Aarushhh/wikipedia-simple-splitted huggingface dataset:
ASL is also used (sometimes with other sign languages) in the Philippines, Singapore, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Mauritania, Kenya, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe. Like other sign languages, its grammar is different from any spoken language.

ASL includes fingerspelling.  Fingerspelling is a way to show the written letter.  ASL uses one hand to show the English alphabet, although there are ways to show alphabets from other languages.  Names of people and places can be fingerspelled. Fingerspelling is also used for words that have no sign, or for when people are confused about what a used sign means.
Statistics 
Counting the number of ASL speakers is difficult because ASL users have never been counted by the American census. ASL use in the general American population has not been directly measured. The ultimate source for current estimates of the number of ASL users in the United States is a report for the National Census of the Deaf Population (NCDP) by Schein and Delk (1974). Based on a 1972 survey of the NCDP, Schein and Delk provided estimates consistent with a signing population between 250,000 and 500,000. The survey did not distinguish between ASL and other forms of signing.

Incorrect figures are sometimes cited for the population of ASL speakers in the United States based on misunderstandings of statistics. Demographics of the deaf population have been confused with those of ASL use. This accounts for cited estimations which are greater than 500,000. Such mistaken estimations can reach as high as 15,000,000.
ASL is sometimes incorrectly cited as the third- or fourth-most-spoken language in the United States. These figures misquote Schein and Delk (1974), who said ASL speakers constituted the third-largest population requiring an interpreter in court.

References

Bibliography

Other websites 
  ASL browser(See lots of signs in American Sign Language)
 ASLPro.com Home

Sign languages
A sign language is a way of communicating by using the hands and other parts of the body. It should not be confused with body language. Sign languages are an important way for deaf people to communicate. Deaf people often use them instead of spoken languages. Spoken languages use sounds from the mouth and are understood with the ears. Sign languages use hands and are understood with the eyes. Deaf people can use sign languages more easily than spoken languages.

Language learning and use
Deaf people sometimes learn a sign language from their family, especially if their parents are deaf. But, most deaf children have hearing parents, so they learn a sign language from other deaf people. They may meet other deaf people at school or in the streets. Hearing people may learn to sign directly from deaf people. Or, they may learn a sign language by going to signing classes or by studying a sign language workbook, which can come with an interactive DVD.
Sometimes deaf people do use a spoken language, especially when talking with hearing people. Sometimes hearing people use a sign language with each other, rather than speaking. But, deaf people tend to use sign languages, and hearing people tend to use spoken languages.

Some deaf people can also understand spoken words by looking at a speaker's lips. This is known as lip-reading. It is hard to learn, and few people do it well. Sometimes signing and lip-reading are combined, especially when deaf and hearing people are talking to each other.
History
Sign languages have always existed in deaf communities. In ancient texts we see authors commenting about deaf people and sign language. In the western world, the first studies dedicated to sign languages date from the 17th century. In 1620, in Spain, the priest Juan Pablo Bonnet published a text about teaching deaf people to speak, using gestures as a tool. The language of signs created by Bonet was used by Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Épée, to create a fingerspelling alphabet in the 18th century. This alphabet has changed very little since then, and is used with sign languages in many countries.
The sign alphabet created by Charles-Michel de l'Épée, however, is not the origin of French Sign Language, the sign language that has influenced many other sign languages around the world. Even before Charles-Michel de l'Épée started teaching deaf people, they already used Old French Sign Language, and could read and write in French. This was a great advance, because it proved that deaf people could be educated and didn’t needed speech to think and learn.

Different sign languages
Sign languages are not universal. That means there is not one single sign language for all deaf people around the world. There are many different sign languages. Each deaf community can develop its own sign language. Usually there is a different sign language in each country. Linguists have identified at least 137 different sign languages.

Here are some well-known sign languages:
This list could use more variety. It doesn't need to list every language. However, you can help Wikipedia by adding languages that aren't related to the ones already here.
 American Sign Language (ASL)
 Auslan (Australian Sign Language)
 Austrian Sign Language
 British Sign Language (BSL)
 Indo-Pakistani Sign Language
  (JSL or NS)
 Mexican Sign Language (Spanish: Lengua de señas mexicana or LSM)
 Nicaraguan sign language
 New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL)
 Quebec Sign Language (French: Langue des signes québécoise, or LSQ)
 Turkish Sign Language (TSL)
Grammar of sign languages
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, signing is "a language that uses a system of manual, facial, and other body movements as the means of communication, especially among deaf people." Sign languages have their own grammar rules: syntax, morphology, phonology and semantics. Sign languages are not simply mime. They are not gestures strung together without any rules. Sign languages are real languages.

(People sometimes also use the term "sign language" to talk about a "method of communication, as between speakers of different languages, that uses hand movements and other gestures." This article is about the first use of the term "sign language". It is talking about a real language that must be learned, not just a set of simple gestures that anyone can dream up to communicate.)
A sign language is not a copy of a spoken language. For example, American Sign Language (ASL) and British Sign Language (BSL) are not copies of English. They are different from each other, even though they are both used in countries that speak English. Sometimes sign languages may copy a few elements from a spoken language, but usually they are very different. For example, sign languages often use different locations in space around the signer to represent people or objects that are being talked about. These locations are used like pronouns in spoken languages.

