nodes may thus communicate with all others by transmitting to, and receiving from, the central node only. The failure of a transmission line linking any peripheral node to the central node will result in the isolation of that peripheral node from all others, but the remaining peripheral nodes will be unaffected. However, the disadvantage is that the failure of the central node will cause the failure of all of the peripheral nodes also,


title: Network topology

text: If the central node is "passive", the originating node must be able to tolerate the reception of an echo of its own transmission, delayed by the two-way round trip transmission time (i.e. to and from the central node) plus any delay generated in the central node. An "active" star network has an active central node that usually has the means to prevent echo-related problems.


title: Network topology

text: A tree topology (a.k.a. hierarchical topology) can be viewed as a collection of star networks arranged in a hierarchy. This tree has individual peripheral nodes (e.g. leaves) which are required to transmit to and receive from one other node only and are not required to act as repeaters or regenerators. Unlike the star network, the functionality of the central node may be distributed.


title: Network topology

text: As in the conventional star network, individual nodes may thus still be isolated from the network by a single-point failure of a transmission path to the node.


title: Network topology

text: If a link connecting a leaf fails, that leaf is isolated; if a connection to a non-leaf node fails, an entire section of the network becomes isolated from the rest.


title: Network topology

text: In order to alleviate the amount of network traffic that comes from broadcasting all signals to all nodes, more advanced central nodes were developed that are able to keep track of the identities of the nodes that are connected to the network. These network switches will "learn" the layout of the network by "listening" on each port during normal data transmission, examining the data packets and recording the address/identifier of each connected node and which port it's connected to in a lookup table held in memory. This lookup table then allows future transmissions to be forwarded to the intended destination only.


title: Network topology

text: In a mesh topology (i.e., a partially connected mesh topology), there are at least two nodes with two or more paths between them to provide redundant paths to be used in case the link providing one of the paths fails. This decentralization is often used to advantage to compensate for the single-point-failure disadvantage that is present when using a single device as a central node (e.g., in star and tree networks). A special kind of mesh, limiting the number of hops between two nodes, is a hypercube. The number of arbitrary forks in mesh networks makes them more difficult to design and implement, but their decentralized nature makes them very useful. This is similar in some ways to a grid network, where a linear or ring topology is used to connect systems in multiple directions. A multi-dimensional ring has a toroidal topology, for instance.


title: Network topology

text: A fully connected network, complete topology or full mesh topology is a network topology in which there is a direct link between all pairs of nodes. In a fully connected network with n nodes, there are n(n-1)/2 direct links. Networks designed with this topology are usually very expensive to set up, but provide a high degree of reliability due to the multiple paths for data that are provided by the large number of redundant links between nodes. This topology is mostly seen in military applications. However, it can also be seen in the file sharing protocol BitTorrent in which users connect to other users in the "swarm" by allowing each user sharing the file to connect to other users also involved. Often in actual usage of BitTorrent any given individual node is rarely connected to every single other node as in a true fully connected network but the protocol does allow for the possibility for any one node to connect to any other node when sharing files.


title: Network topology

text: Hybrid networks use a combination of any two or more topologies in such a way that the resulting network does not exhibit one of the standard topologies (e.g., bus, star, ring, etc.). For example, a tree network connected to a tree network is still a tree network, but two star networks connected together exhibit a hybrid network topology. A hybrid topology is always produced when two different basic network topologies are connected. Two common examples for Hybrid network are: "star ring network" and "star bus network"


title: Washington Monument

text: The Washington Monument is a large, tall, white obelisk near the west part of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was built to remember George Washington, who was the first President of the United States. It is the tallest stone structure in the world, and is 555 feet 5⅛ inches (169.294 m) tall. The monument is made of marble, granite, and sandstone. The monument was started in 1848 but was not finished until 1884. This was because the American Civil War started soon after construction started. Construction continued after the war ended, but the type of sandstone was changed. Because of this, about part of the way up, you can see a change in color of the monument. The monument opened on February 21, 1885 after 19 years total of construction.


title: Washington Monument

text: Visitors to Washington, D.C., can tour the inside of the Washington Monument. There is an elevator which takes people to the top. From the top, it is possible to see the National Mall, the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Lincoln Memorial.


title: Washington Monument

text: On Tuesday, August 23, 2011, the Monument was cracked by an earthquake. A 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck Northern Virginia, about from Washington D.C. After inspection, cracks were found at the top of the Monument. Initially Monument and the plaza around it was closed indefinitely however after repair, it has been re-opened in Oct 2019, for visitors. There were early reports that the Monument was leaning. The National Park Service said that while there was damage, the Monument is not leaning.


title: Idiom

text: An idiom is a common phrase which means something different from its literal meaning but can be understood because of their popular use.


title: Idiom

text: Idioms are difficult for someone not good at speaking the language. Some idioms are only used by some groups of people or at certain times. The idiom "shape up or ship out", which is like saying "improve your behavior or leave if you don't", might be said by an employer or supervisor to an employee, but not to other people.


title: Idiom

text: Idioms are not the same thing as slang. Idioms are made of normal words that have a special meaning known to almost everyone. Slang is usually special words, or special meanings of normal words that are known only to a particular group of people.


