Dam Good Luck: From the beginning, Las Vegas was built to serve travelers. The railroad needed a way station, and Las Vegas was the place. Growth continued for ten years, and by 1915 the town had telephones, round-the-clock electricity, and a growing populationmany of whom worked in the railroad repair shop. But such heady progress would soon come to a halt. The growing competition in rail transport resulted in Union Pacific buying the Los AngelesSalt Lake line. Union Pacific then consolidated its operations, eliminating the Las Vegas repair facility. Additionally, Las Vegas had been made a part of Nevada's new Clark County in 1909, a year when the legislature also outlawed gambling. These unfortunate circumstances threatened to relegate Las Vegas to the status of a small desert community that could no longer support its 3000 residents. But the southwest's growing need for water, combined with Las Vegas's fortuitous proximity to the Colorado River, would give Las Vegas a second chance to achieve prosperity. Construction on Hoover Dam (originally Boulder Dam, subsequently renamed for the president who authorized the project) began in 1931 in a canyon 45 miles (72 km) southeast of Las Vegas. Providing an influx of $165 million to the southwestern economy, Hoover Dam played a major role in preventing Las Vegas from drying up, both financially and literally. Not only did it create jobs, but it also created Lake Mead, the massive reservoir that today provides water to all of southern Nevada. More Government Help: The construction of Hoover Dam did not single-handedly save Las Vegas, however. The state legislature helped as well, by legalizing gambling in 1931 and thus solidifying the future of the town, though legislators and residents could never have known this at the time. The hordes of people who attended Hoover Dam's 1935 dedication set the city's now-formidable public relations machine into action. They went to work on what has become one of the lengthiest citywide tourism campaigns ever attempted. It didn't take long for the city to establish itself as a wild-West town with an "anything goes" attitude. Vices outlawed or heavily controlled elsewhere were legal here, available any hour of any day (or night).

Question: "What circumstances threatened to relegate Las Vegas to the status of a small desert community that could no longer support its 3000 residents?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "The proximity of Las Vegas to the Colorado River"

Response: no

To make certain the U.S. was aware of the danger, in July 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Szilard and Wigner visited Einstein to explain the possibility of atomic bombs, which Einstein, a pacifist, said he had never considered. He was asked to lend his support by writing a letter, with Szilard, to President Roosevelt, recommending the U.S. pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research. A secret German facility, apparently the largest of the Third Reich, covering 75 acres in an underground complex, was being re-excavated in Austria in December 2014 and may have been planned for use in nuclear research and development. The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II". In addition to the letter, Einstein used his connections with the Belgian Royal Family and the Belgian queen mother to get access with a personal envoy to the White House's Oval Office. President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II. For Einstein, "war was a disease ... [and] he called for resistance to war." By signing the letter to Roosevelt he went against his pacifist principles. In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life--when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification--the danger that the Germans would make them ..."

Question: "How many years before Einstein's death did he begin the quest toward creating a nuclear weapon?"

Response: "He began his quest 26 years before his death"
OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

A: no

Independence with Partition: The British began to see India's independence as inevitable; however, only a few seemed to understand the vital role of the religious groups. Britain prepared a parliamentary democracy with majority rule, but the majority were Hindusand Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had been killing each other in war for many centuries. Nehru's Congress Party, largely Hindu with a socialist leadership, wanted a parliamentary democracy. As counterweight, British legislation reserved parliamentary seats for religious minorities, but the Punjab and Bengal had such a complicated mixture of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that it was not possible to avoid fights over how separate constituencies were to be formed. The seeds of future trouble were sown. The legislation on reserving seats gave the Muslims the basis for an alternative to an India in which they were only a quarter of the population: Partition. In 1930, the poet Muhammad Iqbal proposed a separate Muslim homeland in the northwest of India. A small group of Indian Muslims at Cambridge came up with the name Pakistan, using the initials of the Punjab, Afghania (N.W. Frontier Province), Kashmir, and Sind (at the same time producing the word pak, meaning "pure"), and adding "stan," the Persian suffix for the word "country. " The Muslim campaign for Partition was led by London-trained Bombay lawyer, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Meanwhile, Gandhi vehemently opposed any dismemberment of the country, and tried to keep people united by fasting to uphold the spirit of love, and by focussing on the common adversary: the British. Advocating civil disobedience, he led his famous Salt March to the sea, to scoop up salt and circumvent the hated British salt tax. This put more than 60,000 in jail. Against this militancy, World War II did not elicit the solidarity of the first. Indians courageously fought alongside the British troops, in Burma, the Middle East, and Europe, but Gandhi saw the British as a provocation for Japanese invasion and was jailed yet again, for launching a "Quit India" campaign in the year 1942. Some anti-British extremists saw the Japanese as an Asian liberator. Winston Churchill didn't want any Indian independence and so it was probably as well for India that he was defeated by Attlee's Labor Party in 1945. With riots growing ever more bloody in Bengal, Bihar, and the Punjab, India's last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, kept a mandate to make the British departure as quick and as smooth as possible. Quick it wassix months after his arrivalbut not smooth.

Question: "Who led the famous Salt March to the sea?"

OPTIONS:
- no
- yes

Answer: "Nehru"

Response:
no