The main difference between sign languages and spoken languages is that sign languages use hand and body movements to form signs while spoken languages use sounds to form words. Really, each sign in a sign language is like a word in a spoken language. Both types of languages use grammar rules to combine words/signs into sentences. That's what makes them languages, and why both types of languages are different from mime or simple gestures.
Spoken words are made up of smaller pieces: individual sounds like "p" or "o". In the same way, signs are made up of smaller pieces: handshapes, movements and locations of the hands, facial expressions and other body movements. These pieces are used in different combinations to make the signs in the language Some signs are made with only one hand, and others are made with both hands. Some signs include movements of the mouth or other parts of the body; without those other movements, the sign is not correct. Other body movements are also important in the grammar. For example, in many sign languages, raised eyebrows indicate a question that has a "yes" or "no" answer.

The grammar rules of different sign languages are similar to each other, but they aren't the same. There is not a universal grammar for sign languages; each sign language has its own grammar. For example, sign languages use different handshapes to form signs; each sign language has its own set of handshapes.
Sometimes a sign looks like the object or action it represents, but this is not always true. For many signs, a person just has to learn the meaning, like words in a spoken language. It's not easy to guess the meaning from what the sign looks like. This is another thing that makes sign languages different from mime; in mime, the meaning of a gesture is obvious, it doesn't have to be learned. However, signs aren't totally arbitrary either. Once a person knows the meaning of a sign, the form of the sign can often help remember the meaning.

Fingerspelling
Fingerspelling

Besides normal signs, many sign languages use fingerspelling. Fingerspelling is also known as a "hand alphabet" or "dactylology". In fingerspelling, each letter in the alphabet of a spoken language has its own sign. Fingerspelling is a tool. People use it to spell names, acronyms and other words from spoken languages. Sometimes people do this when there is not a sign yet. Sometimes people use a fingerspelled word even when there is a normal sign for the same meaning. For example, when talking about a person, a signer might spell their name using fingerspelling. Or, they may use a "name-sign"—a special sign for that person.
Writing sign languages
There is not any official way of writing signs. Some deaf and hearing people think there should be. Some have invented different ways of writing sign languages. Here are some of them.
 Stokoe notation was invented by William Stokoe. He did it for his 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language. People have used it for a few other languages too. Few people use it now.
 The Hamburg Notation System (HamNoSys) is a technical system. Linguists use it for research on sign languages. Most of these linguists are in Europe.
 Sign Language International Phonetic Alphabet (SLIPA) is another technical system. It is intended for research.
 SignWriting was developed by Valerie Sutton starting in 1974. People can use it for ordinary day-to-day use. It works for many different sign languages.
 si5s is also intended for ordinary day-to-day use. It is a system for ASL.
 ASL-phabet is a system designed by Sam Supalla for ASL. He has used it in deaf schools.
Other users of sign language don’t think writing signs is something useful. Usually, deaf people just write the spoken language in their country. They don't try to write the sign language.

Sign languages in deaf culture
Deaf people have their own culture. It is similar to the culture of hearing people around them, but there are important differences. Deaf people have different experiences from hearing people. This makes their culture different.

Sign language is the most important part of deaf culture. Through a sign language deaf people can create a social and cultural identity for themselves. They can communicate naturally with each other. The shared sign language helps hold their deaf community together. Hearing people use spoken languages to do the same things.

Some children are born deaf. Others lose their hearing because of illness when they are very young. These children often learn how to sign and become a part of the deaf community and deaf culture.
However, some people who are physically deaf do not participate in deaf community and deaf culture. Some people lose their hearing later in life. These people usually continue to interact with hearing people using a spoken language. They do not learn to sign. They do not make friends with deaf people who sign. They depend on hearing aids, lip-reading, or writing notes to communicate with their hearing friends.

Some deaf children learn to speak and lip-read a spoken language. This is a difficult skill, but some children succeed. Also, some may have surgery to get a cochlear implant. A cochlear implant helps some deaf children hear better. It is not the same as normal hearing, but it can help them learn to speak. These deaf people can interact with hearing people using a spoken language.

The term "deaf culture" usually refers only to the culture of deaf people who sign.

Related pages 
 American Sign Language (ASL)
 VRS Video Relay Service
 Deaf

Notes

Other websites
Other websites 

 ASL browser(See lots of signs in American Sign Language)
 British Sign Language Learn more about British Sign Language.
 British Sign Online Online British Sign Language course.
 ASLPro.com Home

Disability
 
Language-related lists
Saint-Dié-des-Vosges is a city in the northeast of France, in Lorraine.

Demography 
Now about 23,000 people live there.

Tourism 
Surrounded by the Vosges mountains, it is a popular resort for tourists.
 Cathedral
 Museum Pierre-Noël

Events 
The city is famous for the International Festival of Geography, which takes place every autumn.

