When do Scout and Jem discuss scaring Boo Radley out of his home in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Dill comes up with the idea to get Boo Radley to come out of his house in Chapter 1 of To Kill a Mockingbird.  Boo had lived in seclusion for years.  No one had even seen him in many years, except for those in outlandish stories that circulated around the town of Maycomb.  Dill dares Jem to make Boo Radley come out.  Jem is not one to say no when someone dares him to do something, though he does consider the matter for days.  

Jem accepts the dare, but he wonders how he can even get Boo to come out.  Jem does not want to harm Boo, and he is thoughtful about the matter.  Finally, Dill modifies his dare.  He tells Jem to simply "go up and touch the house."  Jem accepts this and does so, running as quickly as he can.

Please provide some examples of a reversal of values in Act 5 for Lady Macbeth and explain how the values have been distorted by her.

In Act 5, Scene 1, we can see how Lady Macbeth's guilty conscience has become more than she can bear.  Earlier in the play, she had valued ruthlessness and remorselessness, and she'd even prayed to evil spirits to help her become more ruthless and remorseless than she already was.  Now, however, she laments Macbeth's ruthlessness when she asks, "The Thane of Fife had a wife.  Where is / she now?" (5.1.44-45).  Macbeth had brutally murdered Lady Macduff and her children when he realized that Macduff had escaped him by fleeing to England.  Including Lady Macbeth is clearly now no longer part of his plans, and she is sad for Macduff's wife and her own husband's terrible and purposeless brutality.

Further, she had earlier suggested that a little water would clear them of the deed of killing Duncan, implying that regret would never play a role in the way the Macbeths seized power.  However, now she feels that she cannot get the smell of the blood off her hands and cries that "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" (5.1.53-54).  In the end, although she formerly valued remorselessness and ambition and brutality and power, Lady Macbeth now seems to understand the emotional and mental toll taken on her by her earlier priorities, and she cries, pitifully and alone.  Guilt has distorted her previous ideas about which qualities are best.

What do the lines of Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" mean?

"Blowing in the Wind" has multiple interpretations.  It changed the music scene as it appeared on the radio at a time when it was dominated by pop songs such as "Candy Girl" by the Four Seasons.  When Dylan released this on his 1963 album Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, he did not intend for it to have any meaning at all, but the meaning is out there--"blowing in the wind."  War protesters later in the decade listened to the song and said that it was a peace ballad when in the first stanza Dylan mentioned "banning cannonballs."  Civil rights' marchers said the song was for them when in that same stanza Dylan mentions, "How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?"  Yet there are other people who appreciate the simple lyrics, tune, and imagery who think that Dylan paints a lovely word picture.  In a later interview, Dylan himself said that the song was not meant to be specifically for any one group.  The song has since been recorded by other artists including Peter, Paul, and Mary.  

When hydrogen gas is burnt and the products are cooled, a colorless liquid is formed. What is one chemical test that could be carried out to...

It's a pretty safe bet that the "colorless liquid" is water, since hydrogen burned in air combines with the oxygen in air to produce water. From the context of the question, it's clear we aren't permitted to "know" this beforehand, and we can't avoid the point of the questions simply by going around it and asserting our certainty that it's water. This can be frustrating because there's no single chemical test that will conclusively demonstrate this is water, but the point is to demonstrate a means of narrowing down the possibilities so we could apply the same line of thinking to a truly unknown substance in the future.

First, consider the nature of water and which of its properties we could empirically test;

• Water freezes and boils at known temperatures


• It is a highly polar molecule


• Many ionic compounds, like sodium chloride, dissolve in it


• It is not soluble with oil or other nonpolar compounds


• It has a neutral pH


• It has no smell or taste

So, some of the experiments we could conduct include

• cooling and heating it, and evaluating the temperatures at which it boils and freezes


• exposing it to a magnetic field to see if it bends (you can do this easily with a strong magnet and a moving column of liquid, e.g. from a faucet)


• attempting to dissolve table salt in it


• attempting to dissolve olive oil in it


• using pH strips or universal indicator


• smelling it

Generally, I advise against tasting compounds under any circumstances due to the possibility of contamination.

