Social Science Questions & Answers

Shorthand is believed to have been invented by Tiro, a slave of Marcus Tullius Cicero, to keep pace with the speeches his master delivered. Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC), a statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and philosopher, is considered one of Rome’s greatest orators. His political speeches are well known, and he delivered these in an elaborate and flowery style, …

There was no single ‘inventor’ of photography. It evolved through the combined work of many people of many different nationalities. One Frenchman, Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1853), often gets the credit, however, since he was the first to obtain a picture ‘from nature’ with a camera, in the modern photographic sense. He was also the first to ‘fix’ a picture, so …

Charles Darrow, a US citizen, invented Monopoly in 1931, during the Great Depression. Out of work, Darrow earned a living inventing puzzles and games, to sell to toy-makers. With some difficulty, he sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers on a royalty basis. The game sold so well that Darrow became a millionaire. The original game had properties named after streets, hotels, …

Phillip M Parker, an American, has written 200,000 books. He has devised computer algorithms which write text, search and do many more defined operations which have helped him write these books. Among his publications include The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea (168 pages), Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or …

Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1942, but his ships were not the first from Europe to reach North American coasts. It is possible that Irish monks, or a Welsh prince, had crossed the Atlantic centuries before. Their voyages, if they ever took place at all, had been forgotten, and so had the voyages the the Vikings, who had settled first …

Fiction’s most famous detective was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Born in Edinburgh in 1859 he decided to become a doctor, and it was when he was studying medicine at university that he met the man who was to later inspire him to create his most famous character. The man was his professor, Joseph Bell, who was particularly good …

Maricha, son of Sunda, an asura, assumed the form of a golden deer and ranged about the wood near the hermitage of Rama. The horns of the deer were like twin jewels and its face was piebald, its ears like two blue lotus-flowers, its sleek sides soft as the petals of a flower, its hoofs as black as jet, its …

The youngest captain was Cafuaka Marcos Evangelista de Moraes from Brazil. Born on June 7, 1970, he won the World Cup in 1994 and 2002. The oldest captain is Dino Zoff from Italy, born on February 28, 1942. He won the World Cup in 1982.

It is not only animals and plants that are in a danger of disappearing from our planet in the face of the industrial ‘advanced’ nations. There are many races of people that have survived in a very simple, stable way of life for many centuries only to be threatened with destruction in the space of a few decades. A good …

In the 1880’s a huge cargo of fashionable pearl buttons arrived in London from Japan. One of the street vendors in the markets of the time liked the look of them, and he decided to sew of these buttons around the hems of his trousers. The fashion soon caught on among the street vendors, with people trying to outdo one …