Higher education 

Electronics, computer science, graphic design and communication are studied at the University Institute of Technology.
 
In French it is called "IUT" (Institut universitaire de technologie).

People of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges 
 Jules Ferry
 Yvan Goll

Other websites 
 Saint-Dié-des-Vosges website
 Institut universitaire de technologie 

Communes in Vosges
Subprefectures in France
Rhodesian Ridgeback is a breed of dog. 

It has a red-brown coat of fur on its body and a line of hair down its back which is different from the rest of hair on its body. They are sometimes called The African Lion Dog, because they were used by hunters in Africa to find and confuse lions while the hunter shot the lion.

References

Other websites 
 Rhodesian Ridgeback and other dog breeds
 Rhodesian Ridgeback Startpage.

Dog breeds
FCI breeds
A glove is a piece of clothing that covers a hand. There are many different kinds of gloves. Gloves are made of many different fabrics and materials, and gloves are used in many ways.

Gloves worn for protection 
People wear thick gloves, usually made of wool or fabric, to keep their hands warm in cold weather. They wear thin gloves (usually made of rubber or plastic) to keep their hands clean. People also wear thin gloves made of rubber or plastic to keep things they touch clean. Some workers wear gloves made of heavy rubber to protect their hands from chemicals. A mitten is a glove which has a separate place for the thumb, but the other four fingers are together. There are also mittens, which are very similar to gloves. Gloves and mittens are usually used to protect people from cold, and chemicals. People use latex gloves during Earth day to clean up.
Gloves worn for fashion 
There are also gloves that are worn for fashion, because they look good. These type of gloves are made from leather, fur, or different fabrics.

Gloves worn in sport 
Gloves are worn in sports, the most common reason being for extra grip for the competitors hands. Like in golf, baseball and goalkeepers in soccer.

Mittens 
The word is used for certain kinds of usually knitted gloves. Some don't have separate finger pieces, and are made for children. Others have separate finger pieces without tips, so the wearer can use his fingers for delicate work, and keep his hands warm at the same time. some are fingerless gloves .
Sky High is a 2005 movie from Walt Disney Pictures, starring Kurt Russell.

Plot
This movie is about superheroes.  Will Stronghold has two superhero parents.  His dad, Steve, is The Commander, who is very strong.  His mother, Josie, is Jetstream, who can fly.  Will is expected to have great powers of his own, but he finds that he does not have any.  He enters his school, Sky High, where the students are sorted into "hero" and "sidekick."  Will is given the position of a sidekick and takes different classes than the hero track.  He later tells his dad about this, who is not happy that his son will not be like him.
At school, Will also has an enemy named Warren Peace.  The Commander put Warren's father away for three life terms.  During a lunch, Warren gets very mad at Will and starts throwing fireballs, which is his superpower.  Will dives under a bench.  It is here his power comes to him; super strength, like his dad.  He manages to defeat Warren and both are put in a time out room where their powers do not work.  His mother is not happy, but his dad is very happy that Will has powers.  Steve shows Will the hiding place where the Stronghold family does all of their activities.
Will's new powers put him up in the hero track, where he is partnered with a girl named Gwen Grayson.  Will soon falls for Gwen and does not keep up with the friends he made as a sidekick.  Will has an old friend named Layla, whose power is to grow plants.  Will gets more popular.  Gwen gets him to invite all the popular kids for a party.  When Layla comes over to tell Will that she loves him, Gwen stops her and tells her that Will has new friends.  Layla is upset.  When Will learns about it, he breaks off the date.  He was going to go to the prom with Gwen, but now decides to stay home.
His parents go to the prom instead.  There was going to be a ceremony to honor the best superhero of all time.  During the prom, however, it is revealed that Gwen is really a villain named Royal Pain.  The Commander thought he killed her off, but when he zapped her, she simply became a baby instead.  The years passed and she grew into another teenager.  Royal Pain puts on her suit and uses her weapon to make everyone become babies.

Will comes on down to the school.  He is very sorry for how he acted as a hero and tells his sidekick friends that he needs all of their help to beat Royal Pain.  Lash and Speed, two bullies on Royal Pain's side, are knocked out.  Ethan tricks Lash and stuffs his head down the toliet.  Then he becomes a puddle of ooze, which causes Speed to slip.  Warren, now on Will's side, throws fireballs to knock Speed down.
Magenta, whose power is to become a rat, climbs into the system and tries to disable it, otherwise the school will fall from orbit and everyone will die.  Penny, a cheerleader who can make multiple copies of herself, surrounds Layla.  Layla does not want to fight, but when they hit her, she uses her power to make all the plants come out and bind the cheerleaders down.

