Monthly Archives: April 2014
329.WHAT IS THE BILL OF RIGHTS?
The supreme law of the United States is written out in the Constitution. It is the one set of laws that everyone — no matter what city or state he lives in — must obey.
When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787 to draw up the Constitution, most of the delegates took for granted that there were various rights people had that didn’t have to be written into the Constitution. But Virginia and many other states felt that it would be wiser to protect those individual rights by having them written down, and so they insisted that a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution.
328.WHAT IS HYBRID CORN?
Many of us who have never lived on a farm have no idea of the skill and science that go into raising crops today. We might imagine for example, that the farmer simply scatters seeds in the ground and trusts to luck and nature for good results.
The corn crop is quite scientifically controlled today. This control began about fifty years ago when plant scientists discovered a new method of producing different kinds of corn. It was discovered that when the pollen in the tassels of the corn plant was applied by hand to the protected silks on the ear of the same plant, the kernels which were formed produced widely different kinds of corn plants.
327.WHAT IS GEOMETRY?
With the invention of the zero, we would still need some way to tell the value of each figure when writing a number. The invention of the zero made it possible to drop the words or marks used to show place value or values, and to use the position of a figure in a number to show its value.
Any time we deal with the shape, size, and position of objects in space, we are involved in geometry. When prehistoric people did a certain kind of weaving and decoration, they were using geometry without knowing it.
