QUES: The deeper ancestral demography of Bermuda's population has been obscured by the ethnic homogenisation of the last four centuries. There is effectively no ethnic distinction between black and white Bermudians, other than those characterising recent immigrant communities. In the 17th century, this was not so. For the first hundred years of settlement, white Protestants of English heritage were the distinct majority, with white minorities of Irish (the native language of many of whom can be assumed to have been Gaelic) and Scots sent to Bermuda after the English invasions of their homelands that followed the English Civil War. Non-white minorities included Spanish-speaking, free (indentured) blacks from the West Indies, black chattel slaves primarily captured from Spanish and Portuguese ships by Bermudian privateers, and Native Americans, primarily from the Algonquian and other tribes of the Atlantic seaboard, but possibly from as far away as Mexico. By the 19th century, the white ethnically-English Bermudians had lost their numerical advantage. Despite the banning of the importation of Irish, and the repeated attempts to force free blacks to emigrate and the owners of black slaves to export them, the merging of the various minority groups, along with some of the white English, had resulted in a new demographic group, "coloured" (which term, in Bermuda, referred to anyone not wholly of European ancestry) Bermudians, gaining a slight majority. Any child born before or since then to one coloured and one white parent has been added to the coloured statistic. Most of those historically described as "coloured" are today described as "black", or "of African heritage", which obscures their non-African heritage (those previously described as "coloured" who were not of African ancestry had been very few, though the numbers of South Asians, particularly, is now growing. The number of persons born in Asian countries doubled between the 2000 and the 2010 censuses), blacks have remained in the majority, with new white immigration from Portugal, Britain and elsewhere countered by black immigration from the West Indies.

Who was the distinct majority for the first 17 years of the settlement?
What is the answer?
ANS: unanswerable
QUES: The Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was founded after the fall of the Ming, the last Han Chinese dynasty, by the Manchus. The Manchus were formerly known as the Jurchens. When Beijing was captured by Li Zicheng's peasant rebels in 1644, the Chongzhen Emperor, the last Ming emperor, committed suicide. The Manchus then allied with former Ming general Wu Sangui and seized control of Beijing, which became the new capital of the Qing dynasty. The Mancus adopted the Confucian norms of traditional Chinese government in their rule of China proper. Schoppa, the editor of The Columbia Guide to Modern Chinese History argues, "A date around 1780 as the beginning of modern China is thus closer to what we know today as historical 'reality'. It also allows us to have a better baseline to understand the precipitous decline of the Chinese polity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

What were the Manchus originally named?
What is the answer?
ANS: Jurchens
QUES: Given the wide range of styles in classical music, from Medieval plainchant sung by monks to Classical and Romantic symphonies for orchestra from the 1700s and 1800s to avant-garde atonal compositions for solo piano from the 1900s, it is difficult to list characteristics that can be attributed to all works of that type. However, there are characteristics that classical music contains that few or no other genres of music contain, such as the use of a printed score and the performance of very complex instrumental works (e.g., the fugue). As well, although the symphony did not exist through the entire classical music period, from the mid-1700s to the 2000s the symphony ensemble—and the works written for it—have become a defining feature of classical music.

The use of a printed score and the performance of very complex instrumental works are characteristics of what?
What is the answer?
ANS:
classical music