Will finds Royal Pain outside.  She has loaded all the babies onto the bus and will retrain them to be bad people.  He tells her to put his father down.  They fight.  Will is winning when Layla bursts in, distracting Will.  Royal Pain manages to throw Will out of the window.  All seems lost when Will appears in the window – he too has Josie's power of flying.  He then kicks Royal Pain out of the window.  The school begins to fall down.  Will goes outside and uses his power to try to keep the school from hitting the ground.  Magneta cuts the wire in time and saves the school from crashing into the ground.
Steve and Josie give their award to all of the sidekicks that helped out.  All of the villains re put into the time-out room. As Will and Layla become a couple, the final narration states that Ron Wilson became a superhero after falling into a vat of toxic waste, Will and Warren became best friends and Sue and her henchmen are now Will's archenemies.

Other websites 

Disney's official Sky High site
Cast
 Michael Angarano as William "Will" Theodore Stronghold, a freshman at Sky High, whose parents are the two most famous superheroes — Commander and Jetstream — as well as Maxville's top real estate agents in their secret identities. His super strength, inherited from his father, and his ability to fly, inherited from his mother, start as inactive and gradually manifest over the film.
 Danielle Panabaker as Layla Williams, Will's childhood best friend and eventual love interest/girlfriend, who is a pacifist vegetarian and is able to animate and control plant life. Her mother's abilities are said to allow her to talk to animals and her father is a normal human.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Gwendolyn "Gwen" Grayson / Royal Pain (suit actress) / Susan "Sue" Tenny, a senior at Sky High whom Will, along with everyone else, falls in love with. Her power is technopathy. Winstead said of her role, "I bounced around. I was either the hero of the sidekicks or the sidekick to the heroes." When she attended Sky High the first time, no one understood her class of powers and she was slated as a sidekick and a weirdo, eventually turning into a supervillain. An accident with the "Pacifier" de-aged her during a battle with The Commander.
 Patrick Warburton provides the voice of Gwen in her Royal Pain suit. Winstead also serves as the suit actress of Gwen in her Royal Pain suit.
Steven Strait as Warren Peace, the son of an unnamed superheroine and a supervillain known as Baron Battle who is in jail with four life sentences. He is pyrokinetic. Warren is a high school outcast who tries to lead a decent life, but is often misunderstood due to being a son of a felonious father. His name is a pun of the novel, War and Peace. 
 Dee Jay Daniels as Ethan Bank, a sidekick and one of Will's friends who can melt into a fluid (which earned him the nickname "Popsicle").
 Kelly Vitz as Magenta "Maj" Lewis, one of Will's friends who shapeshifts into a guinea pig with purple highlights and streaks in her fur. 
 Nicholas Braun as Zachary "Zach" Braun / Zack Attack, Will's childhood friend who has the latent ability to glow in the dark.
 Malika Haqq and Khadijah Haqq as Penny Lent, Gwen's best friend who duplicates herself and is naturally athletic.
 Jake Sandvig as Lash, a skinny bully at Sky High who has elasticity.
Will Harris as Speed, an overweight bully at Sky High who can run at an extremely high speed.
 Lynda Carter as Principal Powers, the principal of Sky High who has the power to change into a luminous energy form resembling a comet and back at will. Her catchphrase is "Comets away". 
 Bruce Campbell as Tommy Boomowski / Coach Boomer / Sonic Boom, the gym teacher at Sky High who has his ability to release sonic waves from his vocal cords which can be listed as sonic screaming. His real name is listed as Tommy Boomowski in the Commander's Sky High Yearbook. Coach Boomer's job is to sort the superheroes from the sidekicks and oversee the civilian rescue exercise.
Kevin Heffernan as Ron Wilson, Sky High's good-hearted bus driver. He is the offspring of two super-powered parents, just like Will Stronghold is the offspring of the Commander and Jetstream, but does not have any powers. He feels a great sense of pride in driving the "superheroes of tomorrow" to school. It is revealed at the end of the film that he fell into a vat of toxic waste, gaining superpowers of his own.
 Kurt Russell as Steve Stronghold / The Commander, Will's father who is one of the world's strongest superheroes, displaying superhuman strength and invulnerability, and is a successful businessman in his secret identity. In a deleted scene, it is revealed that Steve was an investigative reporter who seeks to change his career before becoming a real estate agent.
 Kelly Preston as Josie DeMarco-Stronghold / Jetstream, Will's mother and a successful real estate agent. As Jetstream, she uses the power of supersonic flight; she is also touted as being an expert in hand-to-hand combat.
Cloris Leachman as Nurse Spex, a kind and eccentric elderly lady that serves as Sky High's single known school nurse, with the ability of x-ray vision. She is the one who tells Will that not everybody gets powers even if they are the child of two superheroes.
 Jim Rash as Mr. Grayson / Stitches, Royal Pain's bumbling cackling sidekick. He raised her as his daughter after she was turned into a baby by the "Pacifier".
 Dave Foley as Jonathan Boy / All-American Boy, The Commander's old sidekick who works as Hero Support teacher at Sky High.
 Kevin McDonald as Professor Medulla, The Mad Science teacher with a hyper-advanced (and oversized) brain, which grants him advanced intelligence, creativity and a multitude of genius-level skills.
 Kim Rhodes as Professor Jeannie Elast / Elastic Girl, a girl who has the talent to twist her body into anything she wants. Her character was never shown in the final cut of the film.
Tom Kenny and Jill Talley as Mr. and Mrs. Chester Timmerman, a couple who witnesses Will prevent Sky High from falling on their new home.
 Loren Berman as Larry, a nerdy boy who can turn into a rock monster.
 Dustin Ingram as Carbon Copy Kid, a boy that can make himself look like anyone.
 Nicole Malgarini as Freeze Girl, a girl with cryokinetic powers.
References

