During ancient and medieval history, Jewish people were victims of ethnic cleansing in many countries. For example, around 1290 AD, King Edward I of England ordered all of the Jews in the country to leave. Hundreds of elderly Jews were executed. Next, France and some German states did the same. Finally, in 1492, Spain ordered its Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave the country. Any Jew who stayed in the country would be executed without a trial. Between 40,000 and 100,000 Jews were forced to leave Spain.
Ten years later, in 1502, Spain also forced its Muslims to leave the country.
In 1652, Oliver Cromwell and the English military took over Ireland. Historians Brendan O'Leary and John McGarry write: "Oliver Cromwell offered Irish Catholics a choice between genocide and forced mass population transfer." Cromwell wanted all of the Irish Catholics to leave eastern Ireland and move to the northwest.
With Cromwell in charge, the English military forced many Irish Catholics to leave eastern Ireland, and killed many of the people who refused to leave. They did this by:
Historian John Morrill says that England's actions were "the greatest episode of ethnic cleansing ever attempted in Western Europe." About 600,000 Irish people died 43% of the Irish population. Because of this, historians do not agree on whether this was an ethnic cleansing or a genocide.
In the 19th century, the United States government committed an ethnic cleansing against Native American tribes. At this time, the United States was growing. Many people in the country wanted to take over what is now the Southern United States. However, this land had always belonged to Native American tribes, like the Cherokee Nation.
In the early 1800s, the United States government started a program of removing these tribes from the South. The government wanted these tribes to move west, outside the United States. Under Andrew Jackson, the United States military took land away from Creek and Seminole Indians.
Some tribes signed treaties and agreed to move. However, other tribes refused to leave the land that had always been theirs. In 1829, Andrew Jackson became President. The next year, he signed the Indian Removal Act. Jackson used this law to force tribes that were still in the South to leave the United States.
The Cherokee Nation refused to leave their homes. In 1838, President Martin van Buren ordered the military to force them to leave. Soldiers forced about 15,000 Cherokees and 2,000 of their slaves to leave their land. At first, the Cherokees were all forced into internment camps, where 353 Cherokee died from diseases during one summer. After that, the Cherokee were forced to walk from the South to what is now Oklahoma and Arkansas. Most historians say that about 4,000 people died on the way. This was one out of every four people in the Cherokee population. Because so many people died, this forced migration is now called the Trail of Tears.
In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. This started World War II. After taking over part of Poland, Nazi Germany committed an ethnic cleansing against the Polish people. They did this in many ways:
Starting in 2003, the government of Sudan has been accused of committing an ethnic cleansing against black ethnic groups in Darfur. The Sudanese military, police, and a militia called the Janjaweed have done this by:
As of 2007, about 450,000 black Darfurians had been killed, and about 800 villages had been destroyed. As of April 2008, about 2.5 million people one-third of Darfur's population were living in refugee camps. These people had been forced to leave their homes, either by soldiers, or because their villages had been destroyed.
Timbre
Timbre is a quality of sound. It is what makes two different musical instruments sound different from each other, even when each instrument plays the same musical note.
"Playing the same note" means they have the same pitch and loudness. For instance, timbre is the difference between a guitar and a piano playing the same note at the same volume. In music, "tone quality" and "color" are synonyms for timbre.
There are many attempts by music theorists to explain timbre more fully. Unfortunately, their ideas depend on the reader having an advanced knowledge of musical theory. The "Acoustical Society of America" (ASA) Acoustical Terminology definition 12.09 of timbre is "that attribute of auditory sensation which enables a listener to judge that two nonidentical sounds, similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch, are dissimilar". It adds "Timbre depends primarily upon the frequency spectrum, although it also depends upon the sound pressure and the temporal characteristics of the sound".
Exaggeration
Exaggeration is a term for a figure of speech. It means the describing of something and making it more than it really is. The verb is to exaggerate.
An example of exaggeration would be: “I was walking along when suddenly this enormous dog walked along. It was as big as an elephant”. The dog may have been big, but it was certainly not as big as that. Another example of exaggeration would be: “I caught a fish as big as my house.”
Overstatement is another word that means almost the same thing. The opposite of overstatement is understatement.
A hyperbole (IPA:[haı'pɝ.bə.li]) is a type of exaggeration that is used in literature. It is a figure of speech. The opposite of hyperbole is hypobole, which is an understatement.
People exaggerate things because they have strong feelings about something. People may exaggerate to make people listen to what they say. They may do it to emphasize something. They may also exaggerate just to sound funny:
People may understate because they are being modest:
In modern slang, the word “hype” is sometimes used about something that is getting more publicity than it really deserves. The word hype comes from the word “hyperbole”.
Meiosis
Meiosis is a special type of cell division. Unlike mitosis, the way normal body cells divide, meiosis results in cells that only have half the usual number of chromosomes, one from each pair. For that reason, meiosis is often called "reduction division". In the long run, meiosis increases genetic variation, in a way which will be explained later.
Sexual reproduction takes place when a sperm fertilizes an egg. The eggs and sperm are special cells called gametes, or sex cells. Gametes are haploid; they have only half the number of chromosomes as a normal body cell (called a somatic cell). Fertilization restores the chromosomes in body cells to the diploid number.
The basic number of chromosomes in the body cells of a species is called the "somatic number" and is labelled "2n". In humans 2n = 46: we have 46 chromosomes. In the sex cells the chromosome number is "n" (humans: n = 23). So, in normal diploid organisms, chromosomes are present in two copies, one from each parent (23x2=46). The only exception are the sex chromosomes. In mammals, the female has two X chromosomes, and the male one X and one Y chromosome.
A "karyotype" is the characteristic chromosome number of a eukaryote species. The preparation and study of karyotypes is part of cytogenetics, the genetics of cells.
All eukaryotes that reproduce sexually use meiosis. This also includes many single-celled organisms. Meiosis does not occur in archaea or bacteria, which reproduce by asexual processes such as binary fission.
The offspring gets a set of chromosomes from each parent so that, overall, half of its heredity comes from each parent. But the two sets of chromosomes are not identical with the parental chromosomes. This is because they are changed during the reduction division by a process called "crossing-over".
This is two-fold:
1. First, to reduce the chromosomes in each egg or sperm to one set only.
2. To allow crossing-over to take place between each pair of parental chromosomes. Crossing-over changes which alleles sit on a particular chromosome.