adityasasidhar/Wikipedia_Cleaned huggingface dataset:
A tree is a tall plant with a trunk and branches made of wood. Trees can live for many years. The oldest living tree found is about 5,000 years old. The oldest tree from the UK is about 1,000 years old. The four main parts of a tree are the roots, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves. Trees are a wide variety of plant species that have independently evolved a trunk and branches as a way to tower above other plants to compete for sunlight.
The roots of a tree are usually under the ground. However, this is not always true. The roots of the mangrove tree are often under water. A single tree has many roots. The roots carry nutrients and water from the ground through the trunk and branches to the leaves of the tree. Leaves can also breathe in air. Sometimes, roots are specialized into aerial roots, which can also provide support, as is the case with the banyan tree.
A coast redwood: , in Redwood National Park, California had been measured as tallest living tree. It has been named Hyperion. Hyperion was measured as 116.07 metres (380.8 ft) tall in 2019. It is estimated to be 600 to 800 years old.
The tallest trees in Australia are all eucalypts, of which there are more than 700 species. The so-called 'mountain ash'. with a slim, straight trunk, grows to over 300 feet.
The stoutest living single-trunk species in diameter is the African baobab: , Glencoe baobab (measured near the ground), Limpopo Province, South Africa. This tree split up in November 2009 and now the stoutest baobab could be Sunland Baobab (South Africa) with diameter 10.64 m and circumference of 33.4 m.
Trees have been found growing at record-breaking heights in Scotland's mountains. On Braeriach, Britain's third highest mountain, a sitka spruce was found at 1,125m (3,691ft).
The oldest reported age for an Angiosperm tree is 2,305 years for the Sri Maha Bodhi sacred fig ("Ficus religiosa") planted in 288 BC at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka; this is said to be the oldest human-planted tree with a known planting date.
Tragedy (Greek theatre)
Taxonomy is a branch of biology. It is about the laws and principles of classifying living things. From one type of taxonomy, many classifications might be produced.
Theft is when one person or group takes from another person, business, or state any object, money, or information without permission and does not intend to return it. A person who has been convicted of theft may be called a thief. However, the practice of engaging in theft is also called stealing. There are many different types of theft, such as pickpocketing and shoplifting. Burglary and robbery are separate crimes which involve theft.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, often shortened to the United Kingdom (or UK), or just Britain, is a sovereign country in Western Europe. It is a constitutional monarchy of four countries which were once separate: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
It is part of the United Nations, the Commonwealth of Nations, NATO, the G7, and formerly the European Union. It had the sixth largest economy in the world by nominal GDP in 2019.
About 95 percent of the UK's population are English speakers. 5.5 per cent of the population speak languages brought to the UK as a result of relatively recent immigration.
The UK has many cities. London is the biggest city in the UK and is the capital city. There are also other large cities in England such as Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne. Scotland has the big cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Cardiff and Swansea are in Wales and Derry and Belfast are in Northern Ireland.
Between the 17th and mid 20th-centuries, Britain became a world power. It became a colonial empire that controlled large areas of Africa, Asia, North America and Oceania.
At its height in 1922, more than 458 million people lived in the British Empire, one-fifth of the Earth's population. Its area was 13,012,000 square miles: almost a quarter of the Earth's land area. The Empire was sometimes called 'the Empire on which the Sun never sets', meaning it is always daytime someplace in the Empire. Many countries left and became independent from the Empire in the 20th century, although Britain keeps links with most countries of its former empire and also still controls fourteen colonies.
Humans have lived in Britain for almost a million years. They did not live there all the time, probably because the climate was too extreme at times.
Written history began in Britain when writing was brought to Britain by the Romans. Rome ruled in Britain from 44 to 410. They ruled the southern two-thirds of Great Britain. The Romans never took over Ireland and never fully controlled Scotland, the land north of the valleys of the River Forth and River Clyde. Their northern border varied from time to time and was marked sometimes at Hadrian's Wall (in modern England), sometimes at the Antonine Wall (in modern Scotland).
After the Romans, waves of immigrants came to Britain. Some were German tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Others were Celts, like the Scoti, who came to Great Britain from Ireland. English and Scots are Germanic languages. They developed from Old English. This was spoken by the Anglo-Saxons in an area from the River Forth to the River Tamar.
A later wave of immigration was that of the Vikings, during the Early Middle Ages or Viking Age. During the Viking invasion of Britain, they set up their own kingdom in north-western England, which the Anglo-Saxons named the "Danelaw", after the Danes who lived there and controlled the land. Vikings from Scandinavia also controlled most of the islands which are now part of Scotland, including the Outer Hebrides, the Inner Hebrides, and the Northern Isles (the Shetland Islands and the Orkney Islands).
