title: William the Conqueror

text: But William's minority rule of Normandy did not start well. Some Normans did not want a boy as their duke. Robert II Archbishop of Rouen was a powerful man in Normandy. He protected William. King Henry I of France also approved of William. In 1037, Archbishop Robert died. Without his support Norman nobles began fighting among themselves. Some wanted William out of the way and tried to kill him. One of William's servants was killed in the very room where William slept. Two more of William's protectors died during this time. Normandy was in complete disorder.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In 1042 William held a church council in Normandy. At that council the church made a new law called the Truce of God. It was to help stop all the private wars. There could be no fighting on feast days or fast days. No fighting was allowed from Thursday night until Monday morning. The punishment for breaking the truce was excommunication. William probably reached the age of majority in about 1044. He no longer needed tutors. He could now rule on his own.


title: William the Conqueror

text: The private wars continued into 1046. William's rule depended on the loyalty of his viscounts. By the fall of 1046 many of the families in lower Normandy began plotting to replace William as duke. Guy of Burgundy, William's cousin, was sent to William's court in hopes he would do well there. William gave Guy castles at Brionne and Vernon. But Guy wasn't happy with this and decided he should rule Normandy himself. He became the leader of what was by now an open revolt. Two of William's viscounts joined Guy. William realized this was a serious threat and he asked King Henry for help. The French king came right away and brought a large army. The combined armies of Duke William and King Henry met the rebels at Val-es-Dunes. The rebels were defeated and Guy fled to his castle at Brionne. William kept the castle cut off from food or supplies until Guy gave up in 1049. The duke forgave his cousin, but Guy soon returned to Burgundy. William's victory at Val-es-Dunes gave him some control of Normandy.


title: William the Conqueror

text: A church council met in October 1047 near the battlefield to consider a new Truce of God. No private wars would be allowed from Wednesday evening through Monday morning. Also no such fighting was allowed during Advent, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. This followed other such truces in place elsewhere in France. But the king and duke were both excluded from this truce. They were allowed to wage war during these times to keep the peace. William's peace in Normandy was now supported by the church.


title: William the Conqueror

text: The battle of Val-es-Dunes was the start of William's rise to power. As the king had stepped in it was more his victory than William's. But William's nobles now began to see him as a leader. He could now think about taking a wife. Shortly before 1049 William decided to marry Matilda of Flanders. She was the daughter of Baldwin V of Flanders and Adela of France, who was the daughter of King Robert II of France. Before it could take place Pope Leo IX refused to allow the marriage. He did not give a reason but the two were cousins. Some time between 1050 and 1052 the two married anyway. But it wasn't until 1059 that another pope, Nicholas II, lifted the ban on their marriage.


title: William the Conqueror

text: While William was building his power in Normandy things were changing around him. King Henry had supported him and William had helped the king against the count of Anjou. About 1052 Count Geoffrey of Anjou and the king suddenly made peace. Just as suddenly the king turned on William. At the same time two of William's uncles, Archbishop Mauger and Count William of Arques rebelled against their nephew. William fought his uncle at the castle at Arques. King Henry now led a large force (army) into Normandy to help Count William of Arques. But Duke William met him in battle and won. Without the king's army to help, the castle had to give up. Duke William sent his two uncles away from Normandy.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In 1054 the king again entered Normandy with a large hostile force. He split his army in two and led the southern forces himself. His brother Odo led the second force east of the Seine river. This time William had all of Normandy supporting him. He had everything that could be used as food removed ahead of the French armies. This would cause them difficulty in keeping their soldiers fed. William also split his soldiers into two armies. William's forces watched the king's armies looking for any chance to attack. When Odo's forces reached the town of Mortimer they found plenty of food and drink. This caused his forces to relax and enjoy themselves. The commanders of William's second army caught them by surprise and killed most of Odo's soldiers. Those who did survive were taken prisoner and held for ransom. When the king got the news that his brother's army had been destroyed his army was struck with panic. The king and his men left Normandy as fast as they could. King Henry I agreed to a peace that lasted three years. But in 1058 the king broke the peace and invaded Normandy again. Just as before William kept the king's army close but waited for the best time to strike. This came as the French army was crossing the Dives river at Varaville. The king had already crossed the river and watched as his army was destroyed as they entered the water. He took what remained of his army and left Normandy for good. The king died a short time later. The new king, his young son Phillip, was under the care of William's father-in-law, Baldwin V. France was no longer hostile to Normandy and this allowed William the freedom to expand.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In 1002 Ethelred King of England married Emma, sister of Duke Richard II of Normandy. The alliance formed by this marriage had far reaching effects. When Canute came to the throne of England in 1016, he took Emma of Normandy as his wife. Her two sons by her former marriage fled to Normandy for their own safety. Edward, the older son, stayed in Normandy for many years at the court of the dukes. The last duke who protected him there was his cousin William. Edward became King of England in 1042. in 1052 Edward made William his heir. In 1065 Harold Godwinson was in Normandy. While he was there he promised Duke William he would support him as successor to the English throne. On 5 January 1066 Edward the king died. But Harold did not respect his oaths. The next day, the day of the funeral, Harold Godwinson was crowned King of England. The story was that on his deathbed, the king had changed his mind, and promised Harold the throne. Harold was not royalty himself and had no legal claim on the throne. For weeks William must have known Edward was dying. But the news of the king's death and Harold's taking the throne must have been a surprise to others.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William began his plans for invasion almost as soon as he received news of the events in England. He called a meeting of his greatest men. William made plans to gather a large army from all over France. His influence and wealth meant he could mount a large campaign. His first task was to build a fleet of ships to carry his army across the English Channel. Then he started gathering an army. His friendship with Brittany, France, and Flanders meant he did not have to rely only on his own army. He hired and paid soldiers from many parts of Europe. William asked for and got the support of the pope who gave him a banner to carry into battle. At the same time Duke William was planning his invasion, so too was Harold Hardrada. The king of England knew both would be coming but he kept his ships and forces in the south of England where William might land.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William may have had as many as 1,000 ships in his invasion fleet. They had favorable winds to leave Normandy on the night of 27 September 1066. William's ship, the Mora, was a gift of his wife, Matilda. It led the fleet to the landing at Pevensey the next morning. As soon as he landed William got news of King Harold's victory over the Norwegian king at Stamford Bridge in the north of England. Harold also received news that William had landed at Pevensey and came south as quickly as he could. The king rested at London for a few days before taking his army to meet William and his French forces.


title: William the Conqueror

text: King Harold's army took up a position on an east–west ridge north of Hastings. The ridge itself was called Senlay Hill. They found the Norman army marching up the valley in front of them. While Harold had more soldiers, they were tired from the 60-mile (96km) forced march from London. William formed his lines at the base of the hill facing the shield wall of the English. He sent his archers halfway up the slope to attack the English. He sent his mounted knights to the left and right to find any weak spots. At first William's knights tried to break through the shield wall with the weight of their horses. But they were attacking uphill and could not gain any speed. Harold's front line simply stood fast and was able to fend off any attacks. William's army began to fall back with rumors of Duke William's death. William removed his helmet so his men could see he was still alive. When William saw that many of Harold's men were following his knights back down the hill he used a trick he had learned years before. He turned suddenly and charged the oncoming English foot soldiers who had no chance against mounted knights.


title: William the Conqueror

text: This tactic worked at least two more times during the battle and made Harold's shield wall weaker. Now William used something new. Where his attacks by knights and soldiers had been separate movements he now used them together. Where his archers had not succeeded against the shield wall he had them shoot high into the air so the arrows came down on top of the English. This may be where king Harold was killed by an arrow through his eye. The shield wall finally broke and the Normans were on top of them. By nightfall the English were either dead on the field or being hunted down by William's troops. William called his troops back and they all spent the night camped on the battlefield.


title: William the Conqueror

text: The battle was won but the English still had smaller armies which had not joined King Harold at Hastings. They had lost their king but were still trying to reorganize. William rested his army for five days before moving towards London. His line of march took him through several towns he either captured or destroyed. When William reached London the English resisted for a short time but in the end surrendered. On Christmas day in 1066 William was crowned King of England. His victory at Hastings gave Duke William the nickname he has been known by ever since: 'William the Conqueror'.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William chose to be crowned at Christmas. This was partly because he thought the English would be less likely to riot at this high feast day. It was also a good choice because he believed it was God's will he be king. Now the king, William spent a few months in England. He then returned to Normandy leaving England in the hands of two capable men. These were his half-brother Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux and William FitzOsbern. Odo was made the Earl of Kent while FitzOsbern became the earl of Hereford. The remaining three English earls were left in place. When William sailed back to Normandy with him were many of his followers. Many of his soldiers who had been paid and others he wished to keep track of. In particular these were the English Archbishop Stigand and Edgar Atheling. He also brought his remaining three English earls, Edwin, Morcar and Waltheof. This was so none of them could start a revolt while he was away. William had his duties at home to take care of. Also many of his soldiers needed to come back to keep the duchy safe.


title: William the Conqueror

text: When William returned to London in December 1067 he began to find out what problems had come up while he was gone. Hertfordshire had been raided by Mercians. Then Exeter had not accepted the rule of the new king. William raised money from all those parts of England that would pay. He also called out English levies. Exeter surrendered after one of its hostages was blinded. After he subdued Devon and Cornwall all seemed quiet. At Winchester William sent for his wife Matilda who was crowned Queen of England there at Pentecost.


