For centuries, people wondered how big the Earth was. Unfortunately, although the Earth was flat, no one was able to figure out its size. Gradually, however, people began to realize that the Earth was really round. Then, in the third century BC (2, 300 years ago), a Greek man ...
calculated that the circumference(圆周) of the Earth was 28,600 miles(46,000 kilometers). The true size of the Earth is 25,000 miles(40,000 kilometers).Eratosthenes' measurement was wrong, but it was very close to the truth.For many centuries after Eratoshenes lived, people made maps of...
The stunning city of Petra in Jordan was built by the Nabataeans with staggering sums from the luxury trade. Now the discovery of a faraway submerged altar temple shows the extent of its reach.
An inch was originally defined centuries ago in Europe as the width of an adult male's thumb, but this became the width of three pieces of barleycorn placed side by side. The foot's origins are what you would probably expect — the approximate length of a man's foot. The Romans first ...
the area is a perfect storm of danger for any ship. Cape Horn is regarded as one of the harshest stretches of water in the world, so much so that it's a well-known ship graveyard; more than 800 vessels and 10,000 lives have been lost to its waters over the centuries, hardly a se...
aInstruments that for centuries had jealously kept their distinct identities now abolished these and intermingled 现在嫉妒地几个世纪保留了他们的分明身分的仪器废除了这些并且混合了[translate] aThere were about nine hundred people at the concert 有大约九百个人在音乐会[translate] ...
The acrostic form has been around for centuries, long before its appearance inmind-melting puzzles. They've popped up in religious literature, poetry, correspondence and even in gravestone epitaphs. The word itself is definitely old-school. It comes from a jumbled Greek letter salad (akrostikhis...
are ultimately concerned with removing barriers to growth, rather than supercharging it. Indeed, William Easterly of New York University has calculated that, even among the 52 countries which had policies most consistent with the Washington Consensus, GDP growth only averaged 2% a year from 1980 ...
This philosophical question about the basic nature of humanity has been debated for centuries, and yetthere remains no clear answer, despite what various religions or political ideologies might claim. In reality, it seems much more reasonable to think that some humans are more essentially decent tha...
The inception of the modern income tax system can be traced back to the 18th and 19th centuries. During times of war, nations like Britain and the U.S. implemented taxes on income to fund their military endeavors. Once the wars ended, these systems, to varying extents, stayed, evolving in...