There were hundreds of years of fighting between both kingdoms of Great Britain. In 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I of England died, her closest relative was King James VI of Scotland. He became king of England and Ireland as well as the king of Scotland. The kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland had the same monarch ever since. James VI and I was the first to be named "King of Great Britain", and he ordered the design of the Union Jack. The Union Jack has been the British national flag ever since.
In 1707, the Parliaments of England and Scotland agreed on the Treaty of Union, which joined the two countries into one country called the "United Kingdom of Great Britain" under Queen Anne with the Acts of Union 1707. This union merged Scotland and England into one kingdom. England and Scotland kept their own laws, with English law in England and Wales and Scots law in Scotland. The division between the Church of Scotland and the Church of England continued. Ireland and Great Britain continued to have the same king, but Ireland did not become part of the new kingdom in 1707.
The UK is northwest off the coast of mainland Europe. Around the UK are the North Sea, the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. The UK also rules, usually indirectly, a number of smaller places (mostly islands) around the world, which are known as British Overseas Territories. They were once part of the British Empire. Examples are Gibraltar (on the Iberian Peninsula next to the Strait of Gibraltar) and the Falkland Islands (in the south Atlantic Ocean).
In the British Isles, the UK is made up of four different countries: Wales, England and Scotland and Northern Ireland. The capital city of Wales is Cardiff. The capital city of England is London. The capital city of Scotland is Edinburgh and the capital city of Northern Ireland is Belfast. Other large cities in the UK are Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bristol, Leicester, Coventry, Nottingham, Bradford, Newcastle Upon Tyne and Southampton.
The physical geography of the UK varies greatly. England consists of mostly lowland terrain, with upland or mountainous terrain only found north-west of the River Tees-River Exe line. The upland areas include the Lake District, the Pennines, the North York Moors, Exmoor, and Dartmoor. The lowland areas are typically traversed by ranges of low hills, frequently composed of chalk, and flat plains. Scotland is the most mountainous country in the UK and its physical geography is distinguished by the Highland Boundary Fault which goes across the Scottish mainland from Helensburgh to Stonehaven. The Royal Observatory, Greenwich is the defining point of the Prime Meridian.The weather of the United Kingdom is changeable and unpredictable. Summers are moderately warm, winters are cool to cold. Rain falls throughout the year, and more on the west than the east because of its northerly latitude and the warm water from the Atlantic Ocean's Gulf Stream. The usually moderate prevailing winds from the Atlantic may be interrupted by Arctic air from the northeast or hot air from the Sahara.
The United Kingdom is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It has met the Kyoto Protocol targets. It has signed the Paris Agreement. The British government want the UK to be carbon neutral by the year 2050.
The United Kingdom has an oceanic climate.
The highest temperature ever recorded in the United Kingdom was , on 19 July 2022 in Coningsby. The lowest temperature ever recorded was , on February 11, 1895 & January 10, 1982 in Braemar, and December 30, 1995 in Altnaharra.
The United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy based on a constitutional monarchy. The people of the United Kingdom vote for a members of Parliament to speak for them and to make laws for them. King Charles III is the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and is the head of state. The government, led by the Prime Minister, governs the country and appoints cabinet ministers. Today, the Prime Minister is Rishi Sunak, who is the leader of the centre-right Conservative Party.
Parliament is where laws are made. It has three parts: the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the King. The House of Commons is the most powerful part. It is where Members of Parliament sit.
Scotland has its own devolved Parliament with the power to make laws on things like education, health and Scottish law. Northern Ireland and Wales have their own devolved legislatures which have some powers but less than the Scottish parliament. The Parliament of the United Kingdom is sovereign and it could end the devolved administrations at any time. The UK is a unitary state and not a federation of states.
The Parliament of the United Kingdom is the legislature, the political assembly that makes laws and decides tax. The British people are represented by members of parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. MPs are chosen in elections. The MPs in the House of Commons decide who will be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The prime minister decides who will be in the British Government (His Majesty's Government). The government is not controlled by the king or queen, but by Parliament. In Britain, Parliament is made up of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Unlike the House of Commons, the people in the House of Lords are not elected. The people who sit in the House of Lords are called peers. Most peers are appointed by the government. There are some who are hereditary peers (who inherit their peerages from ancestors or other family members). Certain bishops in the established Church of England also attend the House of Lords. (The Church of England is the national church in England. The Church of Scotland does not have bishops, and neither Wales nor Northern Ireland has an established national church.) Together, the two houses make a bicameral legislature, in which the House of Commons has more power. In the past, the House of Lords had more power. Before the 20th century, the prime minister was often a member of the House of Lords. As the House of Lords lost its powers, as political reforms tried to improve democracy, the House of Commons became more powerful and the prime minister is now always a member of the House of Commons.