2000s superhero movies
2005 movies
American family movies
American superhero movies
Disney movies
The main character Lloyd Irving and his friends, Genis Sage and Colette Brunel, are sent away from the town where Lloyd lived. Genis' sister Raine and the mercenary Kratos join them. While traveling, Colette begins to change into an angel. Lloyd learns that she is in charge of saving the world. Two groups of people want her to stop. They are the Desians, bad guys that enslave humans, and Sheena, a woman that wants to kill Colette. Sheena and Colette save each other from the Desians and become friends. Eventually, they get ready to save the world. Kratos betrays Colette and the others to Cruxis, the angels who control the Desians. Lloyd and the others manage to escape. They go to a different world called Tethe'alla.  There, they make three new friends called Zelos, Presea, and Regal. Kratos still wants to find them and the Cruxis leader, Mithos, is very angry. Lloyd's group learns that if they want to save the world, they need to have Sheena gain the power of the eight "Summon Spirits"
. The spirits are magical creatures.  After using the power of the summon spirits, the problem gets worse. Lloyd and Kratos need to work together to save the world from being destroyed by the Giant Kharlan Tree. Yuan uses a drug where it puts people to sleep on everyone. After this, Lloyd wakes up in the middle of the night. Kratos is with Yuan and two of Yuan's henchman. Lloyd learns that Kratos is his father. Kratos dives in front of Lloyd to stop him from being hurt. Kratos then tells Lloyd that there is a ninth Summon Spirit by the name of Origin. Lloyd has to fight Kratos to get its help because Origin was sealed by Kratos himself. The Summon Spirit helps Lloyd use the eternal sword. After this, they go to Derris Kharlan and there is one last battle with Mithos.
Nintendo GameCube games
PlayStation 2 games
PlayStation 3 games
Role-playing video games
2004 video games
Windows games
Video games developed in Japan
The recent invention of the printing press helped spread awareness of the Church's abuses. A start was made in translating the Bible into various local languages. For example, John Wycliffe and William Tyndale worked on translating it into the English language. Much of Tyndale's translation was used in the King James version of the Bible. Luther translated the Bible into German.

Causes of Reformation
The start of the 16th century, many events led to the Protestant reformation. Clergy abuse caused people to begin criticizing the Catholic Church. The greed and scandalous lives of the clergy had created a split between them and the peasants. Furthermore, the clergy did not respond to the population's needs, often because they did not speak the local language, or live in their own diocese. The papacy lost prestige.
However, the split was more over doctrine than corruption. The main points of criticism were:
 The Bible was only printed in Latin. It was not printed in the local language. Printing was controlled by the church by a system of censorship. Catholic Mass, the Church's chief religious service, was also in Latin. This meant the people could not check whether what the priest said was actually correct.
 The church sold tickets of indulgences (forgiveness) from sins for money. This suggested that the rich could buy their way into Heaven while the poor could not - quite the opposite of what the Bible says. (See Gospel of Matthew 19:24)
 Religious posts were often sold to whoever was willing to pay the most money for them, see Simony. This meant many priests did not know enough about Christianity. So they told the people many different things. Some of the things had little to do with what was written in the Bible.
In 1515, the Pope started a new indulgence campaign to raise money for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, a church in Rome. Preachers came to Germany to sell the indulgences, promising that money could release souls from purgatory. Martin Luther, a German Catholic monk thought this went too far. On October 31, 1517, he sent his 95 theses to the local archbishop in protest. It is said he nailed a copy to the door of a church in Wittenberg. These theses, written in Latin, were points that Luther wanted to debate. Most of them related to the problems caused by the sale of indulgences. Luther said that the idea the money could buy forgiveness prevented people from turning away from sins. He said that it also made people give less money to the poor. Luther did not attack the Pope. He blamed the abuses on others. Nevertheless, his ideas implied that the pope was corrupt also. Without Luther's permission, the 95 Theses were translated into German and sent to many places. Many people agreed with Luther
. The Catholic Church tried to stop these new ideas, but without much result. Luther was considered an enemy of the Pope, and when he refused to change his ideas he was excommunicated (put out of the church). In the beginning, Luther had not planned to separate from the Catholic Church or to create a new religion; he wanted to reform the Catholic Church.
In many countries, Christians put the needed reforms listed by Luther into practice. People began to read the Bible in their own language, and many could see for themselves how the Catholic Church had let the Christian faith become corrupted. Many who stayed in the Catholic Church adopted some of Luther's ideas. The Pope reestablished the Inquisition to combat heresy. The Catholic Church responded to the Protestant reformation with the counter-reformation. Between 1545 and 1563 the Council of Trent met to decide what to do. Some of the worst abuses were eliminated but many of the old teachings were kept. The Inquisition tried to force people to keep those ideas. Finding force not very successful, the Pope created new religious orders like the Jesuits. These new religious orders were told to combat Protestantism by educating the population to Catholicism. The Pope made the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of banned books. It had a big influence in its first centuries and was not ended until the 1960s
. The Catholic Church used baroque art to touch the religious feeling of the faithful and bring them to the Catholic religion.
Longer Term Impacts
Catholic countries such as Spain and Italy for a long time didn't allow Protestants to live there, and Protestant countries kept out Catholics. With the American Revolution the idea of freedom of religion began to expand. Protestants are influential in the United States and the English Canada. Quebec was a (formerly French) Catholic province of Canada. After the Seven Years War the British imposed the Quebec Act  granting freedom of religion in Quebec, while including in Quebec some of the present day United States, for example Ohio and Michigan. Catholics were granted religious freedom in those areas. Protestant colonists saw this as one of the Intolerable Acts. In later centuries, many Protestant churches were established in the province of Quebec. Many Catholic churches began in Ohio and Michigan. Eventually most Christian countries allowed some religious freedom.
Churches based on Reformation ideas have multiplied into different forms, especially in historically Protestant countries. Even in much of Latin America, which is historically Catholic, Evangelical churches, which follow many of the Protestant ideas have greatly expanded. In the 20th century, some countries still had state churches, but also allowed full freedom of religion. In these countries, conflict between Protestant and Catholic Christians have become less important. They have to work together to confront a more secular society. In 2016 Pope Francis praised Luther in a prayer service commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Reformatiom. In turn, some Protestant churches have embraced some Catholic worship traditions, and others have praised them for their stand on social issues.

