Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
Climate is the prevailing or average weather of a place as determined by the temperature and meteorological changes over a period of years.
b) The climate of a place depends largely on the latitude of the place, the features of the surrounding terrain, the nearness to an ocean, or a mountain range that channels and directs wind patterns. We have seasons in our weather pattern, and changes in the length of the warming day throughout the year, due to the ecliptic of the earth's annual path around the sun. It is the daily warming and cooling of the land and oceans that is the prime generator of the world weather system.
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
The extremes of climate in Kansas are predicated on the fact that the state is in the middle of the continent and the great plains, not near any mountains or oceans, exposed in winter to cold winds from the north in Canada, and in summer to heavy moisture-laden winds from the Gulf of Mexico. It is the meeting of these two wind sources in the fall that creates the huge wind vortices and deep moist convections which become the tornadoes that are a yearly danger in Kansas.
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
a) Rivers have many uses: first, to drain off excess water from the land surface; secondly, to replenish the aquifers under their stream bead and underlying all of Kansas and from which we get most all of our water for irrigation and human consumption; thirdly, the river is a highway of commerce, with the steamboats reaching far into the west; and fourthly, as an area of recreation, fishing, boating, and swimming.
b) Oceans are the reservoir for the majority of heat received from the sun, for the runoff of all rivers and aquifers, the source of most all rain from the evaporation of the surface waters, and the engine which drives our weather patterns, and the moderator of coastal climates. The ocean fisheries are a major source of protein to many of the world's people. International commerce would not be possible except for the navigation of the oceans.
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
The mountains of North America lay in four great chains, oriented generally north to south. They are in order from East to West, the Appalachian/Adirondack chain inland from the Atlantic coast, including the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains. They are an old range, worn down through the eons. Across the Great Planes from them, midway to the Rocky Mountains, are the Black Hills of the Dakotas, somewhat isolated from the Rockies.
The Rocky Mountains, consisting of many parallel ranges, are located at the western boundary of Montana, running southeasterly from the Yukon to Arizona and New Mexico. They form the Continental Divide, which determines the course of the rivers emptying into the Mississippi drainage, and those emptying into the Pacific Ocean. The high plateaus and basins of Utah and Nevada by and large intervene between the Rockies and the next great chain, the Sierra Mountain range in California and the extension northward in Oregon and Washington State, where they are called the Cascade Range.
Beyond the Sierra/Cascades across the interior valleys of California and Oregon is the Coastal Range, lying quite close to the Pacific Ocean. Westerly from the Cascades in Washington on the Pacific Coast is the Olympic range north of the Columbia River forming the Olympic peninsula.
The Olympics has one of the most important rainforests of the world and is a valuable source of timber, as are all the mountain ranges of North America. Most mining in North America is in the mountains, the Eastern mountains are a source of coal and iron, and the Rockies and Sierras are a source of gold, silver, and other metals.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco.
a) Monrovia City is the capital of the nation of Monrovia, on the Atlantic Ocean, at the mouth of the Saint Paul River. Situated on Bushrod Island and Cape Mesurado, it is the nation's chief port and commercial center. It has extensive docks. Iron ore and rubber are major exports; substantial quantities of imports are transshipped to neighboring countries.
The University of Liberia (founded in 1862) is there. Monrovia was founded in 1822 by the American Colonization Society as a refuge for freed slaves from North America; it was named in honor of United States President James Monroe. Large numbers of former slaves have been resettled here.
b) Odessa is capital of Odessa region of the Ukraine, a port on Odessa Bay of the Black Sea. The third largest Ukrainian city after Kiev and Kharkiv, Odessa is an important rail junction and transportation hub. Grain, sugar, coal, cement, metals, jute, and timber are the chief items of trade at the port of Odessa, which is the leading Ukrainian Black Sea port.
Odessa is also a naval base and the home port of a fishing and an antarctic whaling fleet. The city's industries include shipbuilding, machine building, metalworking, food processing, and the manufacture of chemicals, machine tools, clothing, and products made of wood, jute, and silk.
Health resorts are located nearby. Odessa has a university (est. 1865), an opera and ballet theater (1809), a historical museum (1825), a municipal library (1830), an astronomical observatory (1871), and an opera house (1883-87). Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Greeks predominate in Odessa's cosmopolitan population. The city is said to occupy the site of an ancient Miletian Greek colony (Odessos, Ordyssos, or Ordas) that disappeared between the 3rd and 4th centuries. In the 14th century the site, then under Lithuanian control, became a Crimean Tatar fortress and trade center called Khadzhi-Bei. In 1764 it passed to the Turks, who built a fortress (Yenu-Duniya) to protect the harbor. It was captured by the Russians in 1789.
c) Sited on high plains at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains, Denver, the capital of Colorado, has a sunny, cool, dry climate, averaging 13 inches of precipitation a year. The sun shines 300 days a year. Denver was established by a party of prospectors on November 22, 1858, after a gold discovery at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River.
