Knowledge is power

21/05/2022

Rugby
Rugby is a popular sport in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and France. In recent years Italy has become a great rugby nation. It competes with England, Wales, Scotland, France, and Ireland at the Six Nations Championship. It’s an annual rugby competition. All these teams are dreaming of Grand Slam. The Grand Slam means to win all the matches of the competition.
But now in addition to the Six Nations Championship, the Rugby World Cup takes place this year. It is the only time Northern hemisphere teams meet teams from the Southern hemisphere in a great competition. Apart from the UK the spirit of rugby is very popular in Australia and New Zealand. That is why the teams of the southern hemisphere are New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. They can also add Argentina which is also good at rugby very well.

Rugby is associated with three main values: respect, team spirit and courage. It can also be said that rugby fans behave very well before, during and after matches. There are no cases of violence in the grandstands. And if you have your favorite rugby team, you can safely go to the stadium, watch the World Cup and support your team.

18/05/2022

How much time do you need to fall in love?
A person can fall in love quickly. As British scientists confirm, it will take 8.2 seconds for a person to fall in love with someone. The scientists explain that a look of 4 seconds is a right proof that a man is impressed and interested. But there is an interesting thing that this rule doesn’t work for women. This look means nothing for them. They can look at a man even much longer without falling in love.
British scientists decided to study it and invite more than one hundred students for an experiment. Then they hid cameras to observe the movements of the students’ eyes. Then students were asked to complete a form.

In the end they get a result that 8.2 seconds is even more than enough to fall in love. To tell the truth this experiment doesn’t seem serious. Indeed to make reliable statistic Результаты it’s necessary to have several thousand cases which should be studied and analyzed. It seems that this question stays in God’s jurisdiction as before. And it cannot be predicted in advance.

18/05/2022

Who doesn’t celebrate Christmas?
Christmas is one of the most popular holidays on the planet. It seems strange but not everybody celebrate such a great holiday. It depends on the religion and the culture of people. So, who does not celebrate this holiday?

Firstly, it’s a religious holiday. Christians commemorate the birth of Christ. So people who are neither Christian nor believers don’t have holiday mood on this day.
Besides, other people refuse to take part in Christmas, because they consider that this holiday became too commercial. It’s true that in December stores are full of Christmas goods. And people spend a lot of money to have a good time with their friends, family and relatives. Most of them are ready to waste money for small useless presents. It is clear that they celebrate Christmas because it’s a family party and a great opportunity to be together.

Nevertheless this cheerful and commercial side of this holiday attracts some countries, for example, China. They have been celebrating Christmas for several years. But this holiday is not in their culture.

And in many countries we can find the same traditions. Families decorate a tree, prepare a holiday meal, and wait for Santa Claus and his gifts. But each country also has its things. In the USA there are garlands of popcorn, and in Sweden there are goats made of straw.

Someone doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but two billion people, nearly every third person in the world, celebrate Christmas. And this year it will be again, and it will be magic.

16/05/2022

How to celebrate Valentine’s Day in the USA
Valentine’s Day, a festival of romantic love and care, is celebrated on the 14th of February. This old festival has taken a great importance in recent years. But Valentine’s Day is not considered as a public holiday in the USA. It means that stores, schools and different organizations work as usual.
People give small gifts or they exchange cards and love letters that express their feelings. The small present can be a bunch of flowers, chocolate, a teddy bear or jewelry and a dinner in a restaurant. It really depends on the people, their tastes, imagination and financial opportunities.
Many restaurants and hotels have special offers on this day. People who have romantic relationships usually book weekend breaks in hotels. Restaurants are busier than usual, because a lot of people are planning to spend an evening with their partners. Valentine’s Day is also popular day for date to make a marriage proposal.
This holiday is unlike of such holidays as Easter, Christmas or New Year, it’s a party that is not celebrated with the family. This holiday is only for two persons. If a married couple is going out, they invite a nanny who takes care of their children.