Related pages
 Protestantism

References
A sermon is a speech that a priest or other speaker gives during church service. The speech has a theological, religious or moral content. The purpose of a sermon is to give hope to the people who hear it, or to encourage them to do right things in their lives.  The speaker may also talk about the current problems of the community, and offer ways to solve them.Very often, sermons given by priests or other clergy are based on passages from the Bible.

Other websites

Sermon central
A large collection of professional sermons

Christian genres
Sand is a mixture of very small pieces of different rocks or minerals. It is the same minerals from which those pieces are broken, such as granite and feldspar. Sand is gritty to touch. It is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles. Sand is also formed various rocks by weathering and erosion. Erosion breaks large boulders into smaller rocks. They get smaller and smaller until they reach the beach or a low-lying area as sand.

Sand grains are between the size of gravel grains (which is from 2 mm to 64 mm) and the size of silt (which is around 0.0625 mm to 0.004 mm). Most sand is found on beaches, and in deserts. The most common sands are made of silica (silicon dioxide, or SiO2). Calcium carbonate is the second more common.

Sand dunes are made when wind or a river pulls sand into a mountain-like shape. They can be found in deserts, but sometimes high up on beaches too.
Sand is crucial in the process of mixing concrete. It can also be used to make sand castles. Sand is sometimes in households for aesthetic purposes.

Examples of Sand

Other websites

Basic English 850 words
Geology
Alsatian (, ) is a Germanic language. It is spoken in Alsace (eastern part of France). It is used for a number of dialects, spoken in Alsace, Franche-Comté, and Jura. Linguistically, we are looking at a number of dialects, with common properties. 

Most of the Alsatian dialects are Germanic. Alsatian is also used for a few dialects that are based on French, and that are spoken in the Vosges, Franche-Comte, territoire de Belfort, and Jura (on both sides of the border). 

There are slight differences in the dialects, the one in the north have a sligtly different vocabulary and grammar to the ones in the south. The dialect spoken in the city of Strasbourg is also slighlty different from those in the sourrounding areas.

Statistics 
In 2012, the Office pour la Langue et la Culture d’Alsace did a survey:

 43% said they had a good knolwedge of Alsatian, and they used it regularly.
 33% said they had a basic knowledge or understanding of Asatian
 25% said they didn't know Alsatian.

Of those who speak Alsatian:
96% speak it with their families
 88% speak it with friends
 48% speak it at the office

Those who speak Alsatian are generally older:

 In the age group 60 years and older, 74% speak Alsatian
 In the age group 44-59, 54% do
 Of those 30-44, 24% do,
 12% of the 18-30 year old
 only 3% of the 3 to 17 year old

In the three big cities of the region (Strasbourg, Colmar and Mulhouse), Alsatian is spoken less. There, fewer than a third of the adults sa they speak Alsatian. Around Wissenbourg, Haguenau, and Saverne, over half the people answered they were good speakers.

References

German dialects
Languages of France
Alsace
Ian Russell McEwan CH, CBE, FRSA, FRSL (born 21 June 1948), is an English novelist (who is also called "Ian Macabre" because of the type of his early work).

