Imagine you are standing in a farm field in central Illinois. The land is so flat you can see for miles and miles. On a clear day, you might see a grain silo 20 miles away. You might think to yourself, it sure is flat around here. If you drive one hundred miles to the south, the landscape changes. In southern Illinois, there are rolling hills. Why do you think this is? What could have caused these features? There are no big rivers that may have eroded and deposited this material. The ground is capable of supporting grass and trees, so wind erosion would not explain it. To answer the question, you need to go back 12,000 years. Around 12,000 years ago, a giant ice sheet covered much of the Midwest United States. Springfield, Illinois, was covered by over a mile of ice. Its hard to imagine a mile thick sheet of ice. The massive ice sheet, called a glacier, caused the features on the land you see today. Where did glaciers go? Where can you see them today? Glaciers are masses of flowing ice.

Question: "How long ago was Springfield, Illinois covered by over a mile of ice?"

Response: "20 years ago"

A: no

In her storage room-turned-office, Jennifer Baum works under an expanding leak that is causing the ceiling to turn brown and crumble. Mold grows in the buckets positioned to catch the water. She shrugs it off. Outside her office she has taped up a clear plastic suit, and a sign that reads, "All employees must don protective gear before coming in." Such is life in limbo. Nearly a year after Sept. 11, the Legal Aid Society-the lawyers for New York's poor and homeless-remains, well, homeless. The nonprofit has been barred from returning to its 90 Church St. headquarters, across from the World Trade Center site, because of environmental concerns. Legal Aid has uncomfortable company. More than 11,500 New Yorkers continue to work out of temporary space, according to analysis by Manhattan-based real estate brokerage TenantWise.com Inc. and Crain's New York Business. That's 8% of the 137,000 workers who lost their offices or access to them when the Twin Towers collapsed. Legal Aid's 450 displaced attorneys and staffers have spent the past 12 months spread among previously unused spaces-some unused for good reason-in the nonprofit's other offices. It could be another year and a half before they return to their old desks. They have contended with difficult working conditions as demand for Legal Aid's services is on the rise because of Sept. 11 and the deteriorating economy. The civil division is spread among a few boroughs. Their papers and documents, some 20,000 boxes worth, are stuck in a storage facility in Linden, N.J. "I am counting the days till we can have all the parts back in one place," says Steven Banks, Legal Aid's associate attorney in chief. In the memories of the exiled workers, the old office has achieved mythical proportions. They say the wood paneling and rugs had the ability to cool emotions and lift spirits. The Legal Aid office on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, where 65 displaced workers have cobbled together space amid the faded and scratched walls, looks more like a bargain basement.

Question: "What type of business is the Legal Aid Society?"

Response: "Real estate brokerage"

A: no

In chapters 3 and 4 we described how the U.S. government adjusted its existing agencies and capacities to address the emerging threat from Usama Bin Laden and his associates. After the August 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton and his chief aides explored ways of getting Bin Laden expelled from Afghanistan or possibly capturing or even killing him. Although disruption efforts around the world had achieved some successes, the core of Bin Laden's organization remained intact. President Clinton was deeply concerned about Bin Laden. He and his national security advisor, Samuel "Sandy" Berger, ensured they had a special daily pipeline of reports feeding them the latest updates on Bin Laden's reported location. In public, President Clinton spoke repeatedly about the threat of terrorism, referring to terrorist training camps but saying little about Bin Laden and nothing about al Qaeda. He explained to us that this was deliberate-intended to avoid enhancing Bin Laden's stature by giving him unnecessary publicity. His speeches focused especially on the danger of nonstate actors and of chemical and biological weapons. As the millennium approached, the most publicized worries were not about terrorism but about computer breakdowns-the Y2K scare. Some government officials were concerned that terrorists would take advantage of such breakdowns. On November 30, 1999, Jordanian intelligence intercepted a telephone call between Abu Zubaydah, a longtime ally of Bin Laden, and Khadr Abu Hoshar, a Palestinian extremist. Abu Zubaydah said, "The time for training is over." Suspecting that this was a signal for Abu Hoshar to commence a terrorist operation, Jordanian police arrested Abu Hoshar and 15 others and informed Washington. One of the 16, Raed Hijazi, had been born in California to Palestinian parents; after spending his childhood in the Middle East, he had returned to northern California, taken refuge in extremist Islamist beliefs, and then made his way to Abu Zubaydah's Khaldan camp in Afghanistan, where he learned the fundamentals of guerrilla warfare. He and his younger brother had been recruited by Abu Hoshar into a loosely knit plot to attack Jewish and American targets in Jordan. After late 1996, when Abu Hoshar was arrested and jailed, Hijazi moved back to the United States, worked as a cabdriver in Boston, and sent money back to his fellow plotters. After Abu Hoshar's release, Hijazi shuttled between Boston and Jordan gathering money and supplies. With Abu Hoshar, he recruited inTurkey and Syria as well as Jordan; with Abu Zubaydah's assistance, Abu Hoshar sent these recruits to Afghanistan for training.

Question: "On what date did Abu Zubaydah say, "The time for training is over."?"

Response: "November, 1999"

A:
no