title: Idiom

text: To learn a language a person needs to learn the words in that language, and how and when to use them. But people also need to learn idioms separately because certain words together or at certain times can have different meanings. In order to understand an idiom, one sometimes needs to know the culture from which the idiom comes.


title: Idiom

text: To know the history of an idiom can be useful and interesting. For example, most native British English speakers know that "No room to swing a cat" means "there was not much space" and can use the idiom properly. However, few know this is because 200 years ago sailors were punished by being whipped with a "cat o' nine tails". A big space was cleared on the ship so that the person doing the whipping had room to "swing the cat".


title: Idiom

text: An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be understood from the dictionary definitions of each word taken separately. The linguist's term for the real meaning of an idiom is the subtext.


title: Idiom

text: Articles by Oxfam and the BBC have said that many idioms in English are unclear, or ambiguous. Many are understood differently in different countries. Many of the examples are taken from face-to-face talk, but may also apply in written reports.


title: Idiom

text: Vocables are sounds that are not proper words, but mean something, and are often ambiguous. One is a long drawn-out sound "hmmmmmm".


title: Idiom

text: One suggestion is that these idioms are used to smooth over difficult areas in social interaction. They cover passive-aggressive statements which might cause more conflict if openly expressed.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotation marks or inverted commas (informally known as quotes and speech marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs to mark a section of text as speech, a quotation, a phrase, or an unusual word. They are used in groups of 2, as a pair of opening and closing marks. They are used in either of two forms: or .


title: Quotation mark

text: Depending on the typeface, the opening and closing quotation marks may be identical in form (called “vertical” or “straight” or “typewriter” quotation marks), or they may be distinctly left-handed and right-handed (“typographic” or, colloquially, “curly” quotation marks). The closing single quotation mark is identical or similar in form to the apostrophe, and similar to the prime symbol. However, these three characters have quite different purposes. See also: ditto mark.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotation marks show that part of the text is either a person speaking or a quotation. Double quotation marks are used as a rule in the United States, while both single and double quotation marks are used in the United Kingdom and other commonwealth countries. A publisher’s or author’s style can be considered as more important than national preferences. However, the style of opening and closing quotation marks must be matched:


title: Quotation mark

text: Sometimes, quotations are nested in more than two levels. Nesting levels up to five can be found in some translations of the Bible. In these cases, questions arise about the form (and names) of the quotation marks to be used. The most common way is to simply alternate between the two forms, thus:


title: Quotation mark

text: If such a passage is further quoted in another publication, then all of their forms have to be shifted over by one level.


title: Quotation mark

text: In most cases, quotations which span multiple paragraphs should be set as block quotations, and thus do not require quotation marks. Quotation marks are used for multiple-paragraph quotations in some cases, especially in narratives. The convention in English is to put an opening quotation mark at the first and each subsequent paragraph, but use a closing quotation mark only for the final paragraph of the quotation, as in the following example from the book "Pride and Prejudice":


title: Quotation mark

text: As noted below, in some older texts, the quotation mark is repeated every line, rather than every paragraph. The Spanish convention uses closing quotation marks at the beginning of all subsequent paragraphs beyond the first.


title: Quotation mark

text: When quoted text is interrupted, such as with the phrase "he said," a closing quotation mark is used before the interruption, and an opening quotation mark after. Commas are also often used before and after the interruption, more often for quotations of speech than for quotations of text:


title: Quotation mark

text: It is incorrect to use quotation marks for paraphrased speech. This is because a paraphrase is an indirect quote, and in the course of any composition, it is important to document when one is using a quotation versus when one is using a paraphrased idea.


title: Quotation mark

text: However, another convention when quoting text in the body of a paragraph or sentence—for example, in an essay—is to recognize double quotation marks as marking an exact quotation, and single quotation marks as marking a paraphrased quotation or a quotation where grammar, pronouns, or plurality have been changed in order to fit the sentence containing the quotation (see reported speech).


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotes indicating irony, or other special use, are sometimes called scare quotes. They are sometimes gestured in oral speech using air quotes.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotation marks are also used to indicate that the writer realizes that a word is not being used in its current commonly accepted sense.


title: Quotation mark

text: In addition to conveying a neutral attitude and to call attention to a neologism, or slang, or special terminology (also known as jargon), quoting can also indicate words or phrases that are "descriptive" but unusual, colloquial, folksy, startling, humorous, metaphoric, or contain a pun:


title: Quotation mark

text: The "Chicago Manual of Style" (CMS), 15th edition acknowledges this type of use but cautions against overuse in section 7.58, “Quotation marks are often used to alert readers that a term is used in a nonstandard, ironic, or other special sense […] They imply ‘This is not my term,’ or ‘This is not how the term is "usually" applied.’ Like any such device, scare quotes lose their force and irritate readers if overused.”


title: Quotation mark

text: Using either quotation marks or italics can emphasize that an instance of a word refers to the word itself, rather than its associated concept.


title: Quotation mark

text: A three-way distinction is occasionally made between normal use of a word (no quotation marks), referring to the concept behind the word (single quotation marks), and the word itself (double quotation marks):


title: Quotation mark

text: The logic, for this form, derives from the need to distinguish use forms, coupled with the mandate to retain consistent notation for like use forms. The switching between double and single quotes in nested citation quotes reveals the same literary device for reducing ambiguity.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotation marks, rather than italics, are generally used for the titles of shorter works. Whether these are single or double is again a matter of style; however, many styles, especially for poetry, prefer the use of single quotation marks.