title: William the Conqueror

text: By summer more rebellions had broken out. At the same time others were fleeing England. Edgar Atheling along with his mother and sisters left for Scotland where they were welcomed. In the North strong anti-Norman groups were gathering around York. Earl Edwin and his brother Morcar left William's court to join the rebels in the north. William then built a castle at Warwick. This caused the Earls and others to give in to William. Other castles followed. William then entered York where others came to him and submitted. He then negotiated with the king of Scots to prevent any invasions of England from the north. But his campaign in the North was not as effective as he thought. In 1069 a second uprising developed into a war. The men William left in charge had been killed. A small Norman force was holding out in York when William came to their aid. After building another castle William left Earl William FitzOsbern in charge. For the next five months the north was quiet. But the northern English leaders had sent word to King Swein in Denmark offering him the crown if he could defeat the Normans. Swein sent a Danish fleet to England.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In the summer of 1069 the Danish fleet appeared off the coast of Kent. It moved up the coast towards the north, raiding as it went. William and his army were in the south guarding against any incursions. Finally the fleet joined the English rebels on the banks of the River Humber. The remaining English earls all deserted William and joined the combined English-Danish forces. They moved against the Norman garrison at York and killed all but a few women and children. William Malet, a Norman who had lived in England before 1066 was also spared.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William's northern army was wiped out and York was in ruins. At the same time smaller rebellions were breaking out in Wales and southwest England. William knew he was in trouble. He began by calling in all his commanders and troops to combine his forces. The king knew that with a smaller army he had to deal with one group of rebels at a time. He sent William FitzOsbern and Brian of Brittany to deal with Exeter. William himself fought an army moving in from the east. In both cases the Norman armies were victorious. He now moved on the northern armies that had destroyed York. But he was unable to get any farther north than Pontefract. After trying for several weeks William bribed the Danish Fleet to withdraw from York for the winter. They agreed and returned to the mouth of the Humber to winter there. William was now able to move up to York. He rebuilt the castles there. He then had his forces spread out and destroy everything useful for the English and Danish army to feed itself. The result was widespread famine and the people of the area either left or starved to death. This was William's infamous harrying of the North. The result of all this was the surrender of his English Earls and most of the rebels in England. The few remaining groups were quickly crushed by William's army. But one group proved more stubborn. This was at Chester and after a forced march during Winter, William surprised them before they were ready. After their surrender he built two more castles there then returned to Winchester.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William never again had to lay waste to a county as he did to Yorkshire. He had dealt with the main threats to his rule but some had only been solved in part. The Danish fleet came back in 1070 this time led by King Swen. They joined a small group of rebels on the Isle of Ely led by Hereward the Wake. Again William bribed the Danes to leave and then dealt with the rebels. Hereward was never heard from again.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William now had to rule both England and Normandy. He found he had to be present to keep things under control. When he was in Normandy trouble often broke out in England. When in England, though, Normandy was being ruled by his wife Matilda. But Fulk Rechin, the new count of Anjou, had taken Maine from William's control. William had to take it back in 1073.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In 1082 William arrested his half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent. The reasons are uncertain but Odo was trying to raise an army to march on Rome. His plan was to become the next Pope. William put him on trial on the Isle of Wight. In addition to other crimes was that of trying to raise an army among William's soldiers. As William pointed out, they were needed for the defense of England. Odo protested that not even a king could judge him. As a bishop only the Pope could. William replied that he wasn't seizing a bishop, he was seizing his earl who he left in charge during his absence. Odo was imprisoned in Normandy for the rest of his life.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In 1083 Queen Matilda died and was buried in Caen. The two had been very close and only disagreed over their son Robert Curthose. Robert had repeatedly rebelled against his father yet kept in contact with his mother. This caused a rift between them. Philip I of France had found it difficult for his vassal to become a king like himself and so resented William. Not strong enough to fight William himself, when Robert Curthose rebelled against his father, King Philip helped him.


title: William the Conqueror

text: In the summer of 1085 William learned that Canute IV of Denmark was getting a fleet ready to sail against England. William came back to England in the Autumn with many soldiers. He had to pay them and feed them, at great cost. It may have been at this time he realized he had no records of what was owed him as king. He didn't know if he was collecting all the taxes that were due.


title: William the Conqueror

text: At his Christmas court at Gloucester in 1085 William asked that a great survey be taken in every part of England. The king wanted to know how many people lived in his realm. He wanted to know the size of every property, what each was worth, and how much income it brought in. No such survey had ever been made in England before. It was unique in its details and its contribution to English history. The Domesday Book was the first public record in England.


title: William the Conqueror

text: The text of the book fit into two volumes. The first covered thirty-one counties. It was called 'Great Domesday' because of its size. The second covered the counties of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk and was called 'Little Domesday'. The facts were recorded by several panels made up of bishops and earls. Each panel collected information on several counties. William was presented with a large collection of written records on 1 August 1086. This became the Domesday Book, though it wouldn't be bound into books for almost another century.


title: William the Conqueror

text: William died when he was in Rouen, France from injuries he had received from falling off a horse he owned.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The Berlin Wall (German: "Berliner Mauer") was a wall that separated the city of Berlin in Germany from 1961 to 1989. It separated the eastern half from the western half. Many people believed it was a symbol of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall was taken down on November 9, 1989. The Berlin Wall was about long. It was built to prevent people from escaping from the eastern half of Berlin.


title: Berlin Wall

text: After World War II ended, Germany was divided into four zones, one zone for each of the main Allied countries: France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union. Its capital Berlin was also divided into four zones, so that it was an enclave, like an island inside the Soviet zone. On May 8, 1949, the French, United Kingdom and US zones were made into West Germany ("Federal Republic of Germany", "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", "BRD") and West Berlin. The Soviet zones were made into East Germany and East Berlin. East Germany (German Democratic Republic, "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", "DDR") was founded on October 7, 1949. Europe, Germany and Berlin were divided by an iron curtain.


title: Berlin Wall

text: After Germany split into West and East Germany on May 8, 1949, 2.6 million East Germans left to go to "West Germany". In Berlin alone, 3.6 million people fled to the west. To stop this, on August 13, 1961, the Communist government of East Germany built a wall separating East and West Berlin.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The wall was built to keep the country's people in. But the Soviets and East German government said it was to keep capitalism out. They said that West Germany refused to recognize East Germany as an independent country because they wanted to take over North-East Germany just like Hitler took over Poland.


title: Berlin Wall

text: People still tried to escape even though the Berlin Wall was there. They used many methods to get around the guards and barbed wire on the Berlin Wall.


title: Berlin Wall

text: In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev said that the Soviet Union would not use the Red Army to stop the people of Eastern and Middle Europe from changing their government. After he said that, several countries began to change the way they governed their people. Hungary opened its border and people from East Germany began moving to the west through Hungary. In October 1989 mass demonstrations against the government in East Germany began. The long-time leader, Erich Honecker, resigned and was replaced by Egon Krenz a few days later. Honecker had predicted in January 1989 that the wall would stand for a "hundred more years" if the conditions which had caused its construction did not change. This did not turn out to be true.


title: Berlin Wall

text: In November, 1989, the Central Committee of East Germany decided to make it easier for East Germans to pass through the wall. A mistake by the press officer meant the border was opened several hours before it should have been. Millions of East German citizens celebrated the opening of the wall. Many collected souvenirs with chisels and some television stations filmed people hitting the wall with sledge hammers.


title: Berlin Wall

text: This image of people in West Berlin hitting the wall is often said to be East Berliners breaking out. This is not true. The eastern side of the wall had no graffiti on it. All pictures of people chipping away at the wall show people hitting graffiti covered walls. Less than one year after the Berlin Wall was broken down, Germany again became one country.


title: Berlin Wall

text: In the 28 years of its existence, between 125 and 206 people were killed when trying to cross the Berlin Wall. At least 800 more people were killed outside Berlin, trying to cross from East Germany to the west.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The East Germans did not record all of the deaths, so the real number of how many people died may never be known.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Those people who were caught alive in an attempt to flee, had to go to jail for at least five years. The first victim of the Wall was Ida Siekmann. She was fatally injured after jumping out of the window of her apartment. She fell onto the pavement on the west side. The first victim of the Wall to be shot at was Günter Litfin. He was 24 years old and was shot by police, near the railway station of Berlin Friedrichstrasse, when he tried to get into the West. This was on 24 August, 1961, only eleven days after the border had been closed.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Peter Fechter bled to death in the "death strip", on 17 August, 1962. This led to a public outcry. American troops watched him, but could not help him. The East-German border policemen, who had wounded him, did not help him either.


title: Berlin Wall

text: In 1966, two children, aged ten and thirteen years, were killed in the border strip. This is unusual because the East German border police had orders to not shoot on pregnant women, children or mentally ill people.


title: Berlin Wall

text: On 6 February, 1989, border guards shot and killed Chris Gueffroy as he tried to cross the wall. He was the last person to be killed by border guards. On 8 March, 1989, Winfried Freudenberg died after falling from a gas balloon. He was the last person to die trying to cross the Berlin Wall and escape into West Berlin.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The Berlin wall eventually started to fall once people rioted. Many jumped on top of the wall, and even crowded against it. This caused the wall to collapse in some areas, and more people could get through to the refugee camps that were set up on the other side. "Tear down this wall!" was a speech made by United States President Ronald Reagan to Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev to destroy the wall. The speech was made at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987. It was made to honor the 750th anniversary of Berlin. His speech and its fallout might have aided in the wall's demolition.


