Problem: Through the 1860s, Victoria relied increasingly on a manservant from Scotland, John Brown. Slanderous rumours of a romantic connection and even a secret marriage appeared in print, and the Queen was referred to as "Mrs. Brown". The story of their relationship was the subject of the 1997 movie Mrs. Brown. A painting by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer depicting the Queen with Brown was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and Victoria published a book, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, which featured Brown prominently and in which the Queen praised him highly.
What country was Queen Victoria's manservant with whom she was rumored to have a romantic interest?
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Answer: Scotland


Problem: The northern supercontinent of Laurasia began to break up, as Europe, Greenland and North America drifted apart. In western North America, mountain building started in the Eocene, and huge lakes formed in the high flat basins among uplifts. In Europe, the Tethys Sea finally vanished, while the uplift of the Alps isolated its final remnant, the Mediterranean, and created another shallow sea with island archipelagos to the north. Though the North Atlantic was opening, a land connection appears to have remained between North America and Europe since the faunas of the two regions are very similar. India continued its journey away from Africa and began its collision with Asia, creating the Himalayan orogeny.
In the Eocene, in Europe, which sea ceased to be?
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Answer: Tethys Sea


Problem: There are a number of proposals to redefine certain of the SI base units in terms of fundamental physical constants. This has already been done for the metre, which is defined in terms of a fixed value of the speed of light. The most urgent unit on the list for redefinition is the kilogram, whose value has been fixed for all science (since 1889) by the mass of a small cylinder of platinum–iridium alloy kept in a vault just outside Paris. While nobody knows if the mass of the International Prototype Kilogram has changed since 1889 – the value 1 kg of its mass expressed in kilograms is by definition unchanged and therein lies one of the problems – it is known that over such a timescale the many similar Pt–Ir alloy cylinders kept in national laboratories around the world, have changed their relative mass by several tens of parts per million, however carefully they are stored, and the more so the more they have been taken out and used as mass standards. A change of several tens of micrograms in one kilogram is equivalent to the current uncertainty in the value of the Planck constant in SI units.
What kind of alloy is never used to measure a kilogram?
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Answer:
unanswerable