title: Quotation mark

text: As a rule, a whole publication would be italicised, whereas the titles of minor works (such as poems or short stories inside the collection) would be written with quotation marks.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotation marks can also offset a nickname embedded in an actual name, or a false or ironic title embedded in an actual title; for example, Nat “King” Cole, Miles “Tails” Prower, or John “Hannibal” Smith.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotes are sometimes used incorrectly for emphasis in lieu of underlining or italics, most commonly on signs or placards. This usage can be confused with ironic or altered-usage quotation, sometimes with unintended humor. For example, "For sale: “fresh” fish, “fresh” oysters", could be construed to imply that "fresh" is not used with its everyday meaning, or indeed to indicate that the fish or oysters are anything but fresh. And again, "Cashiers’ desks open until noon for your “convenience”" might mean that the convenience was for the bank employees, not the customers.


title: Quotation mark

text: With quotation marks that are next to other punctuation marks, there are two main systems. They are called “American” and “British,” but some American writers and organizations use the British style and vice versa. Both systems have the same rules for question marks, exclamation points, colons, and semicolons. They have different rules for periods and commas.


title: Quotation mark

text: In both systems, question marks and exclamation marks are placed inside or outside quoted material depending on whether they are for the whole sentence or just the quoted words, but colons and semicolons always go outside.


title: Quotation mark

text: This style of punctuation is common in the U.S., Canada, and it is also used in the U.K. in fiction and journalism.


title: Quotation mark

text: In British style, which is sometimes called logical punctuation, the rule is the same as for question marks and exclamation points: the comma or period goes outside if it is for the whole sentence but inside if it is for just the quoted words. This is called “placement according to sense.”


title: Quotation mark

text: When dealing with words-as-words, short-form works like the titles of songs, and sentence fragments, the two systems are different:


title: Quotation mark

text: For quoting direct speech, American rules place periods and commas inside the quotation marks all the time. In fiction, both styles are the same. In non-fiction, British publishers may permit placing punctuation that is not part of the person’s speech inside the quotation marks but prefer that it be placed outside. According to the "Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Copy-editors and Proofreaders", periods and commas that "are" part of the person’s speech are permitted inside the quotation marks regardless.


title: Quotation mark

text: Many American style guides explicitly permit periods and commas outside the quotation marks when the presence of the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks will lead to ambiguity, such as when describing keyboard input:


title: Quotation mark

text: In the first two sentences above, only one punctuation mark is used at the end of each. Regardless of its placement, only one end mark (?, !, or .) can end a sentence in American English. Only the period, however, "cannot" end a quoted sentence when it does not also end the enclosing sentence, except for literal text:


title: Quotation mark

text: References: "Chicago Manual of Style", 15th edition; "Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford"; "Merriam-Webster’s Guide to Punctuation and Style", second edition.


title: Quotation mark

text: In English, when a quotation follows other writing on a line of text, a space precedes the opening quotation mark unless the preceding symbol, such as a dash, requires that there be no space. When a quotation is followed by other writing on a line of text, a space follows the closing quotation mark unless it is immediately followed by other punctuation within the sentence, such as a colon or closing punctuation. (These exceptions are ignored by some Asian computer systems that systematically display quotation marks with the included spacing, as this spacing is part of the fixed-width characters.)


title: Quotation mark

text: There is generally no space between an opening quotation mark and the following word, or a closing quotation mark and the preceding word. When a double quotation mark or a single quotation mark immediately follows the other, proper spacing for legibility requires that a non-breaking space be inserted.


title: Quotation mark

text: Straight quotation marks (or italicized straight quotation marks) are often used to approximate the prime and double prime. For example, when signifying feet and inches, arcminutes and arcseconds, or minutes and seconds, where the quotation mark symbolises the latter part of the pair. For instance, 5 feet and 6 inches is often written 5' 6", and 40 degrees, 20 arcminutes and 50 arcseconds is written 40° 20' 50". When available, however, the prime should be used instead (e. g., 5′ 6″, and 40° 20′ 50″). Prime and double prime are not present in most character sets, including ASCII and Latin-1, but are present in Unicode, as characters U+2032 (dec. 8242) and U+2033 (dec. 8243), and as HTML entities ′ and ″. Double quotation marks are also often used to represent the ditto mark.


title: Quotation mark

text: Straight single and double quotation marks are used in most programming languages to delimit strings or literal characters. In some languages (e. g. Pascal) only one type is allowed, in some (e. g. C and its derivatives) both are used with different meanings and in others (e. g. Python) both are used interchangeably. In some languages, if it is desired to include the same quotation marks used to delimit a string inside the string, the quotation marks are doubled. For example, to represent the string eat 'hot' dogs in Pascal one uses <nowiki>'eat "hot" dogs'</nowiki>. Other languages use an escape character, often the backslash, as in <nowiki>'eat \'hot\' dogs'</nowiki>.