title: Berlin Wall

text: By late 1989 the GDR was suffering from many problems such as a struggling economy, and large-scale protests. The Hungarian regime had collapsed and was dismantling its border fences with Austria by August 1989. Since the Warsaw Pact allowed citizens to travel within the Soviet bloc, many East German tourists fled to the west via Hungary. When the Hungarian government refused the GDR's demand to stop defectors, East Germany banned all travel to Hungary; prompting demonstrations and protest. This began the GDR's isolation within the bloc.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Erich Honecker, leader of the GDR since 1971, was forced to resign on October 18, 1989. He was replaced by Egon Krenz after a unanimous vote by the politburo. Under Krenz's regime, East Germans could still escape to Hungary via Czechoslovakia.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The number of defectors grew and caused tensions between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The Krenz regime decided to allow people to leave directly to the west through border checkpoints in East Berlin. This prompted many East Germans, who learned about it broadcast from West German media, to go to the border crossings and demand to be let through immediately.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Border guards at each checkpoint told the people to go back home as they had no orders that the wall would open that night. As time passed, the number of people arriving at the checkpoint was increasing and the guards were becoming alarmed. They began taking the more aggressive people aside and stamped their passports with a special stamp that allowed them access to West Berlin however, the people were not aware that they were effectively revoking their East German citizenship and were shocked to be refused entry back into the GDR. The Chief Guard of the checkpoint frantically telephoned his superiors hoping to get answers as to why so many people thought that the wall was to open. By 22:45, it was clear that the outnumbered and overwhelmed border guards would not use their weapons to suppress the crowds. The Chief Guard surrendered and ordered the gates to West Berlin to be opened. The crowds of East Berliners were met with crowds of West Berliners in a happy scene as the Berlin wall had just fallen.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Many people even climbed up onto the wall by the Brandenburg Gate in protest and began to chisel away at the wall. The GDR authorities responded to this initially by blasting the people with water cannons; this proved to be ineffective. The East German army later climbed up onto the wall to prevent others from standing on the wall. The government began demolishing the wall the next day. The fall of the wall destroyed the SED, the ruling party of the GDR, and caused many of its officials to resign. The German Democratic Republic would cease to exist less than a year later; reuniting with the Federal Republic of Germany on October 3, 1990.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The wall was changed and added to several times. It was not really a wall, but a collection of walls and fences and other devices. This is what the "border fence" was made of, starting from the east, going west


title: Berlin Wall

text: The whole was done in an a zone of between 30 and 500 m wide. The official ("civil" border) began before the first fence. Entering the installation required a special permit. The real border was about one or two metres in front of the concrete wall, so that the whole of the wall complex was inside East Germany (only the East Berlin part of the wall was inside East Berlin).


title: Berlin Wall

text: The border between East Germany and West Germany was also heavily defended with fences and mines. East Germans needed a special permit to live close to the border.


title: Berlin Wall

text: After the Reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990, the Berlin Wall was demolished and taken away. A few sections of the wall remain; some of the sections became a museum.


title: Berlin Wall

text: The East Berlin special police who guarded the wall had the order to shoot if this was necessary to stop people fleeing. East German leaders such as Egon Krenz were arrested after German reunification because guards were ordered to shoot to kill.


title: Berlin Wall

text: However, after the Wall was built, many people were no longer able to leave East Berlin using normal border posts. The only way they could do so was to race through the Wall or try to dig a tunnel underneath.


title: Berlin Wall

text: After the unification of Germany, border guards who had shot people were convicted by West German Courts. The judges said, that some of the laws of the border police (about shooting) were against human rights. They therefore should have refused to shoot.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Border guards who did shoot, and stop someone from fleeing could get a reward of up to 500 Marks. Some of those guards were sentenced after the unification.


title: Berlin Wall

text: Another strip of land was given to West Berlin. This strip was only the width of a road which joined West Berlin with a tiny exclave.


title: Hotel

text: A hotel or a guest-house is a large building with many rooms, where people can sleep when they are not at home. A motel is a hotel especially for motorists - people who drive cars - where the room door usually opens into the parking lot rather than to an interior corridor. Inn is sometimes used to mean a smaller hotel. Guest house can also mean an accessory dwelling unit. An extended stay hotel is one where suites are rented by the week.


title: Hotel

text: These places will rent a room for any number of days. They offer rooms to sleep as their business. There are also hotels where conferences are held.


title: Hotel

text: Hotels emerged as inns along important transport routes. The first hotels appeared in the days of the Ancient World, in the Middle Ages they also served as shelters for the infirm. This is indicated by the etymology of the word hotel, hôtel: through st.-fr. ostel, hostel it comes from Latin. cubiculum hospitale ("guest room"), whence the word "hospital".


title: Hotel

text: In the 16th-17th centuries, the hotel is an aristocratic residential building with ceremonial and service courtyards.


title: Hotel

text: Today, according to the definition of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), hotels are called a house with furnished rooms for short-term stay of visitors, consisting of a number of rooms that have a single guide and provide certain services. They are grouped into classes and categories according to the types of services provided, with the equipment available in them.


title: Hotel

text: The hotel is also called a residential property complex (building, part of the building, equipment and other property), designed to provide services.


title: Hotel

text: International luxury hotels have high-quality amenities, full-service restaurants and rooms. They usually provide the highest level of personalized and professional service in major or capital cities.


title: Hotel

text: Branded hotels are typically full-service and classified as luxury. A key characteristic is focus on a unique guest experience.


title: Hotel

text: Small to medium hotels that give a limited number of amenities. This amenities cater and market to a specific demographic of travelers, such as the single business traveler. Such hotels may lack leisure amenities such as an restaurant or a swimming pool.


title: Hotel

text: A motel is an abbreviation for "motor hotel". It is a small-sized low-rise lodging establishment. Usually motels have access to individual rooms from the car park. Motels are good for road travellers, travellers on road trip vacations or workers who drive for their job.


title: Distillation

text: Distillation is a process where a mixture made of two or more liquids (called "components") with different boiling points can be separated from each other. The mixture is heated until one of the components boils (turns to a vapor). The vapor is then fed into a condenser, which cools the vapor and changes it back into a liquid that is called "distillate". What remains in the original container is called the "residue". This is a physical separation process and not a chemical reaction. Fractional distillation (using a distillation column with more than two outlets) can be used to improve the separation. An oil refinery uses fractional distillation to purify crude oil, separating several different liquids for different uses.


title: Distillation

text: This has been used for a long time, to distill alcohol and produce alcoholic drinks. Distillation is a commonly used operation in many industries.


title: Distillation

text: Distillation can be done anywhere, whether it's in a house or a laboratory, but in most countries it is illegal to distill alcohol without a license. Illegally distilled alcoholic drinks are in some places called "moonshine".


title: Distillation

text: Distillation is also the main way of desalination of water. In this case the salt is a solid that is in solution with the water. In alcohol distillation or petroleum distillation, the things to be separated from their solution are two or more distillation liquids.


title: River Thames

text: The River Thames is a large river in England. It goes through London, the capital city of the United Kingdom.


title: River Thames

text: The Thames is 346 kilometres (235 statute miles) long. Its source is near the village of Kemble in the Cotswolds; it flows through Oxford (where it is called "The Isis", a shortening of its Latin name), Reading, Maidenhead, Eton and then Windsor.


title: River Thames

text: From the outskirts of Greater London, it passes Syon House, Hampton Court Palace, Richmond (with the famous view of the Thames from Richmond Hill), and Kew. It then passes through London, then Greenwich and Dartford before it enters the sea in an estuary, The Nore. Part of the area west of London is sometimes called the Thames Valley. The area east of Tower Bridge is called Thames Gateway by development agencies and officials.


title: River Thames

text: About 90 kilometres from the sea, above London, the river begins to show the tide caused by the North Sea. It is said that London was made capital of Roman Britain at the spot where the tides reached in 43 AD, but different things have pushed this spot farther up the river in the over 2000 years since then. At London, the water is slightly salty with sea salt.


title: River Thames

text: The Thames was an important way to go between London and Westminster in the 16th and 17th centuries. The guild of watermen took Londoners back and forth by ferry. One of them, John Taylor, the Water Poet (15801653), described the river in a poem.


title: River Thames

text: In the 17th and 18th century, at a time some call the "Little Ice Age", the Thames often froze over in the winter. This led to the first "Frost Fair" in 1607, with a tent city set up on the river with lots of odd amusements, like ice bowling. The last time the river froze over was in 1814. The building of a new London Bridge in 1825 may have helped stop it from freezing: the new bridge had fewer pillars than the old, allowing the river to flow more easily, and stopping it from flowing slowly enough to freeze in cold winters.


title: River Thames

text: By the 18th century, the Thames was one of the world's busiest waterways, as London became the centre of the very big British Empire. During this time one of the worst river disasters in England took place on 3 September 1878 on the Thames, when the crowded pleasure boat "Princess Alice" crashed into the "Bywell Castle" killing over 640 people.


title: River Thames

text: In the 'Great Stink' of 1858, pollution in the river became so bad that the House of Commons at Westminster had to quit sitting.


title: River Thames

text: The authorities accepted a proposal from the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He moved the effluent eastwards along a series of interconnecting sewers. These sloped towards outfalls beyond the metropolitan area.


title: River Thames

text: The coming of rail transport and road transport, and the decline of the Empire in the years after 1945, made the river less important than it was. London itself is no longer used much as a port, and the "Port of London" has moved down the river to Tilbury. The Thames has been greatly cleaned up, and life has returned to its dead waters.


title: River Thames

text: In the early 1980s, the Thames Barrier was opened to control flooding. It is used many times a year to stop water damage to London's low-lying areas up the river.


title: River Thames

text: There are many bridges and tunnels crossing the Thames, including Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Lambeth Bridge, and the Dartford Crossing.


title: River Thames

text: In September 2011 a British comedian, David Walliams, swam the entire 140 mile length of the river raising over £1million for a charity called Sport Relief. On Red Nose Day, people swim the Thames for charity.


title: River Thames

text: Many books have been written about the Thames. "Three Men in a Boat" by Jerome K. Jerome describes a boat trip up the Thames. Somewhere near Oxford is where the Lidells were rowing in the poem at the start of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Somewhere near here was where Alice fell asleep in the book. The river is named in both "The Wind in the Willows" and the play "Toad of Toad Hall". In "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, Marlow tells his tale while waiting for the tide near the mouth of the Thames.


title: River Thames

text: Other fictional events include Sherlock Holmes looking for a boat in "A Study in Scarlet" and Bill Sykes killing Nancy just near the river, in Charles Dickens's classic novel " Oliver Twist".