Almost all members of Parliament belong to political parties. The biggest parties are the Conservative Party, Labour Party, the Scottish National Party and the Liberal Democrats. Members of the same party agree to work together. A party (often with more than half the seats: a majority) forms the government. The leader of the party becomes the prime minister, who then chooses the other ministers. Because the government has a majority in Parliament, it can normally control what laws are passed.
The British Parliament is in Westminster, in London. It has power over the whole of the United Kingdom. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each have their own parliaments as well, and these have more limited powers. England does not have a separate parliament.
Scotland has the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh. Wales has the Welsh Parliament in Cardiff. Northern Ireland has the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont in Belfast. There are also parliaments in the Isle of Man and in Jersey and Guernsey (the Channel Islands), which are all island states for which the UK has responsibility in international law. Man, Jersey, and Guernsey are "crown dependencies". Some British Overseas Territories have their own legislatures.
About 68 million people live in the UK (2022). They can be divided into four big nationalities based on the countries where they live (or where they were born or their ancestry). Each country has a demonym for its people (for example; England's people are English), but no matter which country someone is from, they have a British nationality.
The crown dependencies are three nations which are not part of any of the four countries in the UK. They are: the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. Unlike the four countries, the governments of the crown dependencies have almost full power over the dependencies, with the exception of military and international relations. Everybody from a crown dependency has a British nationality.
The British Overseas Territories are former colonies of the British Empire which have not become independent from the UK. There are fourteen. Some have civilisations on them while others are military bases. Most of them have their own governments. The UK is responsible for their defence and international relationships. Everybody from an overseas territory has a British nationality.
The United Kingdom is a developed country with the sixth-largest economy in the world. It was a superpower during the 18th, 19th and early 20th century and was considered since the early 1800s to be the most powerful and influential nation in the world, in politics, economics and in military strength.
Britain continued to be the biggest manufacturing economy in the world until 1908 and the largest economy until the 1920s. The economic cost of two world wars and the decline of the British Empire in the 1950s and 1960s reduced its leading role in global affairs. The United Kingdom has strong economic, cultural, military and political influence and is a nuclear power. The United Kingdom holds a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, and is a member of the G8, NATO, World Trade Organization and the Commonwealth of Nations. The City of London, in the capital, is famous for being the largest centre of finance in the world.
William Shakespeare was an English playwright. He wrote plays in the late 16th century. Some of his plays were "Romeo and Juliet" and "Macbeth". In the 19th century, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were novelists. Twentieth-century writers include the science-fiction novelist H. G. Wells and J. R. R. Tolkien. The children's fantasy "Harry Potter" series was written by J. K. Rowling. Aldous Huxley was also from the United Kingdom.
The nature of education is a devolved matter in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They have separate, but similar, systems of education with laws that a broad education is required from ages five to eighteen, except for in Scotland where school departure is allowed from the age of sixteen. Pupils attend state funded schools (academy schools, faith schools, grammar schools, sixth form colleges, further education, city technology colleges, studio schools) and other children attend independent fee-paying schools (known as public schools).
There have been universities in Britain since the Middle Ages. The "ancient universities" started at this time and in the Renaissance. They are: the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of St Andrews, the University of Glasgow, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Edinburgh. These are the oldest universities in the English-speaking world.
The University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and London universities (University College London, the London School of Economics, King's College London and Imperial College London) collectively form the Golden Triangle of universities in the south-east of England. A broader group of twenty universities form the Russell Group of research universities.
The BBC is an organisation in the United Kingdom. It broadcasts in the United Kingdom and other countries on television, radio and the Internet. The BBC also sells its programs to other broadcasting companies around the world. The organisation is run by a group of twelve governors who have been given the job by the Queen, on the advice of government ministers.
Road traffic in the United Kingdom drives on the left-hand side of the road (unlike the Americas and most of Europe), and the driver steers from the right-hand side of the vehicle. The road network on the island of Great Britain is extensive, with most local and rural roads having evolved from Roman and Medieval times. Major routes developed in the mid 20th Century were made to the needs of the motor car. The multi-lane high speed motorway (freeway) network was mostly built in the 1960s and 1970s. It links major towns and cities.
The system of rail transport was invented in England and Wales, so the United Kingdom has the oldest railway network in the world. It was built mostly during the Victorian era. At the heart of the network are five long-distance main lines which radiate from London to the major cities and secondary population centres with dense commuter networks and highs-speed lines in the regions. The newest part of the network connects London to the Channel Tunnel from St Pancras station. The system of underground railways in London, known as the Tube, has been copied by many other cities.