title: Quotation mark

text: Standard English computer keyboard layouts inherited the single and double “straight” quotation marks from the typewriter (the single quotation mark also doubling as an apostrophe), and they do not include individual keys for left-handed and right-handed typographic quotation marks. However, most computer text-editing programs provide a “smart quotes” feature (see below) to automatically convert “straight” quote marks into typographic punctuation. Generally, this “smart quote” feature is enabled by default. Some websites do not allow typographic quotation marks or apostrophes in posts (one such example being YouTube). One can skirt these limitations, however, by using the HTML character codes or entities.


title: Quotation mark

text: To make typographic quotation marks easier to enter, publishing software often automatically converts typewriter quotation marks (and apostrophes) to typographic form during text entry (with or without the user being aware of it). This is known as the “smart quotes” feature. Quotation marks that are not automatically altered by computer programs are known as “dumb quotes”. Some implementations incorrectly produce an opening single quotation mark in places where an apostrophe is required, for example, in abbreviated years like "’08" for "2008".


title: Quotation mark

text: In the first centuries of typesetting, writers showed quoted speech by saying who was speaking. Some versions of the Bible still do it this way. During the Renaissance, writers showed quoted speech by using a typeface different from the main body text, like we use italics today. Long quotations were also set this way, at full size and full measure.


title: Quotation mark

text: Quotation marks were first cut in metal type during the middle of the sixteenth century, printers were using them a lot by the seventeenth. In some Baroque and Romantic-period books, quotation marks would be repeated at the beginning of every line of a long quotation. When printers stopped doing this, they still kept the empty margin, which is where we get our modern practice of indenting before block quotation.


title: Quotation mark

text: In Early Modern English, quotation marks were used only to denote pithy comments. Writers first began to use them for direct speech in 1714. By 1749, writers were using single quotation marks, or inverted commas, for direct speech.


title: Honolulu

text: Honolulu is the capital city of the U.S. state of Hawaii. It is also the largest city in Hawaii and it has the most important harbor. It is on the south-east shore of the island of Oahu.


title: Honolulu

text: Honolulu means "sheltered harbor" in the Hawaiian language. No one knows for sure when Honolulu was first settled or when the name was first used.


title: Honolulu

text: Honolulu harbor was called Kulolia before foreigners came. The first foreigner was Captain William Brown of the English ship Butterworth, in 1794. He named the harbor Fair Haven. Other foreign captains is started calling it Brown's Harbor. The name Honolulu was used some time after that.


title: Honolulu

text: Honolulu quickly became the most important harbor of Hawaii. At that time, sandalwood was a big export. Honolulu was also an important supply point for whalers.


title: Honolulu

text: Kamehameha III made Honolulu the capital city of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1850. It was also the capital of the Republic of Hawaii and the Territory of Hawaii. It stayed the capital when Hawaii became a state in 1959.


title: Kanji

text: Kanji (漢字) is one of the three forms of Japanese writing. A kanji is an "ideogram": that is, a type of simple picture. These are made to show a word's meaning. It is a symbol of an idea such as an object, thing or quality.


title: Kanji

text: Kanji ideograms (or “characters”) were taken from Chinese characters, and many changed over time. The word “kanji” means “Han characters” (i.e. “Chinese characters”).


title: Kanji

text: There are two other systems used to write in Japanese. These systems are called hiragana and katakana (together they are called “kana”). They show how a word is pronounced because each character stands for a syllable (a, ka, sa, ta etc.). Each kanji could also be written in kana, indeed they are in children’s books or books for foreigners learning Japanese.


title: Kanji

text: Japanese can have many homophones for one pronunciation, e.g. "kami" can mean “god”, “hair”, "paper", or "upper stream". Since each words is made of the same syllables, they are written using the same kana (かみ in hiragana and カミ in katakana), but since they all have very different meanings, the kanji character for each word is quite different. The kanji for "god" is 神, the kanji for "hair" is 髪, the kanji for "paper" is 紙, and the kanji for "upper stream" is 上. However, each kanji character can have several different pronunciations, according to which meaning (which “reading”) is intended.


title: Kanji

text: Kanji was originally written to look like what it means, thus the Japanese symbol for mouth is 口 (which is said as "kuchi"), and looks like a mouth. Another word, 山 (said as "yama") means mountain. The Japanese have for many words. Many can be shown with just one kanji, but sometimes two kanji characters are combined to make new words, such as 山口 ("yamaguchi"), "mountain-mouth", meaning a cave. (It is also a surname and the name of a prefecture).


title: Kanji

text: Kanji is often combined with hiragana to show the grammatical meaning of the word. In English this would be done with endings (e.g. “act” (the verb), “action” (the noun) etc.)


title: Kanji

text: Most kanji characters can be pronounced at least two different ways according to whether the word is a native Japanese word (this is called the “kun” reading, or “kun-yomi”), or whether it came from Chinese (this called the “on” reading or “on-yomi”). Kanji that stand alone usually have kun-yomi, while kanji compound words usually have on-yomi. For example, 山 on its own is "yama" (the Japanese word for “mountain”). When it is combined with another word or name, it is pronounced "san" e.g. “Fuji-san” (Mount Fuji).