title: Regions of England

text: The region in England is also named the Government Office Region. It is the highest level layer of local government in England.


title: Cathedral

text: A cathedral is a Christian church that is the seat of a Bishop. As cathedrals are the seat of a bishop, they are central church of a diocese. Only those Christian denominations that have bishops have cathedrals. Cathedrals can be found in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican as well as some Lutheran churches.


title: Cathedral

text: In the Greek Orthodox Church, the terms "kathedrikos naos" (literally: "cathedral shrine") and "metropolis" (literally "mother city") are both used to describe the same thing. "Metropolis" is more common, but both terms are officially used.


title: Cathedral

text: There are variations on the use of the term "cathedral"; for example, some pre-Reformation cathedrals in Scotland now within the Church of Scotland still retain the term cathedral, despite the Church's Presbyterian polity which does not have bishops. As cathedrals are often particularly impressive buildings, the term is often used incorrectly to refer to any large important church. Some diocese, however, have other churches that are bigger than the cathedral.


title: Cathedral

text: Several cathedrals in Europe, such as Strasbourg, and in England at York, Lincoln and Southwell, are referred to as "Minster" (German: "Münster") churches, from Latin "monasterium", because the establishments were served by canons living in community or may have been an abbey, prior to the Reformation. The other kind of great church in Western Europe is the abbey.


title: Cathedral

text: The word cathedral is derived from the Latin noun "cathedra" ("seat" or "chair"), and refers to the presence of the bishop's or archbishop's chair or throne. In the ancient world, the chair was the symbol of a teacher and thus of the bishop's role as teacher, and also of an official presiding as a magistrate and thus of the bishop's role in governing a diocese.


title: Cathedral

text: The word cathedral, though now grammatically used as a noun, is originally the adjective in the phrase "cathedral church", from the Latin "ecclesia cathedralis". The seat marks the place set aside in the prominent church of the diocese for the head of that diocese and is therefore a major symbol of authority.


title: Cathedral

text: Some churches are called "cathedral", but they are not the seat of a bishop. This may be because the way the church is organised changed over time. This is the case for Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Poprad, in Slovakia, for example. In Slovak language, this church is called "cathedral". It is part of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Spiš. This diocese was re-organised several times. Currently, the cathedral of the diocese is St. Martin's Cathedral (Spišská Kapitula). Churches that formerly were a diocesan seat may be called concathedral, co-cathedral, or pro-cathedral.


title: Petroleum

text: Petroleum, (from Greek πέτρα - rock and έλαιο - oil) also called crude oil, is a thick and black liquid. It is a natural material mainly made of hydrocarbons. Most petroleum is found by drilling down through rocks on land or off-shore on the continental shelf. Major producers are in the Middle East, the Americas, and Russia. It is the most important world fuel source. It supplies 38% of the world's energy and is also used to make petrochemicals.


title: Petroleum

text: Crude oil is a mixture of many different chemicals (mostly hydrocarbons), most of which burn well. It is separated into simpler, more useful mixtures by fractional distillation in oil refineries to give separate chemicals such as gasoline (or "petrol") for cars, kerosene for airplanes and bitumen for roads. The bitumen gives crude oil its dark black color; most of the other chemicals in crude are slightly yellow or colorless.


title: Petroleum

text: Petroleum can be easily transported by pipeline and oil tanker. Refined petroleum is used as fuels; mainly gasoline ("petrol") for cars, diesel fuel for diesel engines used in trucks, trains and ships, kerosene fuel for jets and as lubricants.


title: Petroleum

text: Petroleum resource is limited and non-renewable. Some believe it will run out within 70 years after a peak oil early in the 21st century.


title: Petroleum

text: Burning petroleum or other fossil fuel adds the carbon in the oil to the oxygen in the air to create carbon dioxide, which is an air pollutant. The carbon can be removed from the carbon dioxide by plants.


title: Petroleum

text: There is a lot of crude oil left underground. Oil companies quote "reserves" which some people confuse with the actual amount of oil underground, but are more to do with the cost of extracting it by oil wells. Most of the crude left underground is in the Middle East which is not a politically stable part of the world. Some governments with lots of oil reserves work together through OPEC to keep production low and prices high. Politicians in countries that burn much oil complain about high oil prices, because voters complain. However many environmentalists worry about damage being done by using oil as a fuel source (especially global warming) and are therefore happy when prices are kept high so that people use less oil.


title: Kartikeya

text: Kartikeya (), also known as Murugan or Kandhan is the Tamil god of war and victory. Kartikeya is the main god worshipped in India, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Singapore, Malaysia and many other places of the world where Tamils live. Kartikeya has six shrines in Tamil Nadu, which are known as Arupadaiveedu. In Tamil Nadu, Kartikeya has continued to be popular with all classes of society since the Sangam age.


title: Kartikeya

text: Kartikeya is considered the son of Shiva and Parvathi, who was created to kill the Asuras and be the eternal protector of the Devas and other living beings. The Asuras were demigods who frequently warred against the Devas or gods. The six sites (padaiveedu) in Tamil Nadu where Kartikeya sojourned while leading his armies are Palani, Swamimalai, Thiruparamkundram, Pazhamudirsolai, Thiruthani and Thiruchendur, the Arupadaiveedu.


title: Kartikeya

text: Kartikeya is considered the God of Tamil language and he is mentioned a lot in Sangam literature. The six abodes of Kartikeya are all in Tamil Nadu. Each of these temples has a unique history and different reason to worship Lord Murugan.


title: Kartikeya

text: Thai Poosam during January – February month is celebrated as a 6-day festival. On Thai Poosam day, Kavadis and Palkudams are taken by devotees in procession around Chhedanagar. Special Abhishekams are performed to the Moolavar and Utsavar. Annadhanam is provided to all devotees participating in the functions. In the night, Kartikeya is taken in procession accompanied by Nadaswaram, Veda Parayanam around Chhedanagar.


title: Kartikeya

text: Vaikasi Visakam day, (during May –June month), Kavadis and Palkudams are taken by devotees in procession around Chhedanagar.


title: Kartikeya

text: Kanda Sashti during October-November month is celebrated as a 6-day festival. Devotees of Kartikeya will fast for 6 days. On the evening of the 6th day, Soorasamharam (correcting sooran) will be held at every Kartikeya temple around the world. Soorasamharam (correcting sooran) at Thiruchendur is every special.


title: Confederacy of Independent Systems

text: The Confederacy of Independent Systems (also known as the CIS or Separatists) was an organization that appeared in the "Star Wars" movies. The CIS was led by the fallen Jedi Count Dooku. The armies of the Separatists had thousands of battle droids. The CIS launched attacks against the Galactic Republic. The Separatists stayed a strong power until the rise of the Empire.


title: Confederacy of Independent Systems

text: The Confederacy of Independent Systems was first shown in Attack of the Clones. This movement, led by chancellor Palpatine, gained support and soon had support from thousands of solar systems. The Galactic Republic feared that a war would begin. Count Dooku and the Separatist leaders were getting ready for a war. Nute Gunray, leader of the Trade Federation, gave thousands of battle droids to the Separatist army. Other leaders, such as Poggle the Lesser and San Hill, gave money and droids to the Separatist cause. On the planet Geonosis, Count Dooku met with the leaders of powerful companies. Count Dooku gave his offer and the Confederacy of Independent Systems was formed. The Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi overheard the meeting and sent a warning to the Republic. The Republic sent a newly created clone army to fight the battle droids. This battle on Geonosis began the Clone Wars. The Geonosian Archduke Poggle the Lesser gives the plans of a new weapon to Count Dooku. Count Dooku leaves the planet and goes to Coruscant. He gives the plans to Darth Sidious as well as telling him that the war has begun.


title: Confederacy of Independent Systems

text: During the Clone Wars, fighting between the Republic and the Separatists continued. Jedi were sent to help the clone armies overcome their enemies. The droid armies fought to hold more planets in its grip. For three years the fighting took place across the Galaxy. The Separatists gained several new allies during the Clone Wars. After the death of Jango Fett on Geonosis, a new bounty hunter named Durge took his place. Count Dooku found a woman named Asajj Ventress who was powerful in the Force. Asajj Ventress proved to be a powerful commander in the Separatist army. A new leader of the Separatists rose at this time. General Grievous was half droid and half alien. He was trained in lightsaber combat by Count Dooku and became feared by Jedi throughout the Galaxy. One of the final and most daring attacks on the Republic came when General Grievous led a large fleet of starships to Coruscant to capture Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.


title: Confederacy of Independent Systems

text: Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is taken from Coruscant and put on the starship "The Invisible Hand". The Battle of Coruscant is fought both on the ground and in space. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker get on "The Invisible Hand" and rescue Palpatine. During this rescue, Anakin kills Count Dooku. General Grievous escapes and the Separatist forces are defeated. General Grievous, now the leader of the CIS, goes to Utapau to talk to the leaders of the businesses. Grievous is told by Darth Sidious to move the leaders to Mustafar. Droid armies' attack on Kashyyyk and Utapau. Obi-Wan Kenobi kills General Grievous on Utapau. Nute Gunray becomes the leader after both the deaths of Count Dooku and General Grievous. The new Sith apprentice, Darth Vader, was sent to Mustafar to kill the leaders. After he finished this job, all droid forces were stopped. This marked the end of the Confederacy of Independent Systems and the beginning of the Galactic Empire.


title: Magna Carta

text: The Magna Carta was a document that was sealed by King John after negotiations with his barons and their French and Scots allies at Runnymede, Surrey, England in 1215.


title: Magna Carta

text: There they sealed the Great Charter, called in Latin "Magna Carta". It established a council of 25 barons to see John keep to the clauses, including access to swift justice, parliamentary assent for taxation, scutage limitations, and protection from illegal imprisonment.


