Blog

The sum of a two digit number and the number formed by interchanging its digits is 110. If 20 is subtracted from the original number, the new...

Hello!

The original number may be written as `bar(ab),` where `a` and `b` are one-digit natural numbers, `0lt=blt=9,` `1lt=alt=9.` The value of the number `bar(ab)` is obviously `b + 10a.`

When we interchange its digits, the resulting number is `bar(ba) = a + 10b.` The sum is `(b + 10a) + (a + 10b) = 11a + 11b = 110` (this is given). So

`a + b = 10.`

The second condition gives that

`(b...

Hello!

The original number may be written as `bar(ab),` where `a` and `b` are one-digit natural numbers, `0lt=blt=9,` `1lt=alt=9.` The value of the number `bar(ab)` is obviously `b + 10a.`

When we interchange its digits, the resulting number is `bar(ba) = a + 10b.` The sum is `(b + 10a) + (a + 10b) = 11a + 11b = 110` (this is given). So

`a + b = 10.`

The second condition gives that

`(b + 10a) - 20 = 4(a + b) + 4,` or `6a - 3b = 24, or 2a - b = 8.`

Thus we have a linear system for `a` and `b.` If we add up these two equations, we obtain `3a = 18,` or `a = 6.` From the first equation `b = 10 - a = 4.` The initial restrictions for `a` and `b` are also satisfied.

The answer: the original number is 64.

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, is Blanche or Jane the better bride for Rochester?

The conventional answer to this would be Jane Eyre, who is, after all, the protagonist of the novel and a sort of stand in for the author herself. I think that it might be more interesting though, to argue that it is only by several rather improbable plot manipulations that the author manages to pull off the Rochester-Jane Eyre romance. To make it convincing, the author ends up gifting Jane with a fortune, killing off...

In a more realistic novel, Blanche, a beautiful young woman of Rochester's own social and economic class, would be an obvious match for Rochester. It is true that Blanche's motives are primarily financial, but that was how marriage worked among the upper classes of the period. Blanche's background would have made her skilled in managing a large household of servants. The bigamy plot would work equally well with Blanche as the romantic interest. Moreover, Blanche and Rochester, both cynical and worldly, would have been a more appropriate match and probably had a better marriage than the older, worldly Rochester and the far younger, unsophisticated, and sternly moralistic Jane.

What did Isabel and America have in common?

Both Isabel and America are relatively young. Isabel is a young slave girl, and America hasn't even declared independence when the book begins, which makes America a very young country by the time the book ends.

Both America and Isabel are also unhappy with their respective masters. America is very unhappy with British rule and the treatment from the king. Things like taxation without representation are big issues for the fledgling country. Isabel is equally unhappy with her master, Madam Lockton. Madam Lockton is incredibly abusive to Isabel and Ruth. She beats both girls at various points in the novel, and she even has Isabel's face branded.

Because of their harsh treatment at the hands of unfair rulers, both America and Isabel deeply desire freedom. Additionally, in order to achieve that freedom, both Isabel and America are forced to take that freedom by force. America declares independence and fights a war to keep it. Isabel breaks herself out of Madam Lockton's house, fakes a document that states that she is free, breaks Curzon out of prison, and escapes New York.

What are two incidents from The Story of My Life that show Helen was mischievous?

Even though young Helen Keller was blind and deaf, she still managed to cause a lot of trouble. In her book, Keller describes how as a little girl she was often accompanied by the cook's daughter. Both girls loved mischief. They got into all kinds of trouble together.

We were busy cutting out paper dolls; but we soon wearied of this amusement, and after cutting up our shoestrings and clipping all the leaves off the honeysuckle that were within reach, I turned my attention to Martha's corkscrews (Chapter 2).

Since Helen Keller lost her sense of sight and hearing to an a toddler, she wasn’t really able to communicate with the adults around her as effectively as they would have liked. She used her own special language of signs that Martha Washington understood. Her parents could communicate with her this way, too, but they still found discipline difficult.

The incidents little Helen was involved in were not all harmless.

One morning I locked my mother up in the pantry, where she was obliged to remain three hours, as the servants were in a detached part of the house. She kept pounding on the door, while I sat outside on the porch steps and laughed with glee as I felt the jar of the pounding (Chapter 2).

After this incident and a few others, including one where an impatient Helen caught herself on fire and caused burns to her hands and hair, her parents decided she needed a teacher. When you cannot give a child proper guidance, the child just runs wild. This is especially problematic when that child is as creative, intelligent, and mischievous as little Helen was.

Helen's parents hired Anne Sullivan as her teacher because they were not close to a school for the blind. Sullivan was able to teach Helen proper sign language even though she was deaf and blind, and soon Helen could communicate much more completely.