title: Kanji

text: However, there are many exceptions to these patterns. For example, some native Japanese words with two or more kanji (usually proper nouns) use their kanji's kun-yomi, like 山口, which is pronounced "yama-guchi", even though the on-yomi for the kanji would be "san" and "kō" in that order. Sometimes, kanji only have on-yomi and have no kun-yomi. For example, the kanji 毒, which means "poison", only has the on-yomi "doku". Sometimes, compound words mix on-yomi and kun-yomi together. For example, the word 金色, which means "golden", is pronounced "kin-iro", in which the first kanji uses its on-yomi, and the second-kanji uses its kun-yomi. Sometimes, the kanji in certain compound words may not even use their kanji readings at all, but are used only to show the word's meaning. For example, the word 煙草 is pronounced "tabako", which means "tobacco" in English. This word was borrowed from Portuguese, and while the pronunciation of the word does not match either kanji, the meaning of the kanji are "smoke" and "grass" in that order, hinting at the word's meaning. There are even some words whose kanji can be used to only show a word's pronunciation and not its meaning. These are called ateji. For example, the word 亜米利加, which means "America", is pronounced "Amerika", but none of the kanji meanings have any obvious connection to America. Usually, however, words of the last kind are usually written in only katakana these days, though sometimes words like "sushi" still written in ateji, like 寿司, because Chinese tourists will recognize the ateji more easily, since the word is written the same way in Chinese.


title: Kanji

text: Kanji characters are classed on the basis of how many brush strokes they are made of. The simplest kanji have one stroke and the most complex may have up to 30 strokes.


title: Kanji

text: There are many different Kanji, the exact number is not known but it is around 50,000. However, not all 50,000 are taught in schools. The government of Japan has set up a 1,945 basic kanji list (Jōyō Kanji) that those learning the language need to know. They are the ones most commonly used in newspapers and magazines, along with street signs and store signs. Kanji takes many years to learn. By the end of his school years a pupil should know about 1,850 kanji. A university graduate would need to know about 3000. If someone does not know the kanji for a word, they can write it in kana and it will be understood, but it is usually not the proper way to write it, however kana can have many meanings for the same word, so unless the person writes in kanji, we will not know what they are saying.


title: Grassland

text: A grassland is a biome, an area of land that mostly has grasses. There are wild grasses, and there may be some trees.


title: Grassland

text: Several parts of the world have grasslands. Grasslands are found in Africa, North America, Central Asia, South America, and near the coasts of Australia. The largest grasslands are in East Africa. Grasslands with a few scattered trees are called savannas. Others are called prairies or steppes.


title: Grassland

text: The graminoids became widespread toward the end of the Cretaceous period. The appearance of mountains in the western United States during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs created a continental climate which was favourable to the evolution of grasslands.


title: Grassland

text: About five million years ago, in the Miocene in the New World and the Pliocene in the Old World, the first true grasslands grew. Existing forest biomes declined, and grasslands became much more widespread.


title: Grassland

text: Grassland vegetation can vary greatly in height. The chalk grassland of southern England is quite short, often with small, delicate flowers.


title: Grassland

text: Grass is quite tall in the Mississippi "tallgrass prairie", the South American grasslands and the African savannas. This provides a degree of cover for the smaller animals, and so increases the number of species which can live there.


title: Grassland

text: Woody plants, shrubs or trees, may occur on some grasslands. The root systems of perennial grasses and forbs (herbaceous flowering plants) form complex mats that hold the soil in place.


title: Grassland

text: The tallgrass prairie is a native ecosystem of the drainage basin of the Mississippi. Retreating glaciers dropped moraine material about 10,000 years ago. Wind-dropped loess and organic matter accumulated. This made the soil. The prairie had the deepest level of topsoil recorded anywhere. Animals such as buffalo, elk, deer, and rabbits lived there.


title: Grassland

text: The animals added nitrogen to the soil with their urine and faeces. Prairie dogs dug tunnels that "aerated the soil and channeled water several feet below the surface".


title: Grassland

text: Between 1800 and 1930, most of this natural environment was destroyed. Settlers transformed what they called "the Great American Desert" or "The Inland Sea" into farmland. They replaced the old grasses with new ones, mostly wheat and maize. They replaced the bison with cattle, another kind of bovine. About 40% of the world's maize grows in the United States, mostly on land that formerly grew grass. The grazing pattern of European cattle, the near-extermination of prairie dogs, and the plowing and cultivation of the land did the damage. Plowing cut tallgrass root systems and interrupted reproduction. Drainage changed the soil's water content, and soil erosion lost soil. Of course, wheat and maize "are" grasses, but ecologically different from the original cereals.


title: Grassland

text: Estimates differ of how much original tallgrass prairie survives. Perhaps less than 1% to 4%, mostly in "scattered remnants found in pioneer cemeteries, restoration projects, along highways and railroad rights-of-way, and on steep bluffs high above rivers".


title: Grassland

text: In many other parts of the world, the grasslands have little rain. or long dry periods. There are few trees because of the low rainfall. Thorny trees called acacias are one of a handful of trees that are able to grow in some African savannas. Wildfires are common and destroy trees. The animals also prevent trees from growing as they eat the tender sprouts before they can develop into grown trees. Elephants are known to tear down grown-up trees and feed on their leaves, making trees even more scarce.