What were the tools used for the lottery in "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson?

The two primary tools used in the lottery are the stones and the black box. Add the pencil and paper and this is the extent of tools used in the lottery. Therefore, the most technologically advanced tool used is the pencil or pen used to write the names down; the stones are as archaic and/or rudimentary as it gets. So, we have writing—one of the most important technological developments in human history—and stones, perhaps the most primitive weapon ever used. This dichotomy encapsulates the dilemma of this society. It is a town with (relatively) modern capabilities (represented by writing) but it is a town stubbornly rooted in the past (represented by the stones). 

The black box itself is also a tool. Although the box is weathered, the general consensus is that the village should not replace the box.

Mr. Summers spoke frequently to the villagers about making a new box, but no one liked to upset even as much tradition as was represented by the black box. There was a story that the present box had been made with some pieces of the box that had preceded it, the one that had been constructed when the first people settled down to make a village here. 

So, the box is treated like a sacred object. Note that while the townspeople generally agree that the box should not be harmed, they have no trouble continuing their tradition of ritual killing. The townspeople gives the box more value than human life. These tools are idols, revered more for their connection to this barbaric ritual than they would be revered for their practical purposes in improving things. In other words, the tools are used to continue an old, barbaric ritual. Instead, they could be used to create new things, instill more knowledge, and thus lead to more progressive, humane thinking. 

What happened to Native Americans after the Indian Removal Act was passed?

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave the President the authority to settle Indian peoples on tribal lands located within states to territorial lands outside of state borders. In short, it empowered Andrew Jackson to remove, through force and negotiation, Indian peoples, who would be sent to "Indian territory" in modern-day Oklahoma. Its effects on Indian people, especially in the Southwest (the modern-day Southeast) were profound. Many, including the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who lived in Mississippi, moved to Indian Territory more or less voluntarily. Others, like the Creeks and the Seminoles, were removed (with some exceptions) without their consent. The Cherokee, who lived in northwestern Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina, divided into factions, with one group accepting removal and another, with far broader popular support within the Cherokee nation, opposing it. A Supreme Court decision in Worcester v Georgia (1832) seemed to support the claims of the anti-removal faction, but the US government held that a treaty negotiated with their rivals was binding on the entire nation. The Cherokee were forcibly removed by the US Army and sent on the disastrous "Trail of Tears" to Indian Territory in 1838. So the effect of the Indian Removal Act, and Jackson's Indian policy more broadly, was the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Native peoples to distant lands in the west.

How did England and France, and the international community in general, initially deal with the threat of Hitler’s rise to power and his acts of...

The word that is most typically used to describe the way that the international community (and England and France in particular) dealt with the rise of Hitler is “appeasement.”  England and France did not want to fight another war.  Therefore, they let Hitler have what he wanted, hoping that he would be satisfied and would end his aggressive moves.  They were, of course, wrong.

France and England were devastated by World War I.  They lost tremendous numbers of young men to the war.  Their national economies were badly damaged.  They certainly had no desire ever to fight another war like that one and it is exceedingly difficult to blame them.

Therefore, when Hitler rose to power and when he began to defy international treaties, these two countries (and the international community in general) essentially decided to look the other way.  When Hitler did things he was not supposed to, they said something along the lines of “okay, you can do that, but then it’s time to stop.”  They hoped that Hitler would get all the things he wanted and would be content to settle down without causing a war.  When he rearmed Germany and took back control of the Rhineland, they told themselves it was reasonable for him to do those things and they looked the other way.  When he implemented the Anschluss, they reasoned that Austria was really practically a part of Germany and, besides, that was all Hitler wanted.  When he took the Sudetenland, they let him do so and later they gave him the rest of Czechoslovakia, hoping that this would satisfy Hitler and he would stop trying to expand.

Of course, this strategy did not work and the French and English were eventually forced to accept that they would have to go to war if they wanted to stop Hitler.  For this reason, the French and British policy of appeasement is seen as one of the major mistakes of history.