title: Magna Carta

text: Because he was forced to seal the charter, John sought approval to break it, from his spiritual overlord Pope Innocent III. Denouncing it as "not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust", the Pope agreed. The Magna Carta is still considered one of the most important documents ever written, having inspired the way we view issues of justice and liberty and influenced laws regarding such throughout the world.


title: Magna Carta

text: The Magna Carta has influenced English law right down to the present day. It is one of the most celebrated documents in the History of England. It is recognized as a cornerstone of the idea of the liberty of citizens.


title: Magna Carta

text: The Magna Carta contains 63 clauses written in Latin on parchment. Only three of the original clauses in Magna Carta are still law today. One defends the freedom and rights of the English Church, another confirms the liberties customs of the City of London and other towns. This clause (translated) is the main reason the Carta is still famous:


title: Magna Carta

text: This clause limits the power of rulers, and introduces the idea of lawful process and the idea of a jury. The BBC summarised the main points of the document as:


title: Magna Carta

text: The BBC said the Magna Carta "established a number of important principles, which have been copied around the world... It inspired the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights".


title: Magna Carta

text: The origin is in the medieval feudal system, in which the King's word was law. It solved, at the time, a conflict between King John and his main men: the barons and bishops. Dispute grew between the barons and bishops and King John over taxes and disputes with the Pope.


title: Magna Carta

text: The barons chose their time to put John under pressure. John had lost a battle against the French, been excommunicated by the Pope (1209–1213), and feared civil war at home. He met the barons at Runnymede, 20 miles south-west of London, in June 1215. The negotiation was managed by John's half-brother, William Longspée, and Elias of Dereham, steward to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton.


title: Magna Carta

text: The content of the Carta was designed to re-balance power between the King and his subjects, but especially between John and the barons. When King John set his seal on Magna Carta he conceded the fundamental principle that even as king he was not above the law. That meant kings would not have as much power as they did before. The Carta also laid down rules of inheritance, and that convictions required some kind of official process. It stated that people had rights not to be unlawfully imprisoned. In other words, the king is bound to rule within the law.


title: Magna Carta

text: Thirteen original copies of the Carta were made and distributed. Only four survive today. The four copies are in The British Library, The Bodleian Library, Lincoln Castle and Salisbury Cathedral. The Magna Carta was sent out again in 1220 by Henry III. In 2009 UNESCO recognized it in its "Memory of the World" register. The British Library brought all four copies together in February 2015, so that scholars could examine them side by side.


title: Mahabharata

text: The Mahābhārata (; , "", ) is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. The other is the "Rāmāyaṇa". It tells of issues between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War. It also tells the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors.


title: Mahabharata

text: The "Mahābhārata" includes philosophical and devotional material. It has a discussion of the four "goals of life" or "puruṣārtha" (12.161). The stories in the "Mahābhārata" include the "Bhagavad Gita", the story of Damayanti, the story of Shakuntala, the story of Pururava and Urvashi, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devyani and the story of Rishyasringa. It also has a shortened version of the "Rāmāyaṇa".


title: Mahabharata

text: The "Mahābhārata" is normally said to be written by Vyāsa. Most of it was probably put together between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. The oldest parts o it are not much older than around 400 BCE. The text probably became in its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century CE).


title: Mahabharata

text: The "Mahābhārata" is the longest epic poem known. It has been said to be "the longest poem ever written". Its longest version has over 100,000 "śloka" or over 200,000 individual verse lines. It also has and long sections of prose. The "Mahābhārata" has about 1.8 million words in total. It is about ten times the length of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" combined, It is about four times the length of the Rāmāyaṇa. The importance of the "Mahābhārata" to world civilization has been compared to that of the Bible, the Quran, the works of Homer, Greek drama, or the works of William Shakespeare. It is sometimes called the fifth Veda.


title: Mahabharata

text: These sections deal with a number of topics such as a number of aspects of Hinduism, Hindu mythology, ethics, and the Hindu way of life. There is also a nineteenth section named "Harivamsha". The Bhagavadgita, a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, is a part of the "Mahabharata".


title: Mahabharata

text: Sage Vyasa taught this epic to his son Suka and his students Vaisampayana and others. King Janamejaya, the son of Parikshit and grandson of the heroes of the epic, performed a great sacrifice ("yajna"). The epic was retold by Vaisampayana to Janamejaya at the advice of Vyasa. Later on, the other sage Suta retold the "Mahabharata" similar to Vaisampayana to Janamejaya, to Saunaka and others, during a sacrifice performed by Saunaka in Naimisaranya, which is near Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh.


title: Mahabharata

text: Noted below are few words about the eighteen sections of the "Mahabharata". In "Mahabharata", these sections are called "parvan". A "parvan" means a book. The names of all "parvas" or books of the "Mahabharata" are noted below.


title: Mahabharata

text: Kunti wants to fulfil her maternal expectations, but she has no man. She recollects the moment when her first son Karna was conceived from an arcane "mantra" which had given her once. Surya, the Sun God, appeared to her then. Thus, Kunti remembers her secret "mantra" and gives birth to the three sons – Yudhistra, Bhima and Arjuna. Yudhisthira’s father was god Yama, Bhima’s father was god Vayu, and Arjuna's father was Indra.


title: Mahabharata

text: Madri, the second wife of Pandu, gave birth to two other sons - the twins, whose fathers were Ashwins (divine twins). Madri's sons are Nakula and Sahadeva.


title: Mahabharata

text: In the year 1932, The "Bhandarkar oriental research institute" located in Pune, needed money for the compilation and publication of the Holy Mahabharata and a guest house. A formal request was made to the seventh Nizam of Hyderabad State, Mir Osman Ali Khan who in no time released a farman to donate Rs.1000 per year for a period of 11 years.


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: Nymphadora Tonks is a fictional character in the "Harry Potter" book series written by J. K. Rowling. The character is played by actress Natalia Tena in the Harry Potter movies.


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: Tonks, as she is known, is the only daughter of Andromeda Black and Ted Tonks. She is a "Half-Blood", but both of her parents are actually magical. Her mother is a pureblood from the ancient wizarding family of the Blacks, and her father is a muggle born, therefore considering that the majority of her father's family are muggles she is considered a half-blood, even though he is not a muggle himself. Tonks is a "metamorphmagus", which means that she can change her appearance at will. Her Patronus is a jack rabbit, but it changed into a wolf (Remus's Patronus) due to her love for Remus Lupin.


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: Tonks is first described in the books as having a pale heart-shaped face, dark twinkling eyes, and short, spikey hair that was a violent shade of violet. She knocked over a plate in the Dursley's kitchen when the 'Advance Guard' came to pick up Harry to take to number twelve, Grimmauld Place. She also knocked over the troll umbrella stand, which made Sirius's mother, Walburga Black, start screaming. She is known as "seriously clumsy."


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: Nymphadora was born on the 11th of May, 1973. She attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from 1984-1991, the time of Charlie Weasley, and was Sorted into Hufflepuff House. She never became a Prefect in her 5th year, because her Head of House, Pomona Sprout, said she lacked necessary qualities, such as the ability to behave herself.


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: She works as an Auror in the Ministry of Magic under the eye of Mad-Eye Moody. She worked as a spy for the Order of the Phoenix. So did Arthur Weasley, Kingsley Shacklebolt, and a few others, as they themselves worked inside the Ministry.


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: In "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", she marries the werewolf Remus Lupin (even though she is much younger than him), and many people disapprove of her choice. Remus Lupin feels that he has endangered her and her son, and leaves her at the beginning of the Deathly Hallows. Harry, already lost his parents and his godfather, mocks him to be a coward, resulting in Harry was thrown into a wall by an angry Remus. But Remus Lupin decided that Harry was right and come back a few days later. They have a son named Edward Remus 'Teddy' Lupin. He is a metamorphmagus, just like his mother, Tonks, and is known for having aqua colored hair. Both Tonks and Lupin die during the Battle of Hogwarts, Lupin by Antonin Dolohov, and Tonks by Bellatrix Lestrange.


title: Nymphadora Tonks

text: Teddy Lupin lives under the care of Andromeda, Tonks's widowed mother, and his godfather, Harry Potter.


title: Stonehenge

text: Stonehenge is a prehistoric World Heritage Site of megaliths eight miles (13 kilometers) north of Salisbury in Wiltshire, England. It was built between 3100 BC and 1550 BC, and was in use until the Bronze Age. The monument is made of a henge, with standing stones in circles. It is probably the most important prehistoric monument in the whole of Britain, and has attracted visitors from very early times.


title: Stonehenge

text: The first stage started around 3100 BC. During this stage, people dug a circular ditch and a ring of 56 pits, known as Aubrey Holes.


title: Stonehenge

text: The second stage started around 2100 BC. During this stage, the Stonehenge builders brought huge pillars of rocks from Southwestern Wales and erected them into concentric circles around the centre of the site. This double circle was never completed, and it was dismantled during the third period of construction.


title: Stonehenge

text: The final stage probably ended before 1500 BC. During this period, the monument was remodeled. Its builders erected a circle of 30 upright stones, weighing up to 50 tons each, capped by ring of stone . These enclosed a horseshoe-shaped formation of five pairs of upright stones, each pair capped with a stone lintel.


title: Stonehenge

text: Using DNA analysis, scientists have discovered that the Stonehenge builders originated from modern-day Turkey.


title: Stonehenge

text: The first stone circle was a set of 'bluestones'. These stones are made of dolerite, an igneous rock.


title: Stonehenge

text: The Stonehenge builders dug holes that held up to 80 standing stones (shown blue on the plan). Only 43 of these can be traced today.


title: Stonehenge

text: There are several theories about how these bluestones arrived at Stonehenge. The "long-distance human transport theory" says the Stonehenge builders brought the bluestones from the Preseli Hills in modern-day Pembrokeshire, Wales - 160 miles (260 km) away from Stonehenge. In 2011, a megalithic bluestone quarry was discovered at Craig Rhos-y-felin, near Crymych in Pembrokeshire. This supported the long-distance human transport theory.


