International Organizations, Defence, Books & Authors, World History

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The first Continental Congress, held at Philadelphia in 1774, was attended by the representatives of the twelve colonies except Georgia. This congress appealed to the British King to remove restrictions on industries and trade and not to impose any taxes without their consent.

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While the nobles and the clergy were exempted from paying taxes, the masses paid all the taxes. Hence it was said : “the nobles fight, the clergy pray and the people pay”. The taille or land tax was entirely paid by the peasants. The gabelle or salt tax was a burden on the common man. The head of each family had to pay the capitation tax.

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The financial crisis in Germany forced the Weimar Republic to make an appeal to the allies for the reduction of the amount of reparation. As a result a committee consisting of ten members was formed under the chairmanship of Dawes, an eminent finance specialist of U.S.A. The committee made some amendments to the provision of the Treaty of Versailles. This known as Dawes Plan. The financial burden of Germany was reduced to certain level.

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After the Second World War, Germany was divided into two separate nations. East Germany was fully under the control of the U.S.S.R. West Germany was supported by the U.S.A. and her allies. A wall was erected across Berlin to separate these two German territories. It was the famous Berlin Wall. But with the collapse of U.SS.R, the German reunification took place on October 3, 1990.

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A durometer is an instrument for testing the hardness of various substances. The term is often used to refer to the measurement as well as the instrument itself. Higher numbers indicate harder materials; lower numbers indicate softer materials. Durometer is typically used as a measure of hardness in polymers, elastomers, and rubbers.

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Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March, 1989, and on 25 December, 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.

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John Boyd Dunlopwas a Scottish-born veterinary surgeon who re-invented pneumatic tyres for his child’s tricycle and developed them for use in cycle racing in 1888 A.D. He is credited with realizing rubber could withstand the wear and tear of being a tire while retaining its resilience. Pneumatic Tyre came to be known as Dunlop Rubber and Dunlop Tyres.

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Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian biologist, distinguished the main blood groups in 1900. He announced in 1901 that there were three major human blood groups : A, B and C (later called O). Landsteiner’s three fellow scientists discovered a fourth blood type named AB in 1902. Landsteiner’s discovery led to blood transfusions between people with compatible blood groups. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1930 for his work.

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Orology is the branch of physical geography dealing with mountains. It is a field of research that regionally concentrates on the Earth’s surface’s part covered by mountain landscapes.

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The protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” Saleem Sinai, is born at the exact moment of India’s independence and possesses telepathic abilities.