The universe is space and its contents. It is made of many billions of stars and planets and enormous clouds of gas separated by big spaces. The Big Bang started the expansion of the universe.
Astronomers use telescopes to look at very distant galaxies. This is how they see what the universe looked like a long time ago. The past tense is because the light from distant parts of the Universe takes a very long time to reach us. From these observations, it seems the physical laws and constants of the universe have not changed.
Physicists are currently unsure if anything existed before the Big Bang. The size of the universe is not known.
People have long had ideas about the universe. Most early ideas had the Earth at the centre of the universe. This is known as geocentrism.
Some ancient Greeks thought that the universe has infinite space and has existed forever. They thought it had a set of celestial spheres which corresponded to the fixed stars, the Sun and various planets. The spheres circled about a round but unmoving Earth.
Over hundreds of years, better observations led to Copernicus's Sun-centred model, known as heliocentrism. This was very controversial at the time, and was fought by religious authorities, most famously by the Christian church (see Giordano Bruno and Galileo).
In the 1900s, better telescopes showed astronomers more about the universe. The Solar System is in a galaxy made of billions of stars, which we call the Milky Way. Other galaxies exist outside it, as far as we can see. This started a new kind of astronomy called cosmology, in which astronomers study what these galaxies are made of and how they are spread out. By measuring the redshift of galaxies, cosmologists soon discovered that the Universe is expanding (see: Hubble).
The most used scientific model of the Universe is known as the Big Bang theory, which says the Universe expanded from a single point that held all the matter and energy of the Universe. There are many kinds of scientific evidence that support the Big Bang idea. Astronomers think that the Big Bang happened about 13.73 billion years ago. this would make the universe 13.73 billion years old. Since then, the universe has expanded to be at least 93 billion light years, or 8.80 metres, in diameter. It is still expanding right now, and the expansion is getting faster.
Astronomers are not sure what is causing the universe to expand. Because of this, they call the mysterious energy causing the expansion dark energy. By studying the expansion of the Universe, astronomers have also realized most of the matter in the Universe may be in a form which cannot be observed by any scientific equipment we have. This matter has been named dark matter. Just to be clear, dark matter and energy have not been observed directly (that is why they are called 'dark'). However, many astronomers think they must exist: many astronomical observations would be hard to explain if they didn't.
The word "universe" comes from the Old French word "univers", which comes from the Latin word "universum". The Latin word was used by Cicero and later Latin authors in many of the same senses as the modern English word is used.
A different theory is an early Greek model of the universe. In that model, all matter was in rotating spheres centered on the Earth; according to Aristotle, the rotation of the outermost sphere was responsible for the motion and change of everything within. It was natural for the Greeks to assume that the Earth was stationary and that the heavens rotated about the Earth, because careful astronomical and physical measurements are needed to prove otherwise.
Usually the universe is thought to be everything that exists, has existed, and will exist. This definition says that the universe is made of two elements: space and time, together known as space-time or the vacuum; and matter and different forms of energy and momentum occupying space-time. The two kinds of elements behave according to physical laws, in which we describe how the elements interact.
A similar definition of the term "universe" is everything that exists at a single moment of time, such as the present or the beginning of time.
It is possible to form space-times, each existing but not able to touch, move, or change (interact with each other. The entire collection of these separate space-times is denoted as the multiverse. In principle, the other unconnected universes may have different dimensionalities and topologies of space-time, different forms of matter and energy, and different physical laws and physical constants, although such possibilities are speculations.
It is worth emphasizing that those distant regions of space are taken to exist and be part of reality as much as we are; yet we can never interact with them, even in principle. Even with most of the visible universe, we cannot interact with it in practice. A relatively simple task, so it might seem, would be to communicate within our galaxy. Even if we knew how to send a message successfully, it would be well over 200,000 years before a reply could come back from the far end of the Milky Way, whose diameter is 100,000 light years. galaxy. The spatial region which we can see is called the "observable universe".
The Universe is huge. The matter which can be seen is spread over a space at least 93 billion light years across.
For comparison, the diameter of a typical galaxy is only 30,000 light-years, and the typical distance between two neighboring galaxies is only 3 million light-years. As an example, our Milky Way Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years in diameter, and our nearest sister galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is located roughly 2.5 million light years away. The observable Universe contains more than 2 trillion (10) galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated stars (more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth).
Typical galaxies range from dwarf galaxies with as few as ten million (10) stars up to giants with one trillion (10) stars, all orbiting the galaxy's center of mass. Thus, a rough estimate from these numbers would suggest there are around one sextillion (10) stars in the observable Universe; though a 2003 study by Australian National University astronomers resulted in a figure of 70 sextillion (7 x 10).