title: Grassland

text: Grass can still grow because it survives the aridity and the trampling of the animals. This is why grasslands can feed vast numbers of animals. Animals include mice, rats that eat mostly seeds. Snakes, hawks and eagles eat mostly small animals. Big animals, mostly grazers, include zebras, ostriches, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, horses, and antelopes.


title: Play (theatre)

text: A play is a piece of writing (literature) which can be seen at a theatre or on television, or heard on the radio. Plays often show conversations between people. A play is usually watched, rather than being read.


title: Play (theatre)

text: The people who appear in a play are actors; in a theatre they stand on a stage so the people watching (the audience) can see them better. A director helps the actors to work better, or tells them how he wants the play to be.


title: Play (theatre)

text: Plays can be very interesting because they can be understood in many different ways. When the writer - the playwright - makes the play, he can not say how the actors or director will use it. Sometimes the playwright is also the director or an actor: Molière, for example, was often an actor in his plays. But the director can change the play in different ways: the actors' costume, the music, how people say things, how they move or what they hold. Modern directors can direct plays by Shakespeare, and these old plays seem modern now, too.


title: Play (theatre)

text: Symbolic can also be called expressionistic. Its all about how the writer or director presents ideas in a very different point of view.


title: Leisure

text: Leisure (or free time) is when a person can choose what to do. During a person's leisure time, they do not have an obligation to be at school or work at a job. During leisure time, people can do fun activities, family activities, or other non-work activities, such as hobbies.


title: Leisure

text: A vacation or holiday is the setting aside of time specifically for leisure. During their vacation, some people travel to a different region or country, and stay at a hotel so that they can do things they could not do near home. Other people prefer to spend their vacation time at home in their own community.


title: Leisure

text: In rich industrialized countries such as the US and Canada, as well as in most European countries, workers are allowed to stay home on the weekend (usually Saturday and Sunday), and use it as leisure time. People in poorer developing countries usually have less leisure time, as they have to work longer hours and more days per year.


title: Vocabulary

text: The vocabulary a person uses is all the words that person knows and uses. In general, a person who is five knows about 4,000 to 5,000 words. Adults who have gone to college may know 20,000 words. A hearing vocabulary and reading vocabulary are bigger than a speaking vocabulary or writing vocabulary, as people understand some words that they do not use.


title: Vocabulary

text: The number of words in a language is more than the words listed in one dictionary. One dictionary may have a list of 500,000 (half a million) words. Another dictionary may have some other words that the other dictionary does not have. Adding up all the words in those dictionaries, there are about 750,000 words in English. There may be more words than that.


title: Vocabulary

text: The most used words are short words. That is true in all languages. The 50 most common words in English have fewer than seven letters. Half of these words have fewer than four letters.


title: Vocabulary

text: The vocabulary of a language is always changing. New words are made or words change their meaning. Words about computers, like "download" are new to the English language. The new word "bling" came from hip hop. Words like "cool" have developed new meanings.


title: Supermarket

text: A supermarket, grocery store (or just grocery) is a retail store that sells food. Most grocery stores sell fresh fruit, vegetables, seafood, meat, and other prepared foods.


title: Supermarket

text: The person who controls a grocery store is called a grocer. A grocer will order food from farmers or other people who send out farmers food to other grocery stores and restaurants.


title: Supermarket

text: There are a range of different types and sizes of grocery stores. Some grocery stores are small community stores with a limited range of items. Other grocery stores are large stores with a vast selection of food items.


title: Supermarket

text: They may also sell household cleaning and laundry supplies, and hygiene items (soap, toothpaste, etc.). They may also contain a pharmacy (known as a drug store or chemist in some places).


title: Supermarket

text: Items at a grocery store can be sold in one of two ways. Most fruits, vegetables, meat, and seafood are usually sold by weight (for example, apples cost 99 cents per pound), while other items are usually sold by quantity (for example, table salt costs $1.59 for each box). Not all items are the same price at each grocery store. Also, every week, some items at grocery stores cost less that what it normally would cost (we say that these items are "on sale"), so people would want to go buy them since they don't have to pay as much as they would normally have to get that item. Many grocery stores print a flyer that shows which items are on sale that week. These flyers are then sent to other people in the mail, who would read the flyer and go to the store to buy the items shown in it.


title: Supermarket

text: Supermarkets are large grocery stores that sell a large variety of fresh and packaged food and other consumer or household products. Supermarkets are divided into sections, such as bakery, dairy, produce (fruits and vegetables), frozen, meat, and deli, along with a "general grocery" section where one can find packaged goods, cleaning supplies, and personal hygiene items. Many supermarkets today now also sell hot, prepared food that is ready to eat, or contains a food court with different fast food shops. The term "supermarket" usually refers to a larger store than the term "grocery store."


title: Supermarket

text: A hypermarket is a very large supermarket that is part of a larger general merchandise store such as Walmart, which also sells clothes, electronics, household hardware, and other items. It can be said to be a hybrid (or combination) of a grocery store and a department store. These stores are mainly found in suburbs where there is a lot of room to build and near where people live.