"Imagine no heaven" by Salman Rushdie is about individuals struggling with a complex sets of external forces that regulate and define their lives....

In "Imagine no heaven," Rushdie sees orthodox religion as an external force that regulates an individual's life.

Rushdie's letter is written to the six billionth person born on the planet. He offers advice on two critical levels to this little person: "How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?" In answering these questions, Rushdie suggests that dogmatic religious structures represent an external force that regulates and defines people's lives.

Rushdie lays out his case to the six billionth person on the planet in several ways. Rushdie believes that religious dogma seeks to control people's lives because it requires "much more" of the individual. Rushdie argues that "rituals of worship that grow up around" people become a part of their lives. He tells the six billionth person that religion will eventually become "the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity." This construction suggests that religion all over the world has a profound effect on how people see and define themselves.

Religion's pretense for abuse is another way Rushdie sees its controlling nature. Rushdie argues that while its message might be universal harmony, people who hold a zealous view towards religion might embrace it as a form of "public oppression." They persecute others as they see themselves as "charioteers of the gods." Rushdie feels that these people do not have a problem with religion being the pretext for so much human suffering: "In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name." The wars that religion fuels represent regulation of human action:

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their "sphere of influence". They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless—American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country's Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city's increasingly fearful Muslims.

The destructive capacity of religion is where Rushdie's fears about its effect on individual identity are most pronounced.

Rather than present an entirely dark portrait of humanity being regulated by religion, Rushdie suggests that there can be a way for individuals, particularly the six billionth person born, to reassert control over their lives. Rushdie feels that openly questioning dogmatic notions of the good is one response to a potentially oppressive force: "The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities." Rushdie believes that embracing thought is a viable response to religion's potential for control.

Rushdie wants people to embrace their ability to think. He believes that making conscious choices that represent complexity and nuance as opposed to reductive simplicity is a way for people to resist the controlling force that religion could be:

Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves. To my mind religion, even at its most sophisticated, essentially infantilises our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us: the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

As Rushdie closes his letter, he believes that individuals do not have to succumb to the pressures of religion's propensity for control. He believes that reveling in our ability to think is something that "all six billion of us could do for ourselves." He believes that thinking for oneself is a way for individuals to participate in "the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part: once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behaviour." To see the world as "undogmatised and plain" is a way to repel the controlling aspect of religion. Rushdie believes this is the way out of the regulation and control intrinsic to religion.

In "Meeting at Night" by Robert Browning, what does the lover have to cross in order to meet his lady?

In the poem, the lover has to cross the ocean, a mile of "warm sea-scented" beach, and three fields in order to reach his lady's farmhouse.

The poem begins by describing the "grey sea" and how the lover travels by the light of the "yellow half-moon large and low." We get the idea that the lover is in a hurry, as he "gain(s) the cove with pushing prow." His boat presumably moves at such great...

In the poem, the lover has to cross the ocean, a mile of "warm sea-scented" beach, and three fields in order to reach his lady's farmhouse.

At last, when he reaches the land, he finds that he only has one mile of beach and three fields to cross before the farmhouse comes into view. The rhythm of the poem, signifying the haste at which the lover travels, is reinforced by kinesthetic imagery ("A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch / And blue spurt of a lighted match"). The end of the poem sees the joyful reunion between the lover and his lady, with their "two hearts beating each to each!"

What are the basic principles of Confucian philosophy? How did the formulation of the principles constitute a response to China’s disarray at...

China was in a state of what Wright refers to as "chaos and moral decline" during the Eastern Zhou (Wright 20). Confucius's two main principles of li, or correct ritual, and ren, or "humanness," brought order to the chaos by stressing the importance of carrying out certain actions but also carrying them out with the proper degree of humanity. Without this sense of ren, Confucius thought the practice of rituals would be...

Taoism, which allowed for greater freedom than Confucianism, stressed following the tao, loosely translated as "the way." However, this philosophy was not as powerful as Confucianism as a philosophical basis for China because leaders often lost their sense of the tao if their empires became too advanced. Taoism works best in a simple, peaceful society, and is not always amenable to the demands of a quickly evolving civilization, which China's was at this point. Confucianism and Taoism were often practiced simultaneously, as people used Confucian ideas to guide their public lives and Taoist ideas to guide their private lives.

Legalism, which instituted a system of rewards and punishments, did not necessarily create moral leaders. Only Confucianism, with its emphasis on li and ren, was able to create the type of moral leadership that could create an orderly society. That is why Confucianism became the philosophical basis for Chinese life.