A Ton of Crap (20 page)

Lasting Effects of the Magna Carta
The Magna Carta greatly influenced the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights during the writing of these documents. The third clause from the Magna Carta, which stated accused persons shall not be imprisoned until found guilty by their peers is perhaps the most obvious influence, as it appears in the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Also, the first clause included the principle of the separation of church and state.

READING

Reading Disorders
Reading disorders are the most common forms of learning disabilities. Developmental reading disorder, or dyslexia, is a learning disability that impairs the ability to comprehend accurately in areas such as reading, spelling, and speaking. Dyslexia does not interfere with the ability to think and understand ideas or affect the intelligence of a person. Many common symptoms of dyslexia are having difficulty rhyming, having difficulty recognizing written words, and difficulty determining what a simple sentence means.

SCIENTIFIC NOTATION

Engineering Notation
Engineering notation is a form of scientific notation used in civil and mechanical engineering. It is slightly different than scientific notation. In engineering notation, the powers of ten are restricted to be only multiples of three. This is because they are actually powers of a thousand, so instead of writing 1,0002, it looks like 106.

THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM

Other Organs
The liver, gallbladder, and pancreas also play a key role in the digestive system. These organs send digestive juices to the small intestine. The pancreas is responsible for sending juices that digest protein and fat. Bile, a substance created by the liver but stored in the gallbladder, absorbs fat in the bloodstream. The nutrient-rich blood is then sent to the liver, where waste is filtered out.

POLISH

Useful Polish Phrases
Here are some helpful phrases to use when traveling in Poland:

Good morning.
Dzień dobry.

Good evening.
Dobry wieczór.

Hello.
Cześć.

Goodbye.
Do widzenia
(formal)
Do zobaczenia / Narazie! Cześć!
(informal)

I don’t understand.
Nie rozumiem.

I speak English.
Mówię po angielsku.

Thank you.
Dzięki / Dziękuję / Serdecznie dziękuję.

Where is the toilet?
Gdzie jest toaleta?

How much is it?
Ile to kosztuje?/Po ile to jest?

1. What did Clause 61 do?
   

   1. Made it so that no free man shall be imprisoned or stripped of his rights without lawful judgment by his peers
      
   2. Allowed London and all of the other cities, towns, ports, and boroughs to enjoy their ancient customs and liberties
      
   3. Established the creation of a committee composed of twenty-five barons who would have the power to overcome the rule of the king at any time
      
   4. Guaranteed liberties of the English Church
      

2. The Magna Carta had a great influence in the creation of:
   

   1. The Bill of Rights
      
   2. The U.S. Constitution
      
   3. The Declaration of Independence
      
   4. All of the above
      

3. Methods used for speed reading include:
   

   1. Subvocalized reading
      
   2. Meta guiding
      
   3. Skimming
      
   4. B and C
      

4. What is the difference between lexical and sublexical reading?
   

   1. Lexical involves components of sound, whereas sublexical involves learning the sounds of each symbol.
      
   2. Lexical is based on phonics and sublexical is not.
      
   3. Sublexical uses Rapid Automatized Naming and lexical uses phonics.
      
   4. Lexical uses skimming and sublexical doesn’t.
      

5. What is 400 in scientific notation?
   

   1. 40 × 100
      
   2. 4 × 10-2
      
   3. 4 × 102
      
   4. 40 × 102
      

6. What is 6.4 × 10-3 in decimal
   notation?
   

   1. 6400
      
   2. -6400
      
   3. 0.0064
      
   4. 0.064
      

7. What is a bolus?
   

   1. The gastric juices in the stomach
      
   2. The enzymes in the saliva
      
   3. The waste product created in the liver
      
   4. Food that has been broken down into
      a mushy substance and ready to be
      swallowed
      

8. One of the roles of the gastric juices in the stomach is to:
   

   1. Kill any bacteria in the food
      
   2. Absorb nutrients
      
   3. Turn the food into bile
      
   4. Absorb bile
      

9. What type of language is Polish?
   

   1. A Romance Language
      
   2. A West Slavonic Language
      
   3. An East Slavonic Language
      
   4. A North Slavonic Language
      

10. How do you say “Where is the
    toilet?” in Polish?
    

    1. Gdzie jest toaleta?
       
    2. Po ile to jest?
       
    3. Ile to kosztuje?
       
    4. None of the above
       

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

HISTORY:
The Reformation
Power of the Church, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, The Reformation Spreads Throughout the Land,
John Calvin, The Day of Placards, The Counter-Reformation

LANGUAGE ARTS:
Writing
Logographies, Syllabaries, Left-Handedness, Right-Handedness, Cross-Dominance, Ambidexterity

MATH:
Operations
Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Squaring and the Square Root, Factorials

SCIENCE:
Tissues
What Is Tissue?, Epithelial Tissue, Connective Tissue, Muscle Tissue, Nervous Tissue, Organs

FOREIGN LANGUAGE:
Russian
The Origins, Cyrillic, Peter the Great Reforms the Language, A Need to Change the Language, The Soviet Union’s Spelling Reform of 1918, Useful Russian Phrases

THE REFORMATION

Power of the Church
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, Roman Catholicism was the only religion in Western Europe. The Church believed that it alone had the power to interpret the Bible. However, with the Renaissance and the invention of the printing press, people started believing the Church had too much control. In the fourteenth century, a man named John Wycliffe became the first to translate the Bible from Latin into English. This idea was soon picked up by Jan Hus of Bohemia, who began preaching his own sermons.

WRITING

Logographies
Today, the main logographic systems of writing are found in Chinese and Japanese languages. Logograms are written characters or symbols that represent a word. One major disadvantage to a system like this is the amount of characters one has to know and how long it would take to learn so many words. For this reason, there are no languages that are fully logographic, and they all have some phonetic components.

OPERATIONS

Addition
Addition is literally the process of adding, or combining, one thing to another thing. So in the problem 3 + 6, you are adding or combining the two numbers together, leaving you with an end result of 9. The plus sign (+) is actually derived from an abbreviation of the Latin word
et
, which means “and.” The plus sign first appeared in print in 1489 in Johannes Widmann’s
Mercantile Arithmetic,
or
Behende und hubsche Rechenung auff allen Kauffmanschafft
.

TISSUES

What Is Tissue?
In the body, specific cells group together to perform a certain specialized function, creating tissue. When many tissues group together to carry out a specific function, it becomes an organ. In animals, there are four types of tissue found in the body: epithelial tissue, connective tissue, muscle tissue, and nervous tissue.

RUSSIAN

The Origins
In the sixth century, the Slav people migrated from Old Poland and gradually occupied the Balkans. By the tenth century, Western, Southern, and Eastern Slavonic had emerged as three similar, yet distinct, language groups. Eastern Slavonic is a direct ancestor of what would become Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian. The languages shared many grammatical rules, and were able to share one written language (and only a written language), known as Old Slavonic.

THE REFORMATION

Martin Luther’s 95 Theses
In 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, became fed up with the Church’s policies of selling indulgences and misleading people. Luther wrote a series of 95 theses against the practices of the Church (such as indulgences), as well as new ideas for a better religion (such as rejecting the authority of the pope). Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door of the church at Wittenberg.