title: Supermarket

text: In the past, grocery stores used to be small. The owner, called a shopkeeper, would ask the customer what he or she would like to buy. The shopkeeper would then get the items, bring it to the customer, and put them in bags which the customer would take with them. He would then calculate how much the customer has to pay, and take the money from the customer. The customer then takes the bags of items out of the store by him/herself.


title: Supermarket

text: Today, most groceries stores are too big for one person to take care of. Because of this, the customer has to find the items he or she wants by him/herself. Most often, the customer would take a shopping basket or shopping cart and put the items he or she wants to buy into the basket or cart. For some items, like meat and seafood, the customer still has to have an employee get or prepare the item. Once the customer is done shopping, he or she then brings the items to the "checkout", where a person called a cashier scans the customer's items into a cash register (or a computer as part of a point of sale system) and then takes the customer's payment. Supermarkets typically accept payment by cash, debit cards, and/or credit cards. Recently, there are so-called self-checkout systems where the customer scans the items on his or her own.


title: Supermarket

text: Many large supermarkets also have a loyalty program, where a customer can earn points by purchasing products. When a customer has enough points, a discount or reward is given. These programs are meant to make customers come back to the same store again and again.


title: Ion

text: It can be made from an atom, or from a group of atoms (molecule). It is "charged" so it will move near electricity. This is because atoms are made of three smaller parts:


title: Ion

text: An ion has unequal numbers of protons and electrons. Making an ion from an atom or molecule is called "ionization".


title: Ion

text: The charge on a proton is chosen as +1 (positively charged). The charge on an electron is opposite to the charge on the proton. The charge on the electron is -1 (negatively charged). An atom that is ionized makes two parts, one positive, and one negatively charged. For example, a neutral hydrogen atom has one proton and one electron. Ionizing the atom breaks it into two parts: (1) a positively charged hydrogen ion, H+ (2) a negatively charged electron.


title: Ion

text: A liquid with ions is called an electrolyte. A gas with lots of ions is called a plasma. When ions move, it is called electricity. For example, in a wire, the metal ions do not move, but the electrons move as electricity. A positive ion and a negative ion will move together. Two ions of the same charge will move apart. When ions move they also make "magnetic fields".


title: Ion

text: Many ions are colourless. Elements in the main groups in the Periodic Table form colourless ions. Some ions are coloured. The transition metals usually form coloured ions.


title: Ion

text: In physics, atomic nuclei that have been completely ionized are called charged particles. These are ones in alpha radiation.


title: Ion

text: Ionization happens by giving atoms high energy. This is done using electrical voltage or by high-energy ionizing radiation or high temperature.


title: Ion

text: Polyatomic ions are formed from a number of atoms. Polyatomic ions usually consist of all non-metal atoms. But sometimes the polyatomic ion can have a metallic atom too.


title: Ion

text: Positive ions are called cations. They are attracted to cathodes (negatively charged electrodes). ("Cation" is pronounced "cat eye on", not "kay shun".) All simple metal ions are cations.


title: Ion

text: Negative ions are called anions. They are attracted to anodes (positively charged electrodes). All simple non-metal ions (except H, which is a proton) are anions.


title: Ion

text: Michael Faraday was the first person to write a theory about ions, in 1830. In his theory, he said what the portions of molecules were like that moved to anions or cations. Svante August Arrhenius showed how this happened. He wrote this in his doctoral dissertation in 1884 (University of Uppsala). The university did not accept his theory at first (he only just passed his degree). But in 1903, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the same idea.


title: Ion

text: In Greek "ion" is like the word "go". "Anion" and "cation" mean "up-goer" and "down-goer". "Anode" and "cathode" are "way up" and "way down".


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: The Iran–Iraq War was a war between the armed forces of Iraq and Iran lasting from September 1980 to August 1988. It was commonly called the "Persian Gulf War" until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. The Iraq-Kuwait war, which the United States entered, later was called the "Persian Gulf War" or the "Gulf War".