title: Stonehenge

text: Another theory is that the Irish Sea Glacier brought the stones close to Stonehenge. However, there is no evidence of glacial deposition within southern central England. For that reason, this theory has less support than the long-distance human transport theory.


title: Stonehenge

text: Later, around 2400 BC, the Stonehenge builders brought thirty huge grey sarsen stones (sandstone blocks) to the site. They 'dressed' (worked on) the stones and gave them mortice and tenon joints. They erected these stones in a circle 33 metres (108 ft) in diameter, with a ring of 30 lintel stones resting on top. They fitted the lintels together using another woodworking method: the tongue and groove joint. They arranged the remaining bluestones in an inner circle. Each standing stone was about 4.1 metres (13 ft) high by 2.1 metres (6 ft 11 in) wide, and weighed about 25 tons.


title: Stonehenge

text: The stones may have come from a quarry about 25 miles (40 km) north of Stonehenge on the Marlborough Downs. It is also possible that they were collected from a "litter" of sarsens on the chalk downs, which are closer. The modern Stonehenge consists entirely of original stones (some of which have been replaced in upright position).


title: Stonehenge

text: Stonehenge, however, does have a number of satellite structures which are part of the 'ritual landscape':


title: Stonehenge

text: No one knows who built Stonehenge or why they built it. During the summer solstice, the sunrise lines up with some of the stones in a particular way. This suggests that the arrangement of stones may work as a calendar. In Egypt and South America, similar ancient buildings can be found. They also show the time of the solstice.


title: Stonehenge

text: Some scientists believe that early people were able to foretell eclipses of the sun and the moon based on their positions in relation to the stone monument. The site may have served as an observatory where early rituals or religious ceremonies took place on specific days on the year.


title: Stonehenge

text: Stonehenge itself is owned by the Crown and managed by English Heritage. The surrounding land is owned by the National Trust.


title: Telugu

text: Telugu is an language spoken in the southern part of India and the Peninsular part of Malaysia. It is the official language of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. It is one of the twenty-two scheduled languages of the Republic of India. Telugu is the second most spoken language in India and 15th largest spoken language in the world. As it is one of the oldest languages in the world, Government of India gave it the status of a Classical language.


title: Telugu

text: Aitereya Brahmanyam which is a part of Rigveda (literature dates to 7000 years before CE) written thousands years before CE, has mentioned Telugu. Telugu also finds mention in Rajatarangini, written by Bilhana Kavi. As per Hindu mythology, one of the sons of Bali Chakravarthy (the one who was sent to Pathaala by Vamana) is Andhra or Andhrudu. Telugu region i.e. Andhra or AP was ruled by him, long before the times of Ramayana and Mahabharata (literature is proven to be of the period 3000 years before CE).


title: Telugu

text: Telugu is the only language other than Sanskrit which has the linguistic prakriya (literature game) called Avadhana, which disappeared in other languages with the passage of time. Languages also have become more and more simple and adopted simple pronunciations, the reason for some typical sounds of Telugu being missing in many other languages.


title: Telugu

text: Sri Krishnadeva Raya has said "Desa bhashalandu Telugu Lessa" which means "Among the nation's languages, Telugu is the best." Being a mellifluous language, British authors in the 19th century called Telugu, Italian of the East. It is believed that Italian explorer Niccolò Da Conti, who visited Vijayanagara empire during the reign of Vira Vijaya Bukka Raya in the fifteenth century, coined the phrase.


title: Telugu

text: According to linguists, Proto-Dravidian gave rise to 21 Dravidian languages. They can be broadly classified into three groups: Northern group, Central group, and Southern group of Dravidian languages. The central group consists of ten languages, out of which only Telugu became a civilized language and the rest of the nine languages remained tribal languages. Telugu is the most widely spoken language of the Dravidian family which consists of 24 languages spanning all of South Asia, from Baluchistan to Sri Lanka.


title: Telugu

text: In India the history of scripts has been almost independent of the history of languages. The current similarity in scripts between Telugu and Kannada, which falls under the southern group of Proto-Dravidian languages along with Tamil, Malayalam, Tulu and others, has a lot more to do with the rule of the Chalukyas than the similarity between the languages.


title: Telugu

text: Telugu is mainly spoken in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Yanam district of Puducherry as well as in the neighboring states of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, some parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal in India. It is also spoken in the United States, where the Telugu diaspora numbers more than a million, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Bahrain, Canada, Fiji, Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, Ireland, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and many western European countries, where there is also a considerable Telugu diaspora. Telugu speakers abroad are often some of the wealthiest ethnic groups in the countries they go to due to their high educational attainment and intelligence; in the US, the average Telugu family makes $115,000 a year. In Tamil Nadu, about 6.3% of the population speak Telugu, where it commonly known as Telungu. It is the largest spoken and most dominant language in South India.


title: Telugu

text: With 56 letters [16 vowels and 36 consonants, 4 removed], Telugu has more letters in its alphabet than any other language. There were letters for sounds Al, Aluu, which were later removed from the alphabet. Every Telugu word ends with an vowel.


title: Celsius

text: Celsius (more precisely, a degree Celsius), sometimes called centigrade, is a unit of measurement used in many countries to measure temperature. This unit was created by Anders Celsius (1701–1744), a Swedish astronomer.


title: Celsius

text: 100° Celsius is the boiling point of water at normal pressure. (Water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes).


title: Celsius

text: Since 1948, this unit has been called "Celsius". "Centigrade" was the name of the unit before the change; "centi" meaning 1/100, and "grade" being a scale.


title: Celsius

text: The other commonly used measurement of temperature is the Fahrenheit scale. The Celsius scale, based on multiples of ten, is used with SI, or metric measurements.


title: Celsius

text: In 1742, Anders Celsius made a "reversed" version of the modern Celsius temperature scale. In this scale, zero was the boiling point of water and 100 was the melting point of ice. In his paper "Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer," he wrote about his experiments. He showed that the melting point of ice was basically unaffected by air pressure. Ice would turn into water at the same temperature, whether it was at sea level or on a mountain. This was not the case for the boiling point of water. It would boil easier with less pressure (on a mountain). He decided that zero on his temperature scale (water's boiling point) would be set at the standard barometric pressure at sea level. This pressure is known as one atmosphere. In 1954, Resolution 4 of the 10th CGPM (the General Conference on Weights and Measures) set what exactly is one standard atmosphere ().


title: Celsius

text: In 1744, the year Anders Celsius died, the famous Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) used a reversed version of Celsius's scale when he bought his first thermometer. This had a scale where zero represented the melting point of ice and 100 represented water's boiling point, similar to what we use it today. His custom-made "Linnaeus thermometer", to use in his greenhouses, was made by Daniel Ekström, then Sweden's leading maker of scientific instruments. Ekstöm's workshop was in the basement of the Stockholm observatory. As often happened in this age before modern communications, many physicists, scientists, and instrument makers are given credit with independently making the same measurement scale; among them were Pehr Elvius, the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which had an instrument workshop), who Linnaeus had also talked to; Christin of Lyons; Daniel Ekström, the instrument maker; and Mårten Strömer (1707–1770) who had studied astronomy under Anders Celsius.


title: Celsius

text: The first known document reporting temperatures in this modern "forward" Celsius scale is the paper "Hortus Upsaliensis", dated 16 December 1745, that Linnaeus wrote to a student of his, Samuel Nauclér. In it, Linnaeus reported the temperatures inside the orangery at the Botanical Garden of Uppsala University:


title: Celsius

text: ...since the caldarium (the hot part of the greenhouse) by the angle of the windows, merely from the rays of the sun, obtains such heat that the thermometer often reaches 30 degrees, although the keen gardener usually takes care not to let it rise to more than 20 to 25 degrees, and in winter not under 15 degrees...


title: Celsius

text: For the next 204 years, the scientific and thermometry communities worldwide called this scale the "centigrade scale". Temperatures on the centigrade scale were often reported as "degrees" or "degrees centigrade". The symbol for temperature values on this scale was °C (in several formats over the years). Because the name "centigrade" was also the Spanish and French language name for a unit of angular measurement (one-hundredth of a right angle) and had a similar meaning in other languages, the term "centesimal degree" was used when very precise, clear language was required for international communication, such as by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). The 9th CGPM (General Conference on Weights and Measures) and the CIPM (International Committee for Weights and Measures) officially decided to use "degree Celsius" (symbol: °C) in 1948.