The Universe has not been the same at all times in its history. Its getting bigger accounts for how Earth-bound people can see the light from a galaxy 30 billion light-years away, even if that light has traveled for only 13 billion years; the very space between them has expanded. This expansion is consistent with the observation that the light from distant galaxies has been redshifted; the photons emitted have been stretched to longer wavelengths and lower frequency during their journey. The rate of this spatial expansion is accelerating, based on studies of Type Ia supernovae and other data.
As far as we can tell, the Universe has the same physical laws and physical constants throughout. According to the prevailing Standard Model of physics, all matter is composed of three generations of leptons and quarks, both of which are fermions. These elementary particles interact via at most three fundamental interactions: the electroweak interaction which includes electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force; the strong nuclear force described by quantum chromodynamics; and gravity, which is best described at present by general relativity.
Special relativity holds in all the universe in local space and time. Otherwise, general relativity holds. There is no explanation for the particular values that physical constants appear to have throughout our universe, such as Planck's constant "h" or the gravitational constant "G". Several conservation laws have been identified, such as the conservation of charge, conservation of momentum, conservation of angular momentum and conservation of energy.
Accurate predictions of the universe's past and future require an accurate theory of gravitation. The best theory available is Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which has passed all experimental tests so far. However, since rigorous experiments have not been carried out on "cosmological" length scales, general relativity could conceivably be inaccurate. Nevertheless, its predictions appear to be consistent with observations, so there is no reason to adopt another theory.
General relativity provides of a set of ten nonlinear partial differential equations for the spacetime metric (Einstein's field equations) that must be solved from the distribution of mass-energy and momentum throughout the universe. Since these are unknown in exact detail, cosmological models have been based on the cosmological principle, which states that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic. In effect, this principle asserts that the gravitational effects of the various galaxies making up the universe are equivalent to those of a fine dust distributed uniformly throughout the universe with the same average density. The assumption of a uniform dust makes it easy to solve Einstein's field equations and predict the past and future of the universe on cosmological time scales.
Other observations are not clearly answered by known physics. According to the prevailing theory, a slight imbalance of matter over antimatter was present in the universe's creation, or developed very shortly thereafter. Although the matter and antimatter mostly annihilated one another, producing photons, a small residue of matter survived, giving the present matter-dominated universe.
Some people think that there is more than one universe. They think that there is a set of universes called the multiverse.
By definition, there is no way for anything in one universe to affect something in another. The multiverse is not yet a scientific idea because there is no way to test it. An idea that cannot be tested or is not based on logic is not science. It is not known if the multiverse is a scientific idea.
This is a scientific topic called "the ultimate fate of the universe". It is a topic in cosmology. There are possible scenarios for its evolution. The basic issue is whether its existence is finite or infinite.
The future of the universe is a mystery. However, there are a couple of theories based on the possible shapes of the universe:
There is a consensus among cosmologists that the shape of the universe is considered "flat" (parallel lines stay parallel) and will continue to expand forever.
U.S. customary units is the main system of units of measurement used to measure things in the United States and U.S. territories (except in Puerto Rico and Guam, where the metric system is also officially used and is dominant). The system of Imperial units, on which the U.S. customary units are based, is very similar but there are some differences.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun in our Solar System. Like Neptune, it is an ice giant. It is the third largest planet in the solar system.
The planet is made of ice, gases and liquid metal. Its atmosphere contains hydrogen (H), helium (He) and methane. The temperature on Uranus is near the top of its atmosphere. Its small solid core (about 55% the mass of Earth) is probably about .
The planet is tilted on its axis so much that it is sideways. The cause of this is not known for certain. It has five big moons, many small ones, and a small system of 13 planetary rings.
The distance between Uranus and the Sun is about 2.8 billion km. Uranus completes its orbit around the Sun in 84 earth years. It completes a spin around its axis in 17 hours and 14 minutes. This means there are about 43,000 Uranian days in one Uranian year.
Uranus has been observed many times through a telescope, and even through the naked eye, but was mistaken for a star due to its slow orbit. Sir William Herschel observed Uranus on 13 March 1781 from the garden of his house at 19 New King Street in Bath, Somerset, England (now the Herschel Museum of Astronomy), and first reported it (on 26 April 1781) as a comet. With a homemade 6.2-inch reflecting telescope, Herschel "engaged in a series of observations on the parallax of the fixed stars."
Herschel notified the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne of his discovery and received this reply from him on 23 April 1781: "I don't know what to call it. It is as likely to be a regular planet moving in an orbit nearly circular to the sun as a Comet moving in a very eccentric ellipsis. I have not yet seen any coma or tail to it."
