General but obscure knowledge
We give the answers to the questions we posed last week.
- C. Ozone is a mildly-to-strongly irritating gas if you breathe it into your lungs, and can do some damage along the way. But it forms a layer in the upper atmosphere that intercepts short-wave ultraviolet radiation; the latter would otherwise cause damage to organisms exposed to sunlight. The Montreal Protocol, which restricted the use of chemicals that damaged the ozone layer, is an example of international cooperation to limit environmental damage. There are not enough of those.
- E. There are two Galicias in Europe, one in Spain and one (now) in Poland and Ukraine. Slovenia and Slovakia are the closest pair, both being derived from the Slavs. We don’t know whether there is any linguistic connection between Malacca and Molucca, both now in Indonesia.
- C. The ancient Greek treatises on Astronomy, chiefly Ptolemy’s work, were translated into Arabic after the Islamic conquest of the Levant. In the thirteenth century these were in turn translated into Latin for European scholars, but retained some of the Arabic technical terms.
- A. Pyroxilic spirit and wood naptha are both methanol, or methyl alcohol. Aqua regia, “royal water,” is a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids; so named because it dissolves gold. Aqua fortis is nitric acid, while muriatic acid is hydrochloric acid. There is no obvious relationship between oil of vitriol, sulfuric acid, and sweet oil of vitriol, diethyl ether. Our tutoring consultant intends to bring out these terms when next his Chemistry students complain about how hard it is to learn modern nomenclature.
- B. The Wallace Line runs through the archipelagos of southeast Asia, dividing fauna characteristic of the mainland from that more resembling Australia and the Pacific islands. It has its origin in the water levels of the last Ice Age.
Any of these could have been looked up online, of course, but we hope you played the game on your own at least initially.