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: The war began when Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980, after a long history of border disputes and after Iran demanded the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. Iraqi forces did well at the beginning of the war, taking Iranian Khuzestan province, but they were stopped and forced out of Iran before long. The war continued for years, and neither side gained much ground in the resulting trench warfare. About a million soldiers died, and a similar number of civilians. Both sides used blockade, which other countries opposed. Despite several calls for an end to the fighting by the United Nations Security Council, the two countries fought until 20 August 1988; the last prisoners of war were exchanged in 2003. The war changed politics in the Middle East and worldwide.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: The Iran–Iraq War is also noted for Iraq's use of chemical weapons and biological weapons against Iranian troops and civilians. The role of the United States and Soviet Union was vital, dating back to the Cold War. In 1953, the US encouraged a coup d'état against Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the Prime Minister of Iran. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to power, supporting his military and his government. The United States sold many weapons to the Shah's government. Meanwhile, revolutionaries of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party overthrew the king of Iraq and, with the help of the Soviet Union, built up their army. Starting with the United Arab Republic, they sought to unite all the Arabs into one state, including the Arab minority in Iran.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: After the war started (especially between 1983 and 1988), the United States sold weapons to the Iraqis. This move was mainly due to America's interest in containing the revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini. Thus, both the Soviet Union and the United States supplied Iraq with weapons against Iran. The United States had sold many weapons to Iran before the war. It was believed the soviet union was selling weapons to both sides during the war.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: In the middle of the 20th century, the Ba'ath parties were ruling both in Syria and Iraq. The ideology behind Ba'athismis to unite the Arab regions and create a Pan-Arab state. The ideology is also oriented towards socialism. Although the Ba'ath ideology has nationalist roots and is not related to religion, Ba'ath leaders and politicians have often used religious outlets to gain popularity and support of the people. Although the Pan-Arab nationalism worked out in other Arab countries such as Egypt, this was a difficult case in Iraq. The reason for this, is the diversity of the Iraqi population. Because of the Sunni - Shi'a and Arab-Kurd divide, Iraq is seen as one of the most difficult countries to govern. It was especially difficult, as the Ba'ath party was dominantly Sunni, whereas the population of Iraq, the origin place of Shia Islam, is dominantly Shia (55%). The president of Iraq at the time, was Saddam Hussein, who took most of the power in his own hands and strived for strong Arab leadership. His ambitions to take the lead in the Arab world were also a key element for his later attack on Iran.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: The Shatt al-Arab waterway, bordering Iraq and Iran, is crucial to Iraq, because it is its only major outlet to the sea. The waterway is controlled by Iraq and has been a source of tension between the states long before the Iranian revolution. The main reason for tension around this waterway has been its function as a border. Because of this, it has been an issue between the Ottomans and Iran. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the waterway was controlled by Iraq.However, in 1969 Shah Reza refused to pay fees for Iranian ships passing the waterway. He also started backing up Kurdish separatists groups in Northern Iraq. To stop the support of Iran to the Kurds, Saddam signed the Algiers agreement in 1975. Iran stopped supporting the Kurds, and the border was placed in the middle of the waterway. One of the reasons, according to Saddam himself, for being pressured to sign this agreement was the military advancement of Iran during the rule of the Shah. Saddam withdrew the agreement several days before invading Iran, in sSeptember1980, drawing upon the importance of the waterway. Before and during the war, Saddam was vocal about the right of Iraq to Shatt al-Arab as well as Khuzestan, the bordering Iranian region that is mainly inhabited by Iranian Arabs.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: The Pan-Islamic nature of the new Iranian state was in contrast with the Arab nationalist context of Iraq. After the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, the secular yet authoritarian rule of Hussein felt threatened. A large Persian state posed a threat against the Pan-Arab ideology of Hussein. The Shia Muslims in Iraq were already posing a threat to Saddam by protesting and mobilizing against the Ba'ath regime. This only became worse after the Iranian revolutionaries called upon Iraqis also to initiate a revolution. Other than these political threats, Iraq was in a more fragile position geographically.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: In Iran, the Pahlavi dynasty had been ruling since 1925, after the overthrow of the Qajar dynasty. The Pahlavi empire aimed to create a westernised and progressive Iranian state. The second and last monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza], started implementing bolder reforms that affected citizens' daily lives. As a reaction, opposition from all parts of society began growing. Especially clergymen were encouraging the people to stand up against westernization and strive for an Islamic state ruled by Islamic jurists. Khomeini was one of the leading clerics during the period of political tension. In 1977, these tensions led to large-scale demonstrations and eventually the exile of the Shah. In 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran was officially established, headed by Ayatollah Khomeini. This sudden turn of events in Iran came as a surprise to most countries. The rise of a shia power caused concerns in several surrounding countries. Especially in Iraq, where the Shia majority was ruled by the Sunni minority. It was not only the rise to power of clerics that was concerning. Khomeini and his counterparts were also vocal about their desires to create islIslamicates in the surrounding Muslim majority countries. The ultimate goal was to create a united Pan-Islamic state under Khomeini's rule.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: Shah Mohammed Reza had invested a lot into the modernization of the Iranian army. He was fully backed by the United States, as they supported the anti-communist stance of Iran and saw this as an opportunity to have a state that supported US interests in that region. Thus, the Shah expanded navy, air and ground forces with modern weapons and imported western trainers for the army. For this reason, Iran became more capable than Iraq, also taking into account the army officers that were almost twice as many in Iraq. However, the revolution changed this military upper hand drastically. The revolutionaries did not understand the need for extensive arming supplies and did not want to be the policeman of the US. Therefore, Khomeini and his reign immediately canceled military contracts and sent away the western trainers. Because of the sudden regime change, the morale of the officers also lowered significantly, according to Iraqi intelligence at the time. A parallel military force was created by Khomeini, as the previous officers were in danger of a potential counter-revolution. These factors caused Iran to remain with a limited military force.


title: Iran–Iraq War

text: Iraq invaded Iran in September 22, 1980. Hussein was confident that the invasion would move swiftly, as the Iraqi army was well-equipped thanks to Saddam's investments in the military. Hussein also believed in a quick win due to intelligence reports stating that the Iranian army had been ineffective after the Iranian Revolution. It would later become clear that this invasion would benefit Khomeini by allowing him to eliminate his opposes and uniting his nation for national defense At the center of Iraq's objectives was the annexation of the East Bank of the Shaat Al-Arab waterway which had been the site of numerous border skirmishes between the two countries going back to the late 1960s. The president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, also wanted to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan, substantially populated by Iranian Arabs.