A Ton of Crap (95 page)

Tertiary
The Tertiary period occurred 65 to 1.6 million years ago. This period is divided into five epochs. During the first epoch, the Paleocene epoch, the first primates started appearing. In the Eocene epoch, aquatic mammals and modern birds started to appear. The Oligocene epoch featured toothed whales, cats, and dogs. During the Miocene epoch, primates, horses, camels, rhinos, and beaver-like animals started to appear. During the Pliocene epoch, the first ancestors of modern humans, hominids, appeared and the geography of the planet was similar to what is found today.

HINDI

Hindi Today
Hindi is one of the official languages of the Republic of India, and it is spoken as a second language in places like Fiji, Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, and Surinam. Around 500 to 600 million people speak Hindi, and it is believed to be the fifth most-spoken language in the world. Hindi is the native language for 40 percent of India’s population, and this area is referred to as the Hindi belt.

THE HOLOCAUST

Liberation
As the Allies advanced through Germany, the concentration camps were gradually liberated. In total, an estimated 5 to 7 million Jewish people were killed as a result of the Holocaust. Around 50,000 to 100,000 remained in the Allies’ zones of occupation, many refusing to ever go back to their homes, later being transported to the United States, Israel, and Palestine. The Nuremberg Trials began in October of 1945 and were presided over by American, British, French, and Russian judges. The first trial prosecuted twenty-one members of the Third Reich, including many of those responsible for the Holocaust.

FAIRYTALES

Carlo Collodi
Carlo Lorenzini, who would come to be known as Carlo Collodi, was an Italian author who lived from 1826 to 1890. Originally working as a satirical journalist, Collodi left journalism and began working as a magazine editor and theatrical censor. It is during this time that he began translating the works of Charles Perrault. Inspired by Perrault, Collodi started working on his own fairytales, and began writing “The Story of a Puppet.” His story, which would later be retitled as “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” was very popular. Two years after his death, the story was translated into English.

CHAOS THEORY

Applications of Chaos Theory
Chaos theory has many real-world applications, and has even been exploited by companies. In 1993, Goldstar Co. created a washing machine that used chaos theory and made clothing cleaner and less tangled. As one large pulsator rotated, another smaller pulsator would rise and fall at random times, stirring the water. Chaos theory is also applied to understanding the stock market, in predicting weather, and even understanding how the solar system works. Chaos theory has also been applied to learning more about the body, and can be used in attempting to control brain seizures and cardiac arrhythmias.

GEOLOGIC PERIODS

Quaternary
The Quaternary period, which continues to the present, started 1.8 million years ago and began with a great Ice Age. This is the age dominated by human beings and mammals. During this time, the wooly mammoth, saber-tooth tiger, and other giant mammals (known as megafauna) roamed. Today, much of the remaining megafauna are found in Africa, such as the elephant and hippopotamus. It is during the Quaternary period that the hominids evolved into modern humans (who evolved into their current form around 190,000 years ago.)

HINDI

Useful Hindi Phrases
Here are some helpful phrases to use when traveling to India. Note that these are spelled out phonetically:

Hello.
Namaste
(this can also be used for good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, and goodbye).

Good morning.
Suprabhāt.

Good afternoon/evening.
Śubh dhin.

Good night.
Śubh rātrī.

How are you?
Āp kaise hain˙?

Excuse me.
Kshama kījie.

I don’t understand.
Maim˙ samajhā nahī
(said from a man);
Maim˙ samajhī nahī
(said from a woman).

How much is this?
Kitane kā hai?

Where’s the toilet?
Tāyalet kahan hain˙?

Thank you.
Ābhārī hōn˙.

1. Which of the following did Hitler use as propaganda to elicit anti-Semitism?
   

   1. Newspapers
      
   2. Film
      
   3. Art
      
   4. All of the above
      

2. The largest ghettos in Poland were:
   

   1. Warsaw and Lodz
      
   2. Warsaw and Auschwitz
      
   3. Auschwitz and Lodz
      
   4. Auschwitz and Pogrom
      

3. Which of the following is one of Aesop’s Fables?
   

   1. “The Adventures of Pinocchio”
      
   2. “Cinderella”
      
   3. “The Tortoise and the Hare”
      
   4. “Sleeping Beauty”
      

4. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s story was altered by Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, and the resulting story was:
   

   1. “Beauty and the Beast”
      
   2. “The Ugly Duckling”
      
   3. “Hansel and Gretel”
      
   4. “Little Red Riding Hood”
      

5. Shapes that we see in everyday life, that are complex patterns that never end, and self-similar on other scales are known as:
   