16/05/2022

Macaroons
What is it a strange word? Macaroon. It seems that it has appeared recently and belongs to these modern words. But it is not true.
The macaroon is a soft cake of rounded shape that people have tasted since the middle Ages. It has from 3 to 5 cm in diameter. The macaroon recipe varies by the cook’s skills. Professionals cook more complicated recipes, but housewives can try to cook light variant of them.
Indeed, the preparation and cooking of macaroons is difficult even for professionals. To make a traditional macaroon, you need almond powder, icing sugar, sugar and egg whites. The amount of almond is equal to the amount of icing sugar.
The macaroon has different flavors and colors. Generally, the pink macaroon is made with strawberry or raspberry. The beige macaroon has vanilla flavor. The brown macaroon is made of chocolate or coffee. The yellow macaroon is made with lemon.
Recently it has been cooked a special macaroon which has two flavors. The ‘body’ and the ‘heart’ are different. For example, pear-orange and cherry-apple macaroons are very popular.

13/05/2022

Ottawa - capital of Canada and seat of Carleton County, southeastern Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa, Gatineau, and Rideau rivers. Its metropolitan area lies astride the Ontario-Quebec border.
The first descriptions of Ottawa's future site were written by the founder of New France, Samuel de Champlain, in 1613. The rivers served as passageways for explorers and traders over the following two centuries. The Napoleonic Wars increased Britain's need for shipbuilding timber, and the Ottawa Valley offered just such resources. In 1800 an American, Philemon Wright, had begun timbering across the Ottawa River in what became the city of Hull. During the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States, the Rideau provided the British with a safe shipping route from the Ottawa River to Kingston, on Lake Ontario, thus spurring settlement of Ottawa. It was hastened by the arrival in 1826 of Lt. Col. John By of the Royal Engineers to work on canalizing the river, and the town became Bytown.
Ottawa might still be a modest city had not political quarrels between Quebec city and Toronto and between Montreal and Kingston induced leaders to call upon Queen Victoria to designate a capital for United Canada. In 1855 Bytown was incorporated and rechristened Ottawa after the Indian tribe. It became the fastest growing metropolis in eastern Canada, a development due largely to the presence of the national government. In 1937 Prime Minister William L. Mackenzie King brought the architect Jacques Grйber from France to begin the redevelopment of the national capital district.
The fur trade and lumbering have diminished in importance, and industry now employs only a small fraction of the labour force. The federal government is the major employer. Many commercial and financial associations from around the country as well as embassies and trade associations are also located there.
Ottawa is served by both of Canada's major railroads and several airlines. There is bus service throughout the city. Navigation on the Ottawa and Rideau rivers, except for pleasure craft, is a thing of the past.
The major cultural centres remain the city's three universities. The University of Ottawa and St. Paul University are bilingual institutions, whereas instruction at Carleton University is entirely in English. A large community college, Algonquin, provides technical training. Ottawa also houses the National Arts Centre, which includes an opera house and two theatres, the National Library and Public Archives Building, the National Museum of Science and Technology, and the National Gallery of Canada. Pop. (1991) city, 313 987; Ottawa-Hull metropolitan area, 920 857.

11/05/2022

Sydney city
Сity, capital of the state of New South Wales, Australia. Located on Australia's southeastern coast, Sydney is a major port in the South Pacific and is noted for its beautiful harbour. The city was established as a penal colony in the late 18th century and had become a major trading centre even before the first pioneers pushed inland. It is now the largest metropolitan area in Australia.
A brief treatment of Sydney follows. For full treatment, see Sydney.
The metropolitan area of Sydney stretches from the Blue Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east and from the Hawkesbury River in the north to south of Botany Bay. The city itself was built on the low hills surrounding the harbour.
Sydney's climate is temperate, with a mean temperature in February, the warmest month, of 72 F (22 C); the coolest month, July, averages 54 F (12 C). Rainfall averages 45 inches (1,140 mm) annually, and much of it occurs during the summer months.
About one-third of Sydney's workforce is engaged in manufacturing. No single industry predominates, though oil refining has grown in importance. The government sector is also economically important, as is the port. A second port has been developed in Botany Bay.
Sydney is widely known both for its water sports and recreational facilities and for its cultural life. The universities of Sydney and New South Wales are located there, as is Macquarie University. The world-renowned Sydney Opera House, set on a promontory southeast of the Harbour Bridge, is a major centre for the performing arts, with theatres and recording, concert, and exhibition halls. It is the home of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Opera, dance and theatre companies, and a library.
Rapid development of suburban Sydney and the absence of major highways that bypass the city have caused a persistent transport problem that is only partially mitigated by commuter ferry boats, an underground railway, and extensive metropolitan bus service. Sydney (Kingsford Smith) Airport is on the northern shore of Botany Bay. Area city, 5 square miles (13 square km); metropolitan area, 4,790 square miles (12,407 square km). Pop. (1986) city, 86,311; (1991) city, 3,097,956; (1994 est.) metropolitan area, 3,738,500.