Town founders named the dusty crossroads for James W. Denver, Governor of Kansas Territory, of which eastern Colorado was then a part. Other gold discoveries sparked a mass migration of some 100,000 in 1859-60, leading the federal government to establish Colorado Territory in 1861.
Before the great Colorado gold rush, the Rocky Mountains offered little to attract settlers, except "hairy bank notes," the beaver pelts prized by fur trappers, traders, and fashionably hatted gentlemen in Eastern America and Europe. The gold rush changed that, as the rudely dispossessed Cheyenne and Arapaho soon discovered.
The Mile High City's aggressive leadership, spearheaded by William N. Byers, founding editor of the Rocky Mountain News, and Territorial Governor John Evans, insisted that the Indians must go. After dispossessing the natives, Denverites built a network of railroads that made their town the banking, minting, supply, and processing center not only for Colorado but for neighboring states.
Between 1870 when the first railroads arrived and 1890, Denver grew from 4,759 to 106,713. In a single generation, it became the second most populous city in the West, second only to San Francisco. Although founded as the main supply town for Rocky Mountain mining camps, Denver also emerged as a hub for high plains agriculture. Denver's breweries, bakeries, meat packing, and other food-processing plants made it the regional agricultural center, as well as a manufacturing hub for farm and ranch equipment, barbed wire, windmills, seed, feed, and harnesses.
d) Manitoba, a province in south-central Canada and the easternmost of Canada's three Prairie provinces was part of the Hudson's Bay Company's holdings in North America known as Prince Rupert's Land, founded in 1670. Chief interests for its first two centuries were the fur trade, the province's major economic activity, exploration, and settlement.
After 1870, Prince Rupert's Land was incorporated into the Dominion of Canada. As large numbers of settlers came, agriculture and wheat growing became dominant. Manitoba province has been known as the Keystone Province ever since Canada's Governor General Lord Dufferin described the province in 1877 as "the keystone of that mighty arch of sister provinces which spans the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific." Manitoba lies in the geographic center of Canada. Winnipeg, Manitoba is a transportation and processing center for the agrarian west.
e) Mount Hecla is one of the most active volcanic constructs in Iceland and is also the site of descent into the interior in Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth".
A poem by Richard Hovey, "The Quest of Merlin", mentions Mount Hecla in the prelude: "Interior of a cavern in the bowels of the earth, beneath Mount Hecla. Huge rock fragments, amid which twists tortuously a great root of the tree Yggdrasil. A flickering flame, by the light of which is seen the NORNS, colossal but shadowy shapes, about a gigantic but indistinct Loom. Dull, heavy sounds, out of which arises strange music, which resolves itself continually into imperfect harmonies, which leave the heart in unrest. A sense of striving and struggle beats through the music."
f) The Yukon is Alaska's largest river. It originates in Canada in the Yukon Basin of the Northwest Territory and flows 2,000 miles west into the Bering Sea. From the third week in May when the ice breaks up until mid-October when it re-freezes, it is a summer waterway. After it freezes, it is a winter highway. About 200 riverboats and steamers carry freight during the summer months. I have heard that gold has been discovered along the Yukon.
g) St. Helena is an island in the Atlantic about mid-way between South America and Africa. It was uninhabited when first discovered by the Portuguese in 1502. The island was garrisoned by the British during the 17th century. It became famous as the place of Napoleon Bonaparte's exile, from 1815 until he died in 1821. It is located at 15º 56' South Latitude, 5º 42' West Longitude.
h) The Juan Fernandez Islands, (33º 50'S, 80º 00'W) have developed in isolation, about 400 miles west of Santiago in Chile, on two small islands of volcanic origin, Robinson Crusoe Island and Santa Clara Island. The most ancient of these islands, Robinson Crusoe Island, thought to be some 4 million years old, harbors plant communities including survivors of many ancient plant groups that were once much more widespread in the southern hemisphere. The first human occupation of the islands was in 1574 when the Spanish explorer Juan Fernandez discovered the islands.
i) Aspinwall is a town in Georgia. It is in the area where the Seminole/Muskogee Indians lived.
j) The Orinoco River in Venezuela is one of South America's longest rivers, extending 1,590 miles. Its source is in the Guiana Highlands, on the slopes of the Sierra Parima, in extreme southeastern Venezuela, on the border of Brazil. It flows northwest to a point near La Esmeralda, where it divides. One arm, the Casiquiare River, goes south and after a course of 180 miles enters the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon River.
The main branch continues northwest to the town of San Fernando de Atabapo and, flowing generally north, forms the border between Venezuela and Colombia. After passing over the Maipures and Atures Rapids it meets the Apure River. The Orinoco then turns northeast and traverses the plains of Venezuela before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. The Orinoco averages 4 miles in width. The delta of the river begins 120 miles from the Atlantic.