   1. Butterflies
      
   2. Fractals
      
   3. Chaotics
      
   4. Strange attractors
      

6. Which of the following can chaos theory be applied to?
   

   1. Weather
      
   2. Stock market
      
   3. Migration patterns of birds
      
   4. All of the above
      

7. The K-T extinction, in which all dinosaurs and large marine reptiles died off, occurred after the:
   

   1. Cretaceous
      
   2. Tertiary
      
   3. Quaternary
      
   4. Jurassic
      

8. In what period did the first dinosaurs appear?
   

   1. Cambrian
      
   2. Triassic
      
   3. Jurassic
      
   4. Quaternary
      

9. Much of the vocabulary and grammar of Hindi and Urdu are the same, with the exception that:
   

   1. Urdu is written in Devanagari and Hindi is written in Persian.
      
   2. Urdu is written in Devanagari and Hindi is written in Sanskrit.
      
   3. Urdu is written in Persian and Hindi is written in Devanagari.
      
   4. Urdu is written in Persian and Hindi is written in Suprabhāt.
      

10. Which of the following describes words borrowed from Sanskrit?
    

    1. Ardhātatsam
       
    2. Tatsam
       
    3. Tadbhav
       
    4. Videshī
       

ANSWER KEY: d, a, c, a, b, d, a, b, c, a

HISTORY:
The Cold War
The Iron Curtain, The Marshall Plan, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Space Race, The Berlin Wall, The Dissolution of the USSR

LANGUAGE ARTS:
Biographies
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
;
Into the Wild
;
Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
;
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
;
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash
;
The Autobiography of Malcolm X

MATH:
Applied Mathematics
What Is Applied Mathematics?, Computer Science, Scientific Computing, Operations Research, Actuarial Science, Statistics

SCIENCE:
Biomes
Freshwater, Marine, Desert, Forest, Grassland, Tundra

FOREIGN LANGUAGE:
Mayan Languages
Yucatec Maya, Huasteco, Ch’ol, Q’eqchi’, Mam, Poqomchi

THE COLD WAR

The Iron Curtain
The Warsaw Pact of 1955 was a military treaty between the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, and Hungary in which the countries agreed that should any of them be attacked, military aid would be provided by the other countries. The Warsaw Pact was initiated by the Soviet Union as a counter to the formation of NATO. The term
Iron Curtain
was used in reference to this division within Europe, both literally and figuratively. An actual metal fence separated the West from the East in some areas, cutting off all contact.

BIOGRAPHIES

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who was a poor tobacco farmer, died in 1951 at the age of thirty-one from cervical cancer. Though Lacks has been dead for more than sixty years, her cancer cells (which were the first cells to reproduce on their own, known as “immortal” cells) are still alive today, and are considered one of the most important tools that exist in the medical world. Lacks’s cells were removed from her body during a biopsy and cultured, without her permission.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot tells the story of Henrietta’s suffering, the celebrity of her cells, the birth of a multimillion dollar industry, and the Lacks family, who up until twenty years ago, never knew about Henrietta’s cells.

APPLIED MATHEMATICS

What Is Applied Mathematics?
Mathematics can be separated into two categories: pure mathematics and applied mathematics. Pure mathematics is the study of completely abstract math. Applied mathematics, however, uses mathematical techniques in very real and specialized ways and applies math to some sciences (such as physics), engineering, industry, and business. In applied mathematics, mathematical models are used to solve and work with very real problems and applications. Applied mathematics is also used in newer fields such as computer science.

BIOMES

Freshwater
Freshwater biomes consist of ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, and wetlands. The freshwater biome has a low concentration of salt (less than 1 percent usually), and plants and animals that live in these types of locations would not be able to live in bodies of water with higher concentrations of salt. Ponds and lakes are often isolated from larger bodies of water, and have limited diversity in terms of wildlife as a result. Streams and rivers flow in one direction, ending at the ocean. Wetlands are locations with standing water such as marshes, bogs, and swamps. Wetlands support specific types of aquatic plants and have the highest amount of diversity in terms of wildlife.

MAYAN LANGUAGES

Yucatec Maya
Yucatec Maya is spoken by 800,000 people, and it is the most common form of Mayan language spoken by the indigenous people of Mexico (who are mostly found on the Yucatán Peninsula). The Yucatec Maya language is one of only three Mayan languages that features tone, with Uspantek and a dialect of Tzotzil being the other two. Though currently written with the Latin alphabet, Yucatec Maya used Mayan script (a logosyllabic system where logograms represent entire words) until the sixteenth century.

THE COLD WAR