title: Celsius

text: It would take nearly two decades however, for school textbooks to change from "centigrade" to "Celsius", and many people today still use the old name.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: The Canterbury Tales is a book of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer. It was written in the 14th century. It was one of the first books to be written in Middle English. The book is about a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Canterbury. As they travel along, each person tells a story to pass the time. Chaucer planned to write 120 stories, with each person telling two stories on the way there and two on the way back. However, only 23 were completed, and one was partially finished. Two of the stories are written in prose. The others are written in verse. They were so popular that he was invited to read his stories to the king and royal court.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: "The Canterbury Tales" is about a group of people who are pilgrims. They are travelling to an important sacred site. In the Middle Ages, many Christian people went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Canterbury. Canterbury Cathedral was a famous pilgrimage site because it contained the "shrine" (a place for remembering) of Saint Thomas Becket.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Thomas Becket had been the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1100s. He had an argument with his old friend, King Henry II, and in 1170 he was murdered by some of the King's knights on order from the King. The King felt very sad and guilty. He had a magnificent tomb built for his old friend.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: People began to visit the tomb. Soon, some people said that Thomas Becket was a saint, and that his bones could work miracles. He is regarded as a martyr for the Christian faith and as a saint by both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. In the late Middle Ages his shrine made Canterbury one of the four most important pilgrimage places in Europe.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Many pilgrims used to meet together in London. "The Canterbury Tales" tells of the meeting of a group at an inn in Southwark, which was a village south of the Thames River and now making up part of London. This was a good place to meet because people from the north could cross the Thames River by London Bridge.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Canterbury is in the south-east of England. Pilgrims used to gather in groups because it was dangerous to travel alone. In the days before modern banking, every traveller had to carry a lot of money to pay for food and accommodation (a place to sleep). Robbers often attacked people along the roads.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: When pilgrims gathered in a group, the group could be made up of many different kinds of people, both rich and poor, noble and humble. The groups often contained a number of religious people such as priests, monks and nuns. In Chaucer's story, the most noble person is a knight.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: "The Canterbury Tales" begins with a Prologue (which means "a few words to begin"). In the prologue Chaucer describes the time of year, which is April, when the weather begins to get warmer after winter. He says that it is at this time that people begin to go on pilgrimage. Chaucer tells the reader about the people who are gathered at the inn. He describes the people so clearly that many of them have become famous characters in English Literature, and have often been shown in paintings. Chaucer describes how each person tells a story to entertain the other as they travel along.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Some of the tales (stories) are serious and others are funny. Some of the funny stories are vulgar (sexually rude). A lot of the tales talk about the Christian faith. Sometimes the "theme" (main idea) of one story is followed into the next story, as a new story-teller responds (or answers) to a story they have just heard. All of the tales are about the way that people think and behave towards each other.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: "The Canterbury Tales" is written in the type of English that most ordinary people used in Chaucer's day. Chaucer was one of the first authors (writers) who wrote stories in English. Before, stories were written in Latin or French. Some other writers of Chaucer's time also wrote in English. Some of these writers were John Gower, William Langland, and the Pearl Poet.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Chaucer planned the stories before he wrote them but he did not finish his plan. He planned that each character would tell four stories: two while going to Canterbury and two while returning to London. If Chaucer had finished, he would have written 120 stories. He only actually wrote 24. Chaucer began to write the stories in the 1380s. He stopped writing them in the 1390s. Some think that he deliberately did not write the total 120 stories.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Chaucer was an important person in the royal court. Some people think that, in the stories, Chaucer was saying things about court politics. Some people think that Chaucer based his characters on people that he really knew and who were at the royal court.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: Some people think that Chaucer copied ideas from others peoples’ writings because some of the stories in "The Canterbury Tales" are very similar to them. The characters, however, are very different. The characters have different occupations and personalities. They all tell different types of stories and they tell them in different ways.The big story is about many pilgrims traveling to Canterbury. They are riding horses and the trip takes several days. Chaucer does not say much about the big story and most of the writing is about the stories told by the pilgrims.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: The two earliest manuscripts (hand-written copies) of "The Canterbury Tales" are the Hengwrt manuscript and the Ellesmere manuscript. There are also 84 manuscript and four printed copies of "The Canterbury Tales" that were made before 1500. There are quite a lot of differences in the different copies. Some experts on Chaucer have started The "Canterbury Tales Project". The project is to read all these copies of "The Canterbury Tales", find out the differences and write the most accurate copy.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: With the exception of the Innkeeper/host Harry Bailey, the various manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales had various drawings of each of the Pilgrims who told a tale; other Pilgrims mentioned who did not tell a tale or who were illustrated were the knight's yeoman, a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, a tapestry weaver; a plowman. The original intenent was that each pilgrim was to tell two tales to Canterbury and two on the way back for a free meal; that would have been an estimated 120 tales-instead of the 23 in the book. Indeed, the only Pilgrim who tells two tales is Chaucer himself: Sir Thopas [unfinished] and Tale of Melibee.


title: The Canterbury Tales

text: North Reading Room, west wall. Detail of mural by Ezra Winter illustrating the characters in the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Library of Congress John Adams Building, Washington, D.C


title: Ramli bin Ibrahim

text: Datuk Ramli bin Ibrahim (born 20 May, 1953) is a Malaysian choreographer and a classical ballet dancer. In 2018, the Government of India gave him the Padma Shri for his contribution to the Odissi dance form. He founded the Sutra Dance Theatre and Sutra Foundation to encourage people in learning traditional dance forms.


title: Ramli bin Ibrahim

text: Ramli Ibrahim was born in Malaysia in May, 1953, to Encik Ibrahim Bin Hj Mohmmad Amin, who was a teacher, and Kamariah, who was a secretary of the Kaum Ibu (women's association) of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). He grew up in a liberal Muslim family. In an interview to ‘The Hindu’ in 2016 he also claimed to be a singer.


title: Ramli bin Ibrahim

text: He studied mechanical engineering in the University of Western Australia. Over there, he joined the Australian Ballet School in Melbourne. At around the same time he met Chandrabhanu (Zamin Haroon), another Malaysian Muslim classical dancer who had adopted a Hindu name, Chandrabhanu. He who was studying Bharadhanatyam under Adyar Lakshman, another renowned artist, who taught Ibrahim the art form. Later, he would move to Chennai to learn under Lakshman. He would be taught along with other famous dancers like Radha Anjali and Swapnasundari.


title: Ramli bin Ibrahim

text: It was under the famous Odissi guru, Deba Prasad Das, who was settled in New Delhi, that Ramli Ibrahim started learning Odissi.


title: Ramli bin Ibrahim

text: After going to back to Malaysia in the year 1983, he had setup the Sutra Dance Theatre in Kuala Lampur. The theatre focused on Malaysian art scene and strives to promote Malaysian art forms both nationally and internationally. It mainly associates itself with the Odissi dance form which originated in the Indian state of Odisha. In 2007 he setup the Sutra foundation in Malaysia.


title: Ramli bin Ibrahim

text: He was awarded with the Padma Shri, one of the highest civilian awards for artists and others, by the Indian government in the year 2018 for his contributions to Odissi and Bharadhanatyam for over 40 years.


title: Wolverhampton

text: Wolverhampton is a city and metropolitan borough in the county of the West Midlands in England. It used to be part of Staffordshire. The 2011 census revealed that 249,470 people live in the city.


title: Wolverhampton

text: Wolverhampton originally grew as a market town. It had a large woollen trade industry. In the Industrial Revolution, it became an important place for coal mining, steel production, lock making, and the making of cars and motorcycles.


title: Wolverhampton

text: The city's railway station is on the West Coast Main Line and is an important junction of many lines. Passengers can get direct trains to places such as London, Manchester, Birmingham, Shrewsbury, Walsall, Cornwall, Yorkshire, Glasgow, Edinburgh and areas of Wales.


title: Wolverhampton

text: Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C. are the city's football club. They currently play in the Premier League, the top level of football in England. They play their home games at the Molineux Stadium.


title: Freemasonry

text: Freemasonry is an organization of people who believe in brotherhood and helping others. Its members are known as "Freemasons" (in full: "Ancient Free and Accepted Masons", or simply "Masons"). Freemasons also help one another in times of hardship. Freemasonry can be found all over the world in various forms. About 6 million people are Freemasons.


title: Freemasonry

text: The local groups in various countries are known as "lodges". At the State or National level are "Grand Lodges". These are independent of each other. "Regular" Freemasonry is only for men, but there are also co-ed Masonic lodges (and lodges for only Women) that are not recognized as legitimate by the "regular" groups. All of these lodges believe in "brotherly love, relief and truth". They do work for charities such as running schools for orphaned children. There is a Royal Masonic Hospital which is a home for old members and their families.


title: Freemasonry

text: The word mason means a construction worker who works with stone. He is also called a "stonemason". Freemasonry grew from the groups (guilds) of stonemasons in the Middle Ages. These men were building cathedrals and other big buildings. They were called freemasons because they were free, they were not servants who belonged to a rich lord, like many workers were in those days. They often changed jobs and moved from one town to another. In this way they were different from other craftsmen who often worked in one place and had guilds in one town. The stonemasons tried to keep their skills secret so only they knew how to do their job. This is probably why the Freemasons have hand shakes and passwords that they swear to keep secret.


title: Freemasonry

text: About 1650, Masons' guilds started to let people who were not masons into their guilds. In 1717, the first Grand Lodge (the Grand Lodge of England) was formed. It developed into the governing body of Freemasonry in England. In 1813, it merged with a rival and is now called the United Grand Lodge of England.


title: Freemasonry

text: Freemasonry is controversial and has been opposed. The Anti-Masonic Party (1827-34) was important in early American politics. The Catholic Church opposes Freemasonry, although Freemasonry itself does not block Catholics. Political authorities also sometimes oppose it. Nazi Germany and Eastern Bloc nations outlawed freemasonry.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: K.G.F: Chapter 1 is a 2018 Indian Kannada-language period action film. It was written and directed by Prashanth Neel, and produced by Vijay Kiragandur under the banner of Hombale Films.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: It is the first installment in the two-part series, followed by "". The film features Yash as Rocky, the lead role, while debutante Ramachandra Raju features as Garuda. Anant Nag narrates the film, while Srinidhi Shetty, Vasishta N. Simha, Achyuth Kumar, and Malavika Avinash appear in supporting roles.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: The film was made on a budget of ₹80 crore, making it the most expensive Kannada-language film at its time of release.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: The film focuses on Rocky, who lives in poverty, but grows up to be a high-ranking gangster in Mumbai. Later, reformed, he poses as a slave-laborer in the Narachi Company (Kolar Gold Fields), aiming to assassinate the cult's future heir, Garuda.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: The film's development began in early 2015, after Neel finished writing the screenplay. Filming began two years later, on 15 January 2017. Most of the film is set in the Kolar Gold Fields and was filmed in locales such as Kolar, Mysore, and parts of North Karnataka. The film's production was completed on 17 August 2018. Bhuvan Gowda handled the cinematography and Srikanth Gowda edited the film. Composer Ravi Basrur scored the film.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: After a North American premiere on 20 December 2018, a Kannada version of "K.G.F: Chapter 1" was released, and Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi-dubbed versions followed the next day. They received positive response from audiences. However, critics gave the film mixed reviews. The film performed well commercially and collected in its entire theatrical run. This broke the record for the highest grossing Kannada film of all time.


