Many Quakers in North America, South America, and Africa have a different kind of worship service, like other Christian services. They sing hymns and a pastor gives a sermon. They also have a quiet time, but it does not last as long. These Quakers often have strong Christian beliefs.
And at other times these meetings also decide what Quakers should do - these meetings can be called "meetings for business", but other people call them "meetings for worship for business", because they include parts of both worship and business.
Quakers seek religious truth in their inner experiences. They rely on conscience to guide what they do. They emphasise direct experience of God rather than ritual or ceremony. They believe that priests and rituals are unnecessary and can get between the believer and God. What Quakers say matches what they do.
Almost all Quakers share these beliefs:
Size
The size of something is how much space the thing takes. It can also be described as how big or small something is.
Sizes can be measured. When a size is measured, it is given a number.
"Small" and "big" are opposites.
Opposite
Opposite may refer to:
Direction
Direction follows an imaginary line connecting two points.
Something following the line is moving in that "direction". People show directions by pointing.
The word "direction" is made from the root "direct" meaning to guide.
These are words used to talk about a direction:
Starvation
Starvation is when a person or animal has not eaten food for such a time that they are unable to do things in a normal way.
After the stomach has been left empty for so long the body starts to give up.
There are many effects of starvation. These can include:
The metabolism naturally lowers when a person is starved. This makes weight loss slower.
Consistently not being able to eat enough will lead to permanent damage to the organs. This is the case for humans when they do not eat enough for about 1-2 months. A process called catabolysis will break down body tissues, using them as fuel to keep vital functions (the nervous system and the heart) working. It will first use muscles before it starts destroying fat.
Starvation was also used to inflict a death penalty. People who eat nothing usually die in a few months.
In 1944 Ancel Keys started a scientific experiment about starvation. The participants were all men. They ate 1800 calories a day.
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word or MS Word (often called Word) is a graphical word processing program that users can type with. It is made by the computer company Microsoft. Its purpose is to allow users to type and save documents.
Similar to other word processors, it has helpful tools to make documents.
Microsoft Word is a part of Microsoft Office, but can also be bought separately.
The program was first released in 1981.
Many of the ideas and features in Microsoft Word came from Bravo, the first graphical writing program.
Microsoft bought the Bravo program, and changed its name to "Microsoft Word".
When it first came out, it was not very popular, and did not sell as well as other writing programs like WordPerfect.
Although it was not very popular when it came out, it had a feature called "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get), which meant that people can change the visual style of writing (e.g. bold, italics), by clicking on buttons, when in other programs like WordPerfect, people had to add special 'codes' to change the style of writing. "WYSIWYG" is now a common feature of all computer writing programs.
There are versions for Microsoft Word for other operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows. New versions support fewer operating systems, although they always support Windows.
The program is very popular.
Without configuration the program saved the document in a proprietary file format, so other programs could not open it. When the user sent his document to a friend, the friend needed a copy of Microsoft Word to read the document. Then that friend would probably also save documents in the same secret format of Word. This gave Microsoft Word a dominant position.
Ant
Ants are a kind of insect that lives together in large colonies. They are the family Formicidae.
Ants are a lot like wasps and bees. They all came from the same kind of animal a long time ago, but now they are different. There are about 22,000 different kinds of ants, but we only know of 12,500 for sure. Every kind of ant has a thin part in the middle of their body and two long body parts on their heads called antennae.
Ants live in groups that can be big or small. Some kinds of ants live in small groups and eat other animals. Some ants work together in very big groups. These groups can have millions of ants in them that travel outside every day in a big area. Ants are small, but they are very strong. Some ants are strong enough to carry things that are as heavy as 20 ants. Some ants are called workers. Workers dig tunnels and carry food back to the colony so that other ants and the queen ant can eat.
The groups that ants live in are called colonies. A colony has a female ant called a queen which lays eggs. Those eggs will grow into more ants. Big colonies of ants have different kinds of ants that grow from the eggs. These are called different castes of ants. Some are "workers" which do jobs like carrying and digging, and "soldiers" which fight other animals. Worker and solider ants are females. Another type of ant are "drones" which are male ants.
Really big ant colonies are sometimes called "superorganisms". This means the ants work together so well that they are like little parts of one big animal. Ants cannot live by themselves for very long because they need to work with other ants.
Ants have colonies almost everywhere on planet Earth. Antarctica lacks ants because it's very cold and there's not much food. Small islands may not have ants.
The family Formicidae belongs to the order Hymenoptera, which also includes sawflies, bees and wasps. Ants evolved from a lineage within the vespoid wasps.
Phylogenetic analysis suggests that ants arose in the Lower Cretaceous period about 110 to 130 million years ago, or even earlier. One estimate from DNA studies places the origin of ants at ≈140 million years ago (mya). Another study puts it in the Jurassic at 185 ± 36 mya (95% confidence limits).
After the rise of flowering plants about 100 million years ago ants diversified. They became ecologically dominant about 60 million years ago.
In 1966 E.O. Wilson and his colleagues identified the fossil remains of an ant ("Sphecomyrma freyi") from the Cretaceous period. The specimen, trapped in amber dating back to more than 80 million years ago, has features of both ants and wasps. "Sphecomyrma" was probably a ground forager but some suggest that primitive ants were likely to have been predators underneath the surface of the soil.
During the Cretaceous period, a few species of primitive ants ranged widely on the Laurasian super-continent (the northern hemisphere). They were scarce in comparison to other insects, representing about 1% of the insect population.
Ants became dominant after adaptive radiation at the beginning of the Cainozoic. By the Oligocene and Miocene ants had come to represent 20-40% of all insects found in major fossil deposits. Of the species that lived in the Eocene epoch, approximately one in ten genera survive to the present. Genera surviving today comprise 56% of the genera in Baltic amber fossils (early Oligocene), and 92% of the genera in Dominican amber fossils (apparently early Miocene).
Termites, though sometimes called "white ants", are not ants and belong to the order Isoptera. Termites are actually more closely related to cockroaches and mantids. Termites are eusocial but differ greatly in the genetics of reproduction. The similar social structure is attributed to convergent evolution. Velvet ants look like large ants, but are wingless female wasps.