Chimpanzees mainly eat fruit, leaves, flowers, seeds, bark, honey, insects, bird eggs, and meat. They spend a lot of time with other chimpanzees from their group, acting up, playing, and chatting. Sometimes they will groom each other; combing and looking through each other's thick fur; picking out the dirt and insects. Grooming helps chimps feel comfortable and friendly.
Chimpanzees can walk on two feet, but they prefer to move about on all four legs. On the ground, they walk on their hind feet and knuckles. They have hands that look like human hands, but their thumbs are shorter than those of humans. At night, chimpanzees sleep in nests that they make on tree branches. They bend twigs and tuck in leaves to make a soft platform to rest in a place that is safe from enemies on the ground. The gestation period of chimpanzees lasts between six and eight months. Usually only one offspring is produced; they rarely have twins. Chimpanzees live up to 60 years in the wild.
Jane Goodall has studied chimpanzees since 1960. She observed how chimpanzees use tools in several ways. They will pick up rocks to crack nuts for a meal. They also strip down twigs and stick them into a termite mound to collect a tasty snack. Some have been known to make a sponge from leaves in order to hold more drinking water. The chimp chews leaves to soften them up, dips them in rainwater, and then squeezes the water into its mouth. Chimpanzees are also known to think ahead and solve problems.
The behavior described in this section refers to the common chimpanzee. At present there is no evidence that the bonobo has a similar level of aggressive behavior.
Chimpanzees attack "Colobus" monkeys by working as a team to corner them in the high branches of the trees. Then they tear the monkey apart and eat it. It is thought the main benefit is that meat is a more rich source of nutrition than their usual vegetarian diet.
If they can, male chimpanzees try to kill the male members of neighboring groups. Males work together when they spot a chance to make a lightning raid on an isolated male from the other group. They kill him. In Gombe, Tanzania, a group in the 1970s was seen to kill seven of their neighbors one by one, until all were gone. It can take years for this to happen but, when it does, the remaining females and the neighboring territory are added to the now larger group. Attacks like this are carefully planned, done only when success is likely, and carried out in silence.
The advantage for the males that triumph is to breed more children. Their tribe also holds a larger territory, and so has access to more food. Several authors have drawn a connection between this behaviour and the origins of human warfare.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology studied chimpanzees in Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire. The project followed four groups of chimpanzees for twenty years. They found that female chimpanzees patrolled territory and fought with chimpanzees from other groups too, not just males. The scientists wondered if human beings have been imagining that male chimpanzees do all the fighting because we think of human warfare being done mostly by men.
Chimpanzees show their emotions with their faces and sounds. They make hooting sounds to express the discovery of food, and the face of a chimpanzee with a scowling face and lips pressed is to express annoyance. This means the chimpanzee may attack. Or, the chimpanzee may bare its teeth to express that it is afraid or that a more dominant chimp is approaching.
According to a genome study done by the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, humans share either 96% or 95% of their DNA with chimpanzees. However, this applies only to single nucleotide polymorphisms, that is, changes in "single" base pairs only. The full picture is rather different.
24% of the chimpanzee genome does not align with the human genome, and so cannot be directly compared. There are 3% further alignment gaps, 1.23% SNP differences, and 2.7% copy number variations totaling at least 30% differences between chimpanzee and "Homo sapiens" genomes. On the other hand, 30% of all human proteins are identical in sequence to the corresponding chimpanzee proteins.
Meridian
A meridian is an imaginary line of longitude drawn along the surface of the earth from the North Pole to the South Pole.
Geographers today measure these lines from what they call the Prime Meridian. It is the line of longitude that goes through the Royal Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich, England. They decided this at the 1884 "International Meridian Conference".
Meridians, as lines of longitude, are measured in degrees. The Prime Meridian, as the starting point, is 0 (zero) degrees. Lines west of the Prime Meridian are either called "west", as in "the longitude of Los Angeles, California is 118 degrees west", or as a negative number: "the longitude of Los Angeles, California is -118 degrees". Going the other direction, east of the Prime Meridian is always said as a positive number: "The longitude of Mecca is about 40 degrees east," or just "The longitude of Mecca is about 40 degrees."
1700s
District
A district is an area or locality. In some places, it is a kind of local government.
Some of the countries districts are used in are Austria, Belgium, China, England, Germany, Hong Kong, Serbia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Portugal, Switzerland, the United States, and many more.
In the South Asian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, the common term for an official or government administration district is Zillah.
Literacy
Literacy means the ability to read and write. Being able to read and write is an important skill in modern societies. Usually, people learn how to read and write at school. People who can read and write are called "literate"; those who cannot are called "illiterate".
According to UNESCO, illiteracy is not being able to write or read a simple sentence in any language. They estimated that, in 1998, about 16% of the world's population were illiterate.
Illiteracy is highest amongst the states of the Arabian Peninsula, and in Africa, around the Sahara. In those countries about 30% of men, and 40-50% of women are illiterate, by the UN definition. One of the causes of illiteracy is that someone who can manage to live without being able to read and write often does not have any reason to want to learn to read and write. Cultural factors also play a part, such as having a culture in which the oral tradition (communicating by speaking) is more important than writing. A tribe that mostly herds livestock, for example, may have no need to read or write.
There are two different kinds of illiteracy:
In English the word literacy has traditionally meant to be well educated. It also meant to be familiar with literature (to know about books). In the late 19th century the word came to include the ability to read and write. It still kept its larger meaning. In modern usage, literacy also means being able to read print, visual, and sound texts. To continue learning students must be literate in more than just reading and writing text.
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Isle of Man
The Isle of Man () is an island in the Irish Sea, off the coast of Great Britain (of which it is a crown dependency). Douglas is the capital city. It also has a flag with a red background and 3 armoured legs joined together - "whichever way you throw us, we always land on our feet".
It has a Parliament called Tynwald. It is the longest running parliament in the world.