Although Herschel continued to say this new object was a comet, other astronomers had already begun to think otherwise. Finnish-Swedish astronomer Anders Johan Lexell, working in Russia, was the first to calculate the orbit of the new object. Its nearly circular orbit led him to a conclusion that it was a planet rather than a comet. Berlin astronomer Johann Elert Bode described Herschel's discovery as "a moving star that can be deemed a hitherto unknown planet-like object circulating beyond the orbit of Saturn". Bode concluded that its near-circular orbit was more like a planet's than a comet's.
In 1986, NASA's "Voyager 2" visited Uranus. This is the only space probe that tried to investigate the planet from a short distance. The spacecraft studied the atmosphere of the planet.
Uranus has 27 known moons. They are named for characters from the works of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. The five biggest moons are Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. More moons are likely to be discovered.
Uranus revolves around the Sun once every 84 Earth years. Its average distance from the Sun is roughly 3 billion km (about 20 AU). The intensity of sunlight on Uranus is about 1/400 that on Earth. Its orbital elements were first calculated in 1783 by Pierre-Simon Laplace. With time, discrepancies began to appear between the predicted and observed orbits, and in 1841, John Couch Adams first proposed that the differences might be due to the gravitational tug of an unseen planet. In 1845, Urbain Le Verrier began his own independent research into Uranus's orbit. On September 23, 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle found a new planet, later called Neptune, at nearly the position predicted by Le Verrier.
The rotational period of the interior of Uranus is 17 hours, 14 minutes, clockwise (retrograde). As on all giant planets, its upper atmosphere experiences very strong winds in the direction of rotation. At some latitudes, such as about two-thirds of the way from the equator to the south pole, visible features of the atmosphere move much faster, making a full rotation in as little as 14 hours.
1. Uranus rotates at an angle of about 82 degrees compared to the general planetary system. It is tilted about 82 degrees compared to the Solar System as a whole. It is almost on its side compared with the other planets.
2. The difference between its minimum and maximum distance from the Sun is 1.8 AU, larger than that of any other major planet.
The obvious suggestion made is that the planet had a collision after its addition to the Solar System.
Not all subjects are offered at universities. Mainly, universities offer courses which are about knowledge. They usually do not offer courses in practical trades. In some cases such as law, where there are both knowledge and practical issues, the university does mainly the theoretical side of the subject. Practical qualifications are done elsewhere.
There is a group of notable universities called the Ivy League. They are:
Some other universities are:
There are also institutions of technology who provide course offerings primarily in scientific and technological studies. Some examples are:
The vocabulary a person uses is all the words that person knows and uses. In general, a person who is five knows about 4,000 to 5,000 words. Adults who have gone to college may know 20,000 words. A hearing vocabulary and reading vocabulary are bigger than a speaking vocabulary or writing vocabulary, as people understand some words that they do not use.
The number of words in a language is more than the words listed in one dictionary. One dictionary may have a list of 500,000 (half a million) words. Another dictionary may have some other words that the other dictionary does not have. Adding up all the words in those dictionaries, there are about 750,000 words in English. There may be more words than that.
Venus is the second planet from the Sun. Venus is the only planet in the Solar System that has a day longer than a year. The year length of Venus is 225 Earth days. The day length of Venus is 243 Earth days.
Venus is a "terrestrial planet" because it has a solid, rocky surface like other planets in the inner Solar System. Astronomers have known Venus for thousands of years. The ancient Romans named it after their goddess Venus, goddess of love and beauty.
Venus is the brightest thing in the night sky except for the Moon. It is sometimes called the "morning star" or the "evening star" as at some elongations it is easily seen just before the sun comes up in the morning. At other times, it can be seen just after the sun goes down in the evening. Venus comes closer to the Earth than any other planet does.
Venus is sometimes called the sister planet of Earth as they are quite similar in size and gravity. In other ways the planets are very different. Venus' atmosphere (air) is mostly carbon dioxide with clouds of sulphuric acid. Sulphuric acid is a chemical that is poisonous to life. For this it is sometimes known as the Earth's "evil twin".
The thick atmosphere makes it hard to see the surface. Until the late twentieth century many thought there might be life there. The pressure on Venus' surface is 92 times that of Earth. Venus is one of only 2 planets in the Solar System (the other being Mercury) that has no moons. Venus spins very slowly on its axis and it spins in the opposite direction to the other planets.
Scientists believe that billions of years ago, the atmosphere of Venus could have been like Earth's atmosphere. There may have been lots of water on the surface of Venus. But after 600 million to several billion years, the evaporation of the water put greenhouse gases into its atmosphere.
Venus orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 108 million km (68~ million mi). It completes an orbit every 224.7 days. The rotation of Venus is slow. A Venusian sidereal day is longer than a Venusian year.
