QUES: In past times, mending was an art. A meticulous tailor or seamstress could mend rips with thread raveled from hems and seam edges so skillfully that the tear was practically invisible. When the raw material – cloth – was worth more than labor, it made sense to expend labor in saving it. Today clothing is considered a consumable item. Mass-manufactured clothing is less expensive than the labor required to repair it. Many people buy a new piece of clothing rather than spend time mending. The thrifty still replace zippers and buttons and sew up ripped hems.
What used to be considered an art, back in the day?

ANS: mending

QUES: The treaty was published in the United States for the first time by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 22, 1946, in Britain by the Manchester Guardian. It was also part of an official State Department publication, Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941, edited by Raymond J. Sontag and James S. Beddie in January 1948. The decision to publish the key documents on German–Soviet relations, including the treaty and protocol, had been taken already in spring 1947. Sontag and Beddie prepared the collection throughout the summer of 1947. In November 1947, President Truman personally approved the publication but it was held back in view of the Foreign Ministers Conference in London scheduled for December. Since negotiations at that conference did not prove constructive from an American point of view, the document edition was sent to press. The documents made headlines worldwide. State Department officials counted it as a success: "The Soviet Government was caught flat-footed in what was the first effective blow from our side in a clear-cut propaganda war."
Where wasn't the Foreign Ministers conference held?

ANS: unanswerable

QUES: Judging relationships based on shared characters requires care, since plants may resemble one another through convergent evolution in which characters have arisen independently. Some euphorbias have leafless, rounded bodies adapted to water conservation similar to those of globular cacti, but characters such as the structure of their flowers make it clear that the two groups are not closely related. The cladistic method takes a systematic approach to characters, distinguishing between those that carry no information about shared evolutionary history – such as those evolved separately in different groups (homoplasies) or those left over from ancestors (plesiomorphies) – and derived characters, which have been passed down from innovations in a shared ancestor (apomorphies). Only derived characters, such as the spine-producing areoles of cacti, provide evidence for descent from a common ancestor. The results of cladistic analyses are expressed as cladograms: tree-like diagrams showing the pattern of evolutionary branching and descent.
Why might two plants be similar but not actually be in the same group?

ANS: convergent evolution

QUES: The population of England rose rapidly during the 19th and 20th centuries whereas the populations of Scotland and Wales have shown little increase during the 20th century, with the population of Scotland remaining unchanged since 1951. Ireland for most of its history comprised a population proportionate to its land area (about one third of the total population). However, since the Great Irish Famine, the population of Ireland has fallen to less than one tenth of the population of the British Isles. The famine, which caused a century-long population decline, drastically reduced the Irish population and permanently altered the demographic make-up of the British Isles. On a global scale, this disaster led to the creation of an Irish diaspora that numbers fifteen times the current population of the island.
How long did the Great Irish Famine cause a population decline in Ireland?

ANS:
century-long population decline