title: K.G.F: Chapter 1

text: At the 66th National Film Awards, the film won two awards for Best Action and Best Special Effects. At the 66th Filmfare Awards South, the film won two awards from five nominations. This includes the award for Best Film and Best Actor for Yash.


title: January Jones

text: January Kristen Jones (born January 5, 1978) is an American actress. She is best known for playing the character Betty Draper on the TV series "Mad Men".


title: January Jones

text: Jones was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She is named after January Wayne, a character in Jacqueline Susann's "Once Is Not Enough". She has two sisters – Jacey and Jina.


title: January Jones

text: Jones has had roles in the movies "Anger Management" (2003), "Love Actually," and "". In 2005, she was in "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada". It was directed by and starred Tommy Lee Jones. In "We Are Marshall" (2006), she played the wife of football coach William "Red" Dawson.


title: January Jones

text: She had the lead female role in the movie "Love's Enduring Promise". Her character falls in love with a man who saves her father's life. She currently acts in the AMC series "Mad Men" as young housewife and mother Betty Draper Francis. She is also known for her role as Cadence Flaherty in the 2003 comedy "American Wedding", the third movie of the "American Pie" series.


title: January Jones

text: Jones was ranked No.82 on the "Maxim" Hot 100 Women of 2002. She appeared on the cover of "The Hot Issue" of British "GQ" magazine in May 2009.


title: January Jones

text: On November 14, 2009, Jones hosted an episode of "Saturday Night Live". She got bad reviews for this performance.


title: January Jones

text: In 2011, she starred alongside Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger in "Unknown", directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. She also played Emma Frost in "".


title: January Jones

text: She said in "Vanity Fair" in 2009 that she has joined Oceana as a celebrity spokesperson. She was working to save endangered sharks. Jones dated singer-songwriter Josh Groban from 2003–06.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc, sometimes called spelter, is a chemical element. It is in the group of metals called the transition metals. It is sometimes considered a post-transition metal. Its symbol on the periodic table is "Zn". Zinc is the 30th element on the periodic table, and has an atomic number of 30. Zinc has a mass number of 65.38. It contains 30 protons and 30 electrons. In total, 29 isotopes of zinc are known, and five of these occur in nature. Some isotopes are radioactive. Their half-lives are between 40 milliseconds for Zn and 5x10 years for Zn.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is a metal that is mostly used for galvanizing and batteries. It is the fourth most common metal used by people.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is a shiny bluish grey metal. When it has just been cut, zinc has a whitish-grey color. If it is exposed to air, it will not stay shiny for long. Its melting point is (), and its boiling point is (). This temperature is lower than most transition metals but higher than tin or lead. It can be melted on a cooking stove. It boils at a low temperature for a metal. It is not magnetic. When heated a little, it becomes very flexible. If it is heated more, it becomes very brittle. It forms alloys easily with other metals.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is a reactive metal. It is about as reactive as aluminium and more reactive than most of the more common metals, such as iron, copper, nickel, and chromium. It is less reactive than magnesium. Zinc can react with acids, bases, and nonmetals. It does not rust in air, though. A coating of zinc oxide and zinc carbonate forms on the surface of the zinc when it is in air. This coating stops corrosion. Acids can dissolve this coating and react with the zinc metal. This reaction of zinc with an acid makes a zinc(II) salt such as zinc chloride and hydrogen gas. This is a very common chemical reaction. The reaction below is the reaction with hydrochloric acid.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc can burn when powdered or in small pieces to make zinc oxide, a white powder. The flame is bright blue-green.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc oxide can dissolve in strong bases. This reaction happens in some batteries that have zinc in them.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is a chalcophile. This means that it would rather react with sulfur and elements below it on the periodic table than oxygen. That is why zinc sulfide is the most common zinc ore, not zinc oxide.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc can make chemical compounds with other elements. These chemical compounds are only in one oxidation state: +2. A +1 compound has been found but it is hard to make. There are no other oxidation states other than +1 or +2. Most of these compounds have no color. If they have a color, it is not the zinc that is making the color.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc chloride is one of the most common zinc compounds. They are quite unreactive. They are a little acidic when dissolved in water. They make a green flame when heated in a fire.


title: Zinc

text: Five isotopes of zinc are found in nature. Zn is the most common isotope, with 48.63% of naturally occurring Zinc. This isotope has a half-life of 4.3x10 years. This is so long, that its radioactivity can be ignored. Similarly, (0.6%), with a half life of 1.3x10 years is usually considered to not be radioactive. The other isotopes found in nature are (28%), (4%) and (19%).


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is not found as a metal in the earth's crust. Zinc is only found as zinc compounds. Sphalerite, a mineral that is made of zinc sulfide, is a main ore of zinc. Very little zinc is in the ocean. Zinc ore is normally found with copper and lead ores.


title: Zinc

text: There are some other zinc ores, such as smithsonite (zinc carbonate) and a zinc silicate mineral. They are less common.


title: Zinc

text: The zinc sulfide is concentrated by flotation. There is a detergent that collects the zinc sulfide. The impurities sink to the bottom and are removed. Then the zinc sulfide is heated in air to make zinc oxide and sulfur dioxide.


title: Zinc

text: The sulfur trioxide reacts with the zinc oxide to make zinc sulfate. This makes a soluble form of zinc which can be processed more.


title: Zinc

text: The zinc sulfate is purified and electrolyzed. This electrolysis makes oxygen, zinc, and sulfuric acid. This makes a pure zinc that is known as "SHG" or special high grade.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc oxide can also be reduced by carbon to zinc metal and carbon dioxide at high temperatures. This is a blast furnace process similar to how iron is made.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is used in electrical batteries. The alkaline cell and the Leclanche cell are the ones that use zinc the most. It becomes oxidized and provides electrons for the battery to run.


title: Zinc

text: About 59% of zinc is used for corrosion prevention, which includes galvanizing. 47% of the world's zinc is used for galvanizing. This is used to protect another metal, usually iron, from rusting. The zinc coating corrodes instead of the iron. The zinc coating can be placed on the metal in two ways. The metal can be dipped into a pot of melted zinc. The zinc can also be electroplated on to the metal. Dipping lasts longer but has a patchy surface that some do not think looks nice. It is also used in motorboats and pipelines to slow rusting. The motor of a motorboat often has a "bullet" of zinc, that will corrode easily, but will help other metal parts of the motor to stay rust free.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc is used in alloys. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Brass is the most common zinc alloy. Zinc can form alloys with many other metals. Zinc aluminium is an alloy of zinc and aluminium, which makes good bearings. Commercial bronze has zinc in it. Sometimes cadmium telluride is reacted with zinc to make cadmium zinc telluride, a semiconductor. Nickel silver is another zinc alloy.


title: Zinc

text: Zinc can be used in the pipes of a pipe organ. An alloy of tin and lead was used in the past. Zinc is used in the US penny, which only has a thin layer of copper. The core is zinc. Older pennies were made completely out of bronze.


title: Zinc

text: A mixture of powdered zinc and sulfur can be used to propel a model rocket. This reaction makes zinc sulfide, heat, light, and gases. Zinc sheet metal is used to make zinc bars.


title: Zinc

text: About 1/4 of zinc is used to make zinc compounds. Zinc oxide can be used for sunscreen or paint pigment. Zinc oxide also is a semiconductor. Zinc chloride is used to preserve wood so it does not rot. Some fungicides have zinc in them. Zinc sulfate is used in dyes and pigments. Zinc sulfide is used in fluorescent bulbs to convert the ultraviolet light to visible light.


title: Zinc

text: Humans need a little bit of zinc to help their body run well. If they do not get enough zinc in their food, they can get a mineral deficiency. Almost two billion people have a zinc deficiency. Zinc deficiency makes one more easily get infections. Some people say that when we get colds, we should take more zinc. Others say that zinc does not make a difference. There are medicines that one can use when they have a cold. People add tiny amounts of zinc compounds to vitamin pills and cereals to make sure that they get enough zinc. Most single-tablet vitamins have zinc in them. Zinc is found in at least 100 enzymes. It is the second most common transition metal other than iron. Zinc also is used by the brain. The human body contains 2 to 4 grams of zinc. A zinc enzyme helps remove carbon dioxide from blood. Whole wheat has much zinc in it.


title: Zinc

text: Large amounts of zinc metal are toxic. It can dissolve in stomach acid. When too much zinc is eaten, copper and iron levels go down in the body. Zinc compounds can be corrosive in the stomach. Zinc compounds put in the nose can ruin the sense of smell.


title: Harry Styles

text: Harry Edward Styles (born 1 February 1994) is an English singer-songwriter, and actor. He is known as a member of the boy band One Direction, with Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik (2011-present).


title: Harry Styles

text: Styles made his debut as a singer with his band White Eskimo, who performed locally in Holmes Chapel, Cheshire. In 2010, Styles auditioned as a solo artist for the British television series "The X Factor". After being eliminated as a solo performer, Styles was brought back into the competition, along with four other contestants, to form One Direction. The group landed the title of being 3rd place through the season.


title: Harry Styles

text: Styles and his One Direction colleagues have released the albums "Up All Night" (2011), "Take Me Home" (2012), "Midnight Memories" (2013), "Four" (2014), and "Made in the A.M." (2015). They have also performed on two worldwide tours, one featured on concert film "", and won several awards, including five Brit Awards and four MTV Video Music Awards. Second album, "Fine Line", (2019) was listed among Rolling Stone's 500 Greats Albums of All Time in 2020. The most popular songs of this album were "Watermelon Sugar" and "Adore You"


title: Harry Styles

text: In 2017, Styles had a movie role as a British soldier named "Alex" in Christopher Nolan's war movie "Dunkirk."