Venera 16 was a spacecraft sent to Venus by the Soviet Union. It was made to map the surface of Venus. It was launched on June 7, 1983. Its last radio signal from Venera 16 was on June 13, 1985.
Its territory is completely surrounded by Italy and it is only one of three countries in the world that are enclaves of another country (the others being San Marino, also in Italy, and Lesotho in southern Africa). Also, it is the only country in the world that is an enclave of a city, as all of the land around it is part of Rome, the capital of Italy. The Vatican City is a city-state, because all its territory is urban and built-up.
The Vatican City is also important for its culture and art. The Vatican's masterpieces are very well known in the world: St. Peter's Square, St. Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museums and the Apostolic Palace, where the Pope lives. There are also hundreds of other sculptures and pictures.
In 1929 Benito Mussolini, decided to sign an agreement with Pope Pius XI, called the Lateran Treaty, which gave the territory of the Vatican to the Pope. Another treaty gave the Vatican money each year to compensate for the lost territories.
The government structure is a theocracy (a country run by religion) with the Pope being the highest authority. The pope is elected by the College of Cardinals which can lead the Roman Catholic Church and the city-state itself. The Pope also holds the title of "Bishop of Rome".
The Pope is the head of state of the Vatican and holds the office until death or resignation. As head of state, the pope's title is officially "the Sovereign". The government and legislature is the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State.
Vatican City has a population of 764. The citizens of the Vatican include the Pope, all the cardinals, all the nuncios (who is the equivalent of an ambassador) and other diplomats, all the Swiss Guards, and other important people. Also, there are 372 Vatican citizens who live in other countries, including cardinals and nuncios. Vatican citizenship cannot be passed to children and spouses; and, except for the Pope and cardinals, Vatican citizenship is lost when the term of office comes to an end, for the Swiss Guards, nuncios and diplomats, and other people working for the Vatican.
Velocity is a measure of how fast something moves in a particular direction. To define it needs both magnitude and direction. If an object moves east at 9 metres per second (9 m/s), then its velocity is 9 m/s to the east.
Many companies nowadays offer website hosting allowing one to make websites that can be displayed on the World Wide Web, including a custom domain (www.stuff.com) site.
A wiki is a type of website that lets anyone create and change its pages. The word is sometimes used in Internet slang to mean Wikipedia. W"iki" is short for WikiWikiWeb. "Wikiwiki" is a word from the Hawaiian language, meaning "fast" or "speed". Examples of wikis include Wikipedia, Everipedia, Citizendium, , Conservapedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks.
On a wiki, people can write pages by collaboration. Pages are watched closely to see whether changes are good or bad. If one person writes something wrong, another can correct it. Other users can also add something new to the page. Because of this, the page gets better when people change it. Administrators can block someone from editing if they vandalize, or for other reasons. Users can also discuss things on wikis. Discussion can help people understand things better and get a chance to tell their views. In Wikipedia the talk pages are for that, but in some wikis, the article and the discussion are in the same page.
Wikis can be used for different things; not all wikis follow the same rules for using them. For example, the purpose of Wikipedia is to write articles for an encyclopedia. That is why on Wikipedia, people do not want general discussion that does not help in writing articles.
Ward Cunningham started the first wiki in March 1995. Many people liked it, and wrote there, after which they started similar websites such as Wikipedia. MediaWiki is the most used software for wikis and is the software used for Wikipedia and many other Wikis. JSPWiki is one of many others. "Wiki" is also sometimes an abbreviation for Wikipedia.
Most wikis can be edited by anyone and everyone. Some wikis are even available to people without an account, so sometimes wikis will become a target for vandals to add unwelcome, disruptive or even misleading content. There are many ways to prevent this. Individual pages can be protected to allow only certain users, or only those with an account, to edit them. Administrators can also block users who make repeated Vandal edits after a minimum of a single warning. Vandalism may not be stopped totally, but regular, careful checking can limit the amount of disruptive edits.
A website is a set of webpages that are joined. People look at websites with a computer of some kind, sometimes including the computer inside mobile phones and televisions. The websites are kept on computers called web servers.
A word is something spoken by the mouth which is meaningful. It is usually part of a sentence which makes the meaning clear.
Words are also used in writing, which is a relatively modern invention. In alphabetic writing, a word is a collection of letters. The word then communicates a meaning. These can also usually be pronounced. A logogram is also a word.
Web browsers are used by people to find and look at websites on the Internet. The first web browser was created in 1990. Many web browsers are available for free. All web browsers can go to websites but each browser has good things and bad things about it. For example, some browsers focus on data security and keeping computers safe from viruses. Other browsers are made so that web pages appear on-screen faster.