11/05/2022

In cosmology, the steady state theory is a model developed in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and others as an alternative to the Big Bang theory. Although the model had a large number of supporters among cosmologists in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of supporters decreased markedly in the late 1960s and today it is considered a non-standard cosmology. It is also the basis for another theory known as the quasi-steady state theory which postulates a lot of little big bangs occurring over time.

The steady state theory was developed as a result of theoretical calculations that showed that a static universe was impossible under general relativity and observations by Edwin Hubble that the universe was expanding. The steady state theory asserts that although the universe is expanding, it nevertheless does not change its look over time. For this to work, new matter must be formed to keep the density equal over time.

Because only very little matter needs to be formed, roughly a few hundred atoms of hydrogen in the Milky Way Galaxy each year, it is not a problem of the theory that the forming of matter is not observed directly. Despite violating conservation of mass, the steady state theory had a number of attractive features. Most notably, the theory removes the need for the universe to have a beginning.

Problems with the steady-state theory began to emerge in the late 1960s, when observations apparently supported the idea that the universe was in fact changing: quasars and radio galaxies were found only at large distances (i.e., redshift, and thus, because of the finiteness of the speed of light, in the past) not in closer galaxies. Halton Arp, also since the 1960s, has been taking a different view of the data, claiming that evidence can also point to quasars existing as close as the local Virgo cluster.

For most cosmologists, the refutation of the steady-state theory came with the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965, which was predicted by the big bang theory. Within the steady state theory this background radiation is the result of light from ancient stars which has been scattered by galactic dust. However, this explanation has been unconvincing to most cosmologists as the cosmic microwave background is very smooth, making it difficult to explain how it arose from point sources, and the microwave background shows no evidence of features such as polarization which are normally associated with scattering. Furthermore, its spectrum is so close to that of an ideal black body that it could hardly be formed by the superposition of contributions from dust clumps at different temperatures as well as at different redshifts.

As of 2005, the big bang theory is the one that the majority of astronomers consider the best approximation to describing the origin of the universe. In most astrophysical publications, the big bang is implicitly accepted and is used as the basis of more complete theories. At the same time, after the unexpected observation of an accelerating universe in the late-1990s, there were efforts to develop quasi-steady state theories, in which there is not a single big bang but rather multiple big bangs over time which create matter.

07/05/2022

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is a novel that was the last major work of fiction to be written by Ernest Hemingway and published in his lifetime. It is considered to be one of his most famous works and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 and was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954.

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a battle between an old, experienced Cuban fisherman and a large marlin. The novel opens with the explanation that the fisherman, who is named Santiago, has gone 84 days without catching a fish. In fact, he is so unlucky that his young apprentice, Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with the old man and been ordered to fish with more successful fishermen. Still dedicated to the old man, however, the boy visits Santiago’s shack each night. On the eighty-fifth day, Santiago sets out alone, taking his skiff far onto the Gulf Stream. He sets his lines and, by noon of the first day, a big fish that he is sure is a marlin takes his bait. After a long struggle with the fish Santiago manages to strap the marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the market and how many people he will feed. While Santiago sails back to the shore, sharks are attracted to the trail of blood left by the marlin in the water. Despite his efforts to ward off the sharks, they have almost devoured the marlin’s entire carcass, leaving a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep. The next day, a group of fishermen gather around the boat where the fish’s skeleton is still attached. Manolin, worried during the old man’s endeavor, cries upon finding him safe asleep. The boy brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth – of lions on an African beach. The old man feels very unwell and also coughs up blood a few times towards the end of the story. He doesn’t tell the boy.

The novel has received so much praise and is considered to be one of the best novels in American literature. Santiago fights the creatures of the sea and some readers think that the story is about man’s battle against the natural world. However, the novel can be viewed as the story of man’s place in relation to nature. In the story, Santiago and the marlin show similar qualities of pride, honor, and bravery, and both are subject to the same eternal natural law – they must kill or be killed. Santiago himself says:

“man is not made for defeat . . . [a] man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

07/05/2022

07/05/2022