Illustrated with beautiful images from the British Library's collection, The British History Puzzle Book will provide hours of entertainment and delight readers with questions for history novices to experts alike. It also spans British history from the first Stone Age settlers to today's post-industrial country. A spectacular, puzzle-fueled, myth-busting journey through the hidden history of Britain in 500 questions. Britain's history is one of the richest and most complex in Europe. From the first Stone Age settlers, through the Roman occupation, the waves of Germanic and Viking invaders, the wars of the Middle Ages, the consolidation of the United Kingdom, the British Empire, the two World Wars and today's post- industrial country, its development is filled with well-known highpoints and lesser-known byways. The British History Puzzle Book poses fascinating and fiendish questions which will test your knowledge of the nation's history to the limit and reveal a treasure trove of astonishing facts. So if you've ever wondered where cricket was invented, how many husbands the reigning queens of England have had, or who the first recorded tourist to visit Britain was, then The British History Puzzle Book will provide all the answers.

Guides you through the history of our incredible world with hundreds of questions certain to confound and amuse children and parents alike.

From Carlos Fonseca comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic epic of art, politics, and hidden realities Just before the dawn of the new millennium, a curator at a New Jersey museum of natural history receives an unusual invitation from a celebrated fashion designer. She shares the curator’s fascination with the secrets of the animal kingdom—with camouflage and subterfuge—and she proposes that they collaborate on an exhibition, the nature of which remains largely obscure, even as they enter into a strange relationship marked by evasion and elision. Seven years later, after the designer’s death, the curator recovers the archive of their never-completed project. During a long night of insomnia, he finds within the archive a series of clues about the true history of the designer’s family, a mind-bending puzzle that winds from Haifa, Israel, to bohemian 1970s New York to the Latin American jungles. As he follows this trail, the curator discovers a cast of characters whose own fixations interrogate the unstable frontiers between art, science, politics, and religion. An aging photographer, living nearly alone in an abandoned mining town where subterranean fires rage without end, creates miniature replicas of ruined cities. A former model turned conceptual artist becomes the star defendant in a trial over the very soul and purpose of art. A young indigenous boy receives a vision of the end of the world. Reality is a curtain, the curator realizes, and to draw it back is to reveal the theater of the obsessed. Natural History is a portrait of a world trapped between faith and irony, tragedy and farce. An urgent and impressively ambitious novel in the tradition of Italo Calvino and Ricardo Piglia, it confirms Carlos Fonseca as one of the most daring writers of his generation.

This is the second volume of a unique collection that brings together the best English-language problems created for students competing in the Computational Linguistics Olympiad. These problems are representative of the diverse areas presented in the competition and designed with three principles in mind: · To challenge the student analytically, without requiring any explicit knowledge or experience in linguistics or computer science; · To expose the student to the different kinds of reasoning required when encountering a new phenomenon in a language, both as a theoretical topic and as an applied problem; · To foster the natural curiosity students have about the workings of their own language, as well as to introduce them to the beauty and structure of other languages; · To learn about the models and techniques used by computers to understand human language. Aside from being a fun intellectual challenge, the Olympiad mimics the skills used by researchers and scholars in the field of computational linguistics. In an increasingly global economy where businesses operate across borders and languages, having a strong pool of computational linguists is a competitive advantage, and an important component to both security and growth in the 21st century. This collection of problems is a wonderful general introduction to the field of linguistics through the analytic problem solving technique. "A fantastic collection of problems for anyone who is curious about how human language works! These books take serious scientific questions and present them in a fun, accessible way. Readers exercise their logical thinking capabilities while learning about a wide range of human languages, linguistic phenomena, and computational models. " - Kevin Knight, USC Information Sciences Institute

__________ Available now: the biggest and best quiz book about the deep blue! __________ Think you know the difference between a ship and a boat? Do you really understand the shipping forecast? And what do all the different flags at sea mean? The Nautical Puzzle Book is packed to the brim with over 100 puzzles inspired by the National Maritime Museum's objects and their stories. Inside this book you'll find a fiendish mix of word games, codewords, trivia, picture puzzles, word scrambles, anagrams, crosswords and much more. It's a chance to learn all about epic explorers, history makers, record breakers, myths, legends, seafaring traditions and life at sea. By the time you reach the end you'll have navigated centuries of history, crossed thousands of miles of ocean, and made countless discoveries - so batten down the hatches and set sail! __________ The perfect gift for veteran seafarers and armchair navigators alike. Find out if you're worthy of captaincy or destined to be a deck hand in this beautiful and addictive puzzle book! If you're bored of Zoom Quizzes, then this is the book for all the family.

The quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth is nearly as old as humanity itself. For most of history, people trusted mythology or religion to provide the answer, even though nature abounds with clues to the past of the Earth and the stars. In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of how scientists and philosophers examined those clues and from them built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself. Richet begins his story with mythological traditions, which were heavily influenced by the seasons and almost uniformly viewed time cyclically. The linear history promulgated by Judaism, with its story of creation, was an exception, and it was that tradition that drove early Christian attempts to date the Earth. For instance, in 169 CE, the bishop of Antioch, for instance declared that the world had been in existence for “5,698 years and the odd months and days.” Until the mid-eighteenth century, such natural timescales derived from biblical chronologies prevailed, but, Richet demonstrates, with the Scientific Revolution geological and astronomical evidence for much longer timescales began to accumulate. Fossils and the developing science of geology provided compelling evidence for periods of millions and millions of years—a scale that even scientists had difficulty grasping. By the end of the twentieth century, new tools such as radiometric dating had demonstrated that the solar system is four and a half billion years old, and the universe itself about twice that, though controversial questions remain. The quest for time is a story of ingenuity and determination, and like a geologist, Pascal Richet carefully peels back the strata of that history, giving us a chance to marvel at each layer and truly appreciate how far our knowledge—and our planet—have come.

Why do word puzzles fascinate us? How do they help develop problem-solving skills? How do they teach us about geography, literature, sports, and popular culture? How are they an international language? Jonathan Berkowitz offers a brief history of wordplay, with insights into puzzles and the brain. He offers tips on how to solve puzzles and explains the educational value of puzzles. Challenges in the form of rebuses, anagrams, codes and cryptograms, crosswords, and wordplay with numbers supply even more fun! The Whirl of Words is a unique, rich, and intriguing tour of a wide variety of word puzzles certain to stimulate a brain work-out.