A Ton of Crap (128 page)

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

HISTORY:
War on Terror
9/11, The War on Terror, War in Afghanistan, War in Iraq, Fighting in Pakistan, Death of Osama bin Laden

LANGUAGE ARTS:
Propaganda Techniques
Bandwagon, Glittering Generalities, Plain Folks, Transfer, Assertion, Card Stacking

MATH:
Infinity
The Symbol, Aristotle, Galileo’s Paradox, Cantor’s Set Theory, Finitism, Real Analysis

SCIENCE:
DNA
What Is DNA?, Structure, Protein Synthesis, Replication, Discovery of DNA, Uses of DNA

FOREIGN LANGUAGE:
Extinct Languages
Dalmatian, Ubykh, Tsetsaut, Eyak, Polabian, Apalachee

WAR ON TERROR

9/11
On September 11, 2001, a series of attacks would change the course of United States history. Four commercial passenger jet airliners were hijacked by nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists. Two of the planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Within two hours, both of the towers collapsed (killing 2,752 people, including 343 firefighters and 60 police officers). The third plane crashed into the Pentagon (killing 184 people). After hearing about the other two attacks, passengers and crew aboard the fourth flight attempted to retake the plane, and the plane crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania (killing all forty-four people on board). In 2004, Osama bin Laden took responsibility for the attacks.

PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES

Bandwagon
One of the most common forms of propaganda that appears during both times of war and peace is known as bandwagon. Bandwagon plays a very important role in modern-day advertising. Bandwagon is the idea that a person should do something or join in because everyone else is also doing it. Essentially, what bandwagon does is create a winning side and a losing side, and you know when something is winning because there are more people on that side. In modern advertising, a new form of bandwagon has appeared. This new bandwagon says something along the lines of everyone else is doing something, and if you don’t, you will miss out.

INFINITY

The Symbol
The symbol for infinity, ∞, is known as a lemniscate. This comes from the Latin word
lemniscus
, which means “ribbon.” In John Wallis’s
De Sectionibus Conicis
of 1655, the symbol is used for the very first time. It is unknown why Wallis chose the symbol. Some believe that it was derived from the Roman numeral for the number 1,000. This number was actually derived from the Etruscan numeral and appeared as CI (this was also used at the time to mean “many”). Others believe that the symbol came from the last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega (ω).

DNA

What Is DNA?
Deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is the genetic makeup of each cell in our body, and every characteristic of any living organism and most viruses. Almost every single cell in the body has the same DNA. The DNA is located inside of the nucleus of the cell (called nuclear DNA), though some DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (which is known as mDNA or mitochondrial DNA). Information is stored in the DNA as a code of four chemical bases. The bases are guanine (G), adenine (A), thymine (T), and cytosine (C). There are around 3 billion bases in human DNA. Of those bases, 99 percent are the same in every human.

EXTINCT LANGUAGES

Dalmatian
The Dalmatian language was a Romance language spoken in Croatia. The words stemmed from Latin, and the Latin alphabet was used, although it also featured diacritical marks. The Dalmatian language had two dialects. The dialect of the north was known as Vegliotian, and the dialect found in the south was known as Ragusan. As the Slavic people came to the land, the language started to fade away. In 1898, the last speaker of Dalmatian died. There still exist some Dalmatian words in modern-day Croatian, such as the words for
onion
and
rainwater reservoir
.

WAR ON TERROR