QUES: In Japanese, they are usually referred to as bushi (?, [bu.i]) or buke (?). According to translator William Scott Wilson: "In Chinese, the character was originally a verb meaning "to wait upon" or "accompany persons" in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the original term in Japanese, saburau. In both countries the terms were nominalized to mean "those who serve in close attendance to the nobility", the pronunciation in Japanese changing to saburai. According to Wilson, an early reference to the word "samurai" appears in the Kokin Wakashu (905914), the first imperial anthology of poems, completed in the first part of the 10th century.

What are samurai usually called in Japanse?
What is the answer?
ANS: bushi (?, [bu.i]) or buke (?)
QUES: Around 13001350 the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age. The colder climate resulted in agricultural crises, the first of which is known as the Great Famine of 1315-1317. The demographic consequences of this famine, however, were not as severe as the plagues that occurred later in the century, particularly the Black Death. Estimates of the death rate caused by this epidemic range from one third to as much as sixty percent. By around 1420, the accumulated effect of recurring plagues and famines had reduced the population of Europe to perhaps no more than a third of what it was a century earlier. The effects of natural disasters were exacerbated by armed conflicts; this was particularly the case in France during the Hundred Years' War.

What major conflict rocked France during the 12th and 13th centuries?
What is the answer?
ANS: unanswerable
QUES: In ring-porous species, such as ash, black locust, catalpa, chestnut, elm, hickory, mulberry, and oak, the larger vessels or pores (as cross sections of vessels are called) are localised in the part of the growth ring formed in spring, thus forming a region of more or less open and porous tissue. The rest of the ring, produced in summer, is made up of smaller vessels and a much greater proportion of wood fibers. These fibers are the elements which give strength and toughness to wood, while the vessels are a source of weakness.[citation needed]

What species of hardwood are hickory and mulberry trees?
What is the answer?
ANS:
ring-porous