Web pages are usually stored in HTML code which describes what to show on the page like words or pictures. Web pages can also use two other types of code to tell the page how to work:
Wiktionary is a wiki-based project to develop a multilingual online dictionary, or a group of meanings for words, in the form of a wiki. There are many languages of Wiktionary. Wiktionary is also a thesaurus. Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia. The English Wiktionary currently has over 7.3 million pages and 4.0 million users. Much like Wikipedia, the Wiktionary is run in several different languages that can be selected from its main page. These include the Simple English Wiktionary.
The first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, came out on November 20, 1985. The newest version, Windows 11, came out October 5, 2021. Most personal computers made after 2015 come with Windows 10. However, some older or cheaper personal computers may come with Windows 8.1 or Windows 7.
Windows makes it easier to run programs (applications) than MS-DOS did. DOS required typed commands to make the computer do something. DOS required correct syntax of each command. Making mistakes caused the computer to usually give an error message and do nothing.
Windows has several kinds of applications/programs available. Popular applications include games, word processors (to write words) or additional programs like Adobe Flash Player (to watch some videos and play many games on internet sites). Adding new applications to Windows is called "installing". Applications can be bought/purchased on a CD or DVD. Applications can also be downloaded from the Internet. Some internet applications can be downloaded for free, and others can be bought using the internet.
A double-hung sash is a window that has two sashes (panels) that can independently move up and down. One is usually the lower; one the upper.
A roof lantern is a glass structure that has lots of different colours. It looks like a small building. It is built on a roof for day or moon light.
A stained-glass window is a window that is made up of pieces of coloured glass. The coloured glass can be transparent, translucent or opaque. It usually shows people or places. Usually, the glass in these windows is separated by lead rods. Stained-glass windows are very common in churches.
There are two main types of wine, red wine and white wine. Red wine is made using the skins of the grapes. The skins give the wine a dark color, and chemicals called tannins that taste bitter. Red wine can be sweet or "dry", meaning low in sugar.
White wine is made without the grape skins at all, so it is usually less bitter and more acidic. Like red wines, they can be sweet or dry.
Wine making begins with growing red or white grapes. Wine grapes have thicker skins and bigger seeds compared to table grapes for eating. After the grapes are ripe, they are picked off the plants. There are different ways of picking (for example, using machines, or picking by hand, in the day, or at night).
After harvest, the grapes are crushed to release their juice, which is very sugary. Before, this was done by people stomping on grapes with their bare feet. Today, machines are used, but people sometimes use their bare feet in festivals. The person making the wine also decides now if the wine will be red, white, or rose:
Next, the sweet grape juice is fermented, by adding yeast. In a few days, the yeast turns the sugar into alcohol, and also releases carbon dioxide.
After fermenting, the wine is stored for a while (called "aging"). The person making the wine can make different choices, which will change the flavor of the wine. They can choose to store the wine in a steel container, or a barrel made of oak wood. If they choose wood, the wine will absorb some of the wood flavor, which wine drinkers call "oakiness". This process can take only a couple of weeks, up to several years, depending on what kind of flavor the wine maker wants.
Objects have a length and a width in two dimensions or more. In shapes such as rectangles, multiplying the length and the width equals the area of the shape.
Water () is a transparent, tasteless, odourless, and almost always colourless chemical substance and covers about 71% of Earth's surface.
No known life can live without it. Water is essential for life. This has to be qualified a bit. There are some forms of life which can survive without it, but cannot reproduce without it. Since reproduction is a central part of life, it is clear that water is essential for an organism to survive and reproduce.
Lakes, oceans, seas, and rivers are made of water. Precipitation is water that falls from clouds in the sky. It may be rain if it is liquid, or it may be snow or ice frozen if it is cold. When water gets below , it freezes and becomes ice, the frozen kind of water. If water gets very hot (above , it boils and becomes steam or water vapor.
There is a water cycle.
On 22 July 2011, a report described the discovery of a gigantic cloud of water vapor containing "140 trillion times more water than the Earth's oceans combined" around a quasar 12 billion light years from Earth. According to the researchers, the "discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence".
Water has been detected in interstellar clouds in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Water probably exists in abundance in other galaxies, too. Its components, hydrogen and oxygen, are among the most abundant elements in the universe. Most other planetary systems may have similar ingredients.
We do not know exactly how the Earth came to have so much water. It is everywhere in the Universe, but it is uncommon for a place to have so much. The reasoning is like this: every element (except hydrogen and some helium) has been formed in stars. Therefore, oxygen was originally formed in stars. The formation of water is not a problem: it is exothermic, so forming the molecule from its atoms does not need outside energy. But to explain why the Earth has so much compared to, for example, Mars, is not easy. It is an undecided problem in planetary geology.