Biography 
McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, England and spent much of his childhood in the Far East, Germany and North Africa where his father, an officer in the army, was posted. He was educated at the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, where he was the first graduate of Malcolm Bradbury's pioneering creative writing course.

He has been married twice. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, is the editor of the Guardian's Review section.
In March and April 2004, just months after the British government had invited him to a dinner with First Lady of the United States Laura Bush, McEwan was denied entry into the United States by the United States Department of Homeland Security for not having the proper visa for earning a living (McEwan was preparing to give a series of paid lectures). Only after several days and publicity in the British press was McEwan admitted because, as he said a customs official had told him, "We still do not want to let you in, but this is attracting a lot of unfavourable publicity."

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.

Works 
His first published work was the collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.
The Cement Garden (1978) and Black Dogs (1992) were his early novels.

His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about a person with de Clerambault's syndrome, is regarded by many as a masterpiece, though Atonement has received equally high acclaim.

In 1998, he was controversially awarded the Booker Prize for his novella, Amsterdam.

His 2005 novel, Saturday, follows an especially eventful day in the life of a neurosurgeon. Mr Henry Perowne, the main character, lives in a house on a square in central London where McEwan himself lives after relocating from Oxford.

The 2007 novel, On Chesil Beach, was a short novel about one couple in England and how they experience love and sexuality in the early 1960s. The novel was on the short list of possible Booker Prize winners.

His most recent novel, Solar, is a comedy. A fictional Nobel Prize winning physicist with a disorganized personal life is the main character.

Bibliography
Bibliography

Novels 
 The Cement Garden (1978, filmed in 1993)
 The Comfort of Strangers (1981, filmed in 1990)
 The Child in Time (1987)
 The Innocent (1989, filmed in 1993)
 Black Dogs (1992)
 Enduring Love (1997, filmed in 2004)
 Amsterdam (1998)
 Atonement (2001)
 Saturday (2005)
 On Chesil Beach (2007)

Short fiction collections 
 First Love, Last Rites (1975)
 In Between the Sheets (1978)

Children's fiction 
 Rose Blanche (1985)
 The Daydreamer (1994)

Plays 
 The Imitation Game (1981)

Screenplays 
 Ploughman's Lunch (1985)
 Sour Sweet (1989)
 The Good Son (1993)

Oration 
 or Shall We Die? (1983)

Introduction 
 What We Believe but Cannot Prove : Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, John Brockman, ed. (2005)

References

Other websites 

 Official website
 Ian McEwan in Guardian Books: Authors section
 Powells.com interview 
 Salon.com interview 
 PBS interview: Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero
 1990 audio interview  with Don Swaim at Wired For Books
1948 births
Living people
Booker Prize winners
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
English novelists
Royal Society of Arts
Royal Society of Literature
Writers from Hampshire
Mahjong is a game for four players that was created in China. It is a game of skill, intelligence, calculation and luck.

The Set-Up 
A Mahjong game is played at a square table (four sides all the same length). The dealer is called the "east" player and everyone else is called a different direction because of where they are sitting - so the person to East's left is South, the person across from East is West, and the person to East's right is North. If East wins, he is the dealer again for the next round; if he does not, the dealer is the person to his right (North). That person then becomes East. A game of Mahjong ends when every player has been the dealer four times, or when they have played the number of rounds they said they would play before they started.
Solitaire 
A single-player version of this game exists, called Mahjong Solitaire. It is based on the four-player game, but can be played by one person, so it is one of the games that are played often on computers (such as Solitaire, Spider Solitaire, or Minesweeper). Mahjong Solitaire is much simpler than four-player Mahjong: it is played without dice or chips, by removing tiles (set up in the shape of a pyramid) from the board in sets of two. Each set of two has to match - they are either exactly the same, or go together (two "flowers" tiles, for example). A Mahjong Solitaire player wins when he picks up all the tiles, or he loses when he runs out of sets of two that he can pick up.

Other websites

Games
Ionia was a region in the west of Asia Minor in Ancient Greek times. It was in what is now Turkey. It was the birthplace of the Hellenic civilization. The Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus, caused the migration of Ionic Greeks across the Aegean sea to Anatolia about 1000-900 BCE. The original Greek settlements in the region were numerous and small, but by the 8th century BCE they had consolidated themselves into 12 major cities—Phocaea, Erythrae, Clazomenae, Teos, Lebedus, Colophon, Ephesus, Priene, Myus, and Miletus on the mainland, with the islands Chios and Samos.By the end of the 7th century the Ionian cities had achieved great prosperity through their trading enterprises, their colonization efforts, and their manufacture of ceramics, textiles, and metalware. After World War One it was granted to Greece from Turkey in the Treaty of Sèvres, along with most of the islands in the Aegean sea, Thrace, and Turkey's most important city, Istanbul
. The Turkish army drove the Greeks out soon after, killing many Greek people. They did not challenge the Greeks on the Aegean Islands, though.
Ancient Greek settlements
A harmonic of a wave is the part of a signal's frequency that is a whole multiple (an integer) of the fundamental frequency. The fundamental frequency is the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. If f is the fundamental frequency (that is, 1f), then the harmonics have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f..., and so on. The second harmonic (2f) has a frequency twice that of the fundamental frequency, the third harmonic three times, and so on. This concept applies to wave motions of any form of energy, but is perhaps most often related to acoustics.
Frequencies that lie between one harmonic and another harmonic are called interharmonics. For example, 1f is an interharmonic between the fundamental frequency (or first harmonic) and the second harmonic. Interharmonics is a term invented, or at least standardised, by the international electronics industry about 1999, particularly for use in electrical energy. However, interharmonic frequencies also occur naturally in other radiant energies, for example music or any type of sound.

