QUES: The European, American, and Japanese comics traditions have followed different paths. Europeans have seen their tradition as beginning with the Swiss Rodolphe Topffer from as early as 1827 and Americans have seen the origin of theirs in Richard F. Outcault's 1890s newspaper strip The Yellow Kid, though many Americans have come to recognize Topffer's precedence. Japan had a long prehistory of satirical cartoons and comics leading up to the World War II era. The ukiyo-e artist Hokusai popularized the Japanese term for comics and cartooning, manga, in the early 19th century. In the post-war era modern Japanese comics began to flourish when Osamu Tezuka produced a prolific body of work. Towards the close of the 20th century, these three traditions converged in a trend towards book-length comics: the comics album in Europe, the tankobon[a] in Japan, and the graphic novel in the English-speaking countries.
Who is least known for being the first comics creator in Europe?

ANS: unanswerable

QUES: In March 2006, a law was introduced to forbid smoking in all enclosed public places in Scotland. Wales followed suit in April 2007, with England introducing the ban in July 2007. Pub landlords had raised concerns prior to the implementation of the law that a smoking ban would have a negative impact on sales. After two years, the impact of the ban was mixed; some pubs suffered declining sales, while others developed their food sales. The Wetherspoon pub chain reported in June 2009 that profits were at the top end of expectations; however, Scottish & Newcastle's takeover by Carlsberg and Heineken was reported in January 2008 as partly the result of its weakness following falling sales due to the ban. Similar bans are applied in Australian pubs with smoking only allowed in designated areas.
What company took over Scottish & Newcastle's pubs?

ANS: Carlsberg and Heineken

QUES: One of the central problems in the anthropology of art concerns the universality of 'art' as a cultural phenomenon. Several anthropologists have noted that the Western categories of 'painting', 'sculpture', or 'literature', conceived as independent artistic activities, do not exist, or exist in a significantly different form, in most non-Western contexts. To surmount this difficulty, anthropologists of art have focused on formal features in objects which, without exclusively being 'artistic', have certain evident 'aesthetic' qualities. Boas' Primitive Art, Claude Levi-Strauss' The Way of the Masks (1982) or Geertz's 'Art as Cultural System' (1983) are some examples in this trend to transform the anthropology of 'art' into an anthropology of culturally specific 'aesthetics'.
What is the trend to transform the anthropology of 'art' into an anthropology of?

ANS: culturally specific 'aesthetics'

QUES: Modern Nationalism, as developed especially since the French Revolution, has made the distinction between "language" and "dialect" an issue of great political importance. A group speaking a separate "language" is often seen as having a greater claim to being a separate "people", and thus to be more deserving of its own independent state, while a group speaking a "dialect" tends to be seen not as "a people" in its own right, but as a sub-group, part of a bigger people, which must content itself with regional autonomy.[citation needed] The distinction between language and dialect is thus inevitably made at least as much on a political basis as on a linguistic one, and can lead to great political controversy, or even armed conflict.
If possessing a language leads to a group being regarded as a separate people, what political arrangement presumably follows?

ANS:
its own independent state