The Orinoco is navigable for oceangoing ships for 260 miles, from the mouth to the city of Ciudad Bolivar. It is navigable for smaller craft for a distance of 1,000 miles. The Orinoco was sighted in 1498 by Christopher Columbus and was first explored by Europeans (1530-1531) to the confluence with the Meta River. The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored the upper reaches in 1799.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
a) The principal trade centers of the United States are New York, New York, located at the mouth of the Hudson River; Boston, Massachusetts, located in Boston Harbor; Chicago, Illinois, located at the south end of Lake Michigan; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, located on the reaches of Delaware Bay; Baltimore, Maryland, located on the reaches of Chesapeake Bay; New Orleans, Louisiana, located between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River inland from the Gulf of Mexico; St. Louis, Missouri, located at the confluence of the Missouri River and the Mississippi; Kansas City, Missouri, located on the Missouri River at the Kansas River confluence, also being a great rail hub; Denver, Colorado, situated at the eastern slope of the Rockies as noted above; Los Angeles, California, in Southern California at Los Angeles Harbor; San Francisco in the north of California at San Francisco Bay; and Seattle, Washington, located on east side of Puget Sound in Washington State, now becoming an important trade center in addition to its primary lumber industry and naval shipyards.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
France with its capital at Paris, and Switzerland with its capital at Bern are the only republics in Europe. There are no other republics in Europe as we know a republic to be, all the other nations are Constitutional Monarchies or Principalities.
The major monarchies are Great Britain, London; Germany, Berlin; Russia, St. Petersburg; Ukraine, Kiev; Austria/Hungary, Vienna; Italy, Rome; Spain, Seville; Portugal, Lisbon; Belgium, Brussels; Holland, Amsterdam; Denmark, Copenhagen; Norway, Oslo; and Sweden, Stockholm.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
The Atlantic coast is colder because the southward flow of the Japanese current prevents the majority of cold arctic air from sinking south along the Pacific coast, until east of the Rocky Mountains, sweeping thence across the northern plains, sinking to lower latitudes bringing freezing weather south as far as Florida.
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
As the sun heats the ocean waters the evaporate rises into the prevailing wind currents which flow generally from West to East. On reaching mountainous areas the wind currents rise and are cooled, condensing the evaporate into rain, hail, or snow, which then returns to Earth, the excess which is not absorbed becoming run-off and forming rivulets, streams, then rivers, returning to the sea to repeat the process over again. Eventually, even the water that is absorbed by the Earth also returns to the sea, as in our Colorado/Kansan aquifer, although that may take many thousands of years.
10. Describe the movements of the Earth. Give inclination of the Earth.
Today we know that the Earth is involved in five motions, Rotation, Revolution, Precession, Motion around the galactic nucleus, and Motion of the galaxy. The rotation or spinning motion of a planet about an axis is the most basic of the five planetary motions.
The Earth rotates about its axis once every 24 hours, producing changes in what portion of the Earth is illuminated by the Sun, creating our day and night. The term "revolution" refers to the orbital motion of the Earth as it travels an elliptical path around the sun. The earth's period of revolution, i.e., the time to complete a revolution, is 365.25 days.
As the Earth's axis is inclined 23.4 degrees relative to the orbital plane, this produces our seasons. The Earth's axis is "wobbling", meaning that the axis changes its orientation with respect to celestial objects. This wobbling motion is referred to as "precession". Precession is similar to the wobbling motion of a top as it spins. The earth's period of precession is about 26,000 years.
As we look out into the nighttime sky we cannot help but ponder the vastness of space and the innumerable stars that fill it. Our Sun is one of 100 billion stars that are gravitationally bound and make up the Milky Way Galaxy. Because we are a part of the galaxy, it is difficult for us to determine its shape and size and our location in it. However, based on the best available information, the Milk Way is a spiral galaxy similar in structure to its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy.
Our Sun is located in the flattened disk approximately two-thirds of the way from the central bulge in a spiral arm. Just as the planets orbit the Sun, the Sun orbits around the galactic nucleus. The velocity of the Sun and the planets around the galactic nucleus is consistent with the laws of Kepler and Newton. Astronomers calculate that this period of revolution around the galaxy center is 240,000,000 years. The suspected motion of the galaxy through space has not yet been determined.
--- end of 1895 8th Grade Final Exam and Answers in U.S. History
Time to take this exam: 45 Minutes
Editor's Note:
While I've tried to find out who took the time to answer the exam but haven't been able to, you should know that the answers are correct.
I've made the same comment and asked the same questions after each section in this series on the 8th Grade Final Exam given in Salina, Kansas, in 1895. First, after reading these questions and answers, I realize how dumbed down our society has become. Second, there are a lot of questions that we should be asking.
For example, here are a few questions to think about. How well do you think you would have done taking this 1895 8th Grade Final Exam? Do you think 4-year college students today can pass this exam? How about Teachers today, how would they do taking this exam? Would they be able to pass this test?
Lastly, I have to wonder why 8th Grade children in 1895 were able to pass this test versus 8th Graders today? Have we allowed things to change for the worse? Is it because the government had no input in the education system in 1895 versus their control over what children are learning today?
Just some things to think about.
By the way, I want to thank Pete for his 30 years of service as a Police Officer -- and for reminding me to post this. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.
Tom Correa