Related pages
 Harmonics (music)
 Harmonic series (mathematics)
 Harmonics (electrical power)
 Sine wave

Wave physics
The Art Ross Trophy is given to the top scoring player each year in the National Hockey League (NHL). The player with the most points (goals plus assists) is given the trophy. If two players have the same number of points, the award goes to the player with the most goals. If they are tied in goals, it goes to the player who has played fewer games. If they are tied in games, it goes to the player who scored his first goal of the year the soonest.

Wayne Gretzky has won this trophy ten times, the most of any player. Gordie Howe and Mario Lemieux each won six trophies; Phil Esposito and Jaromir Jagr won five; Stan Mikita won four; and Bobby Hull and Guy Lafleur each won it three times.

The Art Ross Memorial Trophy was first awarded in 1948. This list includes all NHL scoring champions:

Winners

Bold Player with the most points ever scored in a season.

Related pages
 List of NHL players
 List of NHL statistical leaders

References

National Hockey League trophies and awards
A towel is a form of cloth or paper used for drying things. There are many types of towels, such as a beach towel and a washcloth, a small towel used for cleaning dishes and bodies. Towels have many different uses, such as drying yourself after a shower, or wiping a table clean.

For the body, fabric terry towels are mainly used, consisting mainly of cotton fibers due to their high absorbency (reaching up to 300%).

Fabric towels belong to the group of piece textiles. Textile towels often have a sewn loop with which they can be hung on wall furniture hooks for use (previously it was recommended to sew a loop at both ends so that the towel wears out more evenly). In addition to hooks, towels can also be placed in a state thrown over a barbell, and thanks to this straightened suspension, they dry faster. Fabric towels can have finishes such as lace, embroidery, appliques and others.

Disposable towels can be made both in piece form and in a roll, both from paper and non-woven material.

Cloth
South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands are an overseas territory of the United Kingdom claimed by Argentina. They are in the southern part of the Atlantic Ocean. The territory was started in 1985, before that it was classed as part of the Falkland Islands. The islands do not have a native population, but in 2006 they had around 20 people on the islands. Most of these people were scientists who are at Bird Island, museum staff at Grytviken and the British Government Officers.

Antarctic region
Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu is an action-adventure game video game. It was released in 2003 for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube. It is also available for the Game Boy Advance and PC.

The game is based on Batman: The Animated Series. In the game Batman faces a new enemy who sends Gotham City into chaos.

Some critics said that beat 'em up was too recurring and it lacked the story of Batman Vengeance.

2003 video games
Nintendo GameCube games
PlayStation 2 games
Game Boy Advance games
Windows games
Xbox games
Ubisoft games
Batman video games
Video games based on television shows
A vein is a type of blood vessel in the body. All veins carry blood to the heart. Most veins carry blood that is low in oxygen, except for the pulmonary vein and the umbilical veins which carry blood that is high in oxygen. 

A vein has a large lumen (width) and less pressure than an artery. There are smaller amounts of smooth muscle and elastic fibres in the vessel wall. Most veins have one-way valves that keep blood from going backwards.
Veins carry blood to the heart and move to the heart through the vena cava, the biggest vein in human body Other important veins are the coronary veins(veins on the heart) and renal veins(veins on the kidney). 
Veins are mainly seen just below the skin, and could easily be seen from the outside, where they look blue because of the lack of oxygen.
The blood carried by veins is dark red, but when a vein is cut or pierced, the dark blood immediately reacts with the oxygen in the air and becomes bright red colored. The vein appears blue because of the scattering of light through the skin and the way the eye perceives color and light.

Blood vessels
The Ottawa Senators are a professional ice hockey team based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. They are members of the Northeast Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). The Senators play their home games at the 20,652-seat Canadian Tire Centre, which opened in 1996.

The team was started by Ottawa real estate developer Bruce Firestone, the team is the second NHL franchise to use the Ottawa Senators name. The original Ottawa Senators, founded in 1883, had a rich history, winning 11 Stanley Cups and playing in the NHL from 1917 until 1934. On December 6, 1990, after a two-year public campaign by Firestone, the NHL awarded a new franchise, which began play in the 1992–93 season. The current team owner is Eugene Melnyk, and in 2011, the club was valued by Forbes Magazine at $201 million.