Topics

Question 0

Success

Answer 0

• the glory from achieving a goal can distort ones perception and ability to reason. Julius Caesar was a great military and political leader who achieved his goal of uniting the country under his rule, but his selfishness and lack of insight gradually caused the glory of his victory to dissipate. As a result, he was murdered by his fellow politicians and countrymen, even Brutus whom he loved dearly. Though he succeeded in gaining power and uniting the country, the power and glory of his success blinded him and lead him down a path full of calamity.
• Crusades: The Pope and the Crusaders were successful in recapturing Jerusalem and stopping the growth of Islam, but it was also a disaster though they did not see it as one at the time, creating many future problems for the Church, planting seeds of hatred in many Muslim communities, and killing many innocent people. This act of pride and ambition was selfish, brutal, and un-Christian. This colossal mistake has come back to haunt us as many of the problems in the Middle East and terrorism can be related to the mistreating and massacres of the Crusades.

Question 1

Adversity

Answer 1

• Helen Keller: The obstacle this Alabama native, born in 1880, had to overcome was being both blind and deaf, the result of a sickness that afflicted her at the age of 18 months. Any sights and sounds she had observed and any words that she had learnt were soon forgotten. Having overcome her own handicaps to become a well-educated college graduate, Helen devoted the rest of her life to helping the blind of the deaf. Helen Keller became one of the most educated women who ever lived in spite of her handicaps and advocated helping others who may be afflicted to reach their full potential.
• Nicholas James Vujicic, (born on 4 December 1982) is an Australian preacher and motivational speaker born with Tetra-amelia syndrome, a rare disorder characterized by the absence of all four limbs. As a child, he struggled mentally and emotionally, as well as physically, but eventually came to terms with his disability and, at the age of seventeen, started his own non-profit organization, Life Without Limbs. Vujicic presents motivational speeches worldwide, on life with a disability, hope, and finding meaning in life.

Question 2

Creativity and Originality

Answer 2

• Google Inc., the popular Internet search engine, is an example of creativity in the internet world. Google has succeeded by innovating its technology and business model. It has a creative idea to identify and solve the problem of assessing the quality of search results by using the number of links pointing to a page as an indicator of the number of people who find the page valuable. Therefore, Google’s search results became far more accurate and reliable than those from other companies, and now Google’s dominance in the field of Internet search is almost absolute.

Question 3

Authority and Leadership

Answer 3

• The Fall of Rome (476 AD): Incompetent emperors and military leadership may have played a part in the decline of the empire
• American Civil War: Leadership and authority: The southern states rebelled against Lincoln’s leadership and denied his authority over them; he was forced to go to war in order to reassert that authority and leadership.
• American Black Civil Rights Movement: Rebellion against authority: Rosa Parks, MLK Jr., and Malcolm X were all heroes and rebels against the white establishment
• Gandhi: Gandhi was a major political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. He was the pioneer of satyagraha resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience, firmly founded upon ahimsa or total non-violence.
• William Harvey

Question 4

individuality

Answer 4

• Nicolaus Copernicus was a visionary, multi-talented astronomer, scientist from the renaissance: He was the first person to present the Heliocentric theory and was rejected by the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful political and cultural forces of his age. Not accepting conventional wisdom or societal pressure to conform.
• Charles Darwin shocked the world with his theory of evolution as proposed in Origin of Species. He explained that, over time, species adapt to their environment in order to survive and then pass along these acquired traits to future generations in a process known as “natural selection.” Although his ideas are widely accepted today, the notion that species could have evolved from an entirely different species caused outrage from those believing that all living creatures were created by God.

Question 5

Morality and Ethics

Answer 5

• Vietnam War: Power and imperialism: The powerful United States was staging a self-interested, imperial, political intervention in a foreign country; many have argued that it was not our place to do so, and we should have simply let the Vietnamese choose their own form of government.
• Same-Sex Marriage Is legalized in France, England and Wales in 2013

Question 6

Motivation

Answer 6

• American Civil War: Freedom: One of the major causes of the war was the country’s division over the possession of black slaves and some historians see the war as one huge battle for human freedom and independence.
• Gandhi: It was through witnessing firsthand the racism, prejudice and injustice against Indians in South Africa that Gandhi started to question his people’s status within the British Empire, and his own place in society.

Question 7

History and Tradition

Answer 7

• American Civil War: Violence as a solution: The American Civil War is an historical example of violence being the only apparent solution to an impossible problem - reuniting a divided nation and asserting Lincoln’s presidential authority.

Question 8

Society and Community

Answer 8

• Civic duty: The spoiled Roman citizens began to hire more and more mercenaries to defend their borders - paid soldiers with no personal loyalty to the Empire. The Romans may have been better off if they had defended themselves, instead of paying and trusting outsiders to take care of them.
• American Black Civil Rights Movement: Change and Protest: Both violent and non-violent protests, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Riders, and sit-ins were effective in calling attention to the plight of black Americans, and also put economic and social pressure on existing institutions that encouraged racial discrimination.
• American Black Civil Rights Movement: Oppression: Segregation was designed to oppress and control African Americans, and it worked for a time, but eventually it became unendurable and led to a form of uprising.

Question 9

Friendship and Collaboration

Answer 9

• Wright Brother
• Sony Ericsson
• Hellen Keller and Miss Sullivan: Miss Sullivan went to great lengths for her pupil, using the manual alphabet to spell the names of objects that Helen could feel with her fingers. She would place her fingers in Helen’s palm and spell the names of objects just by changing the position of her fingers. The catalyst was the word water. By a process of association, Miss Sullivan would spill water on Helen’s hand and then spell the word water. Helen caught on in time: the finger movement meant the same thing as the liquid she felt. The other doctors had been wrong, Helen could communicate.
  Miss Sullivan remained her companion, travelling throughout the world to raise money through public appearances for her cause.
• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
• US and Russia: Russia grants Edward Snowden, the American who leaked info about U.S. surveillance, asylum for one year, which angered US. Russia and the U.S. reach an agreement that Syria must provide an inventory of its chemicals weapons and production facilities within a week and either turn over or destroy all of its chemical weapons by mid-2014.

Question 10

Progress and Technology

Answer 10

• Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age takes the technology related problems of the present a step further; it imagines a world in which technology has ensured
  that people have all of their basic needs met but has also created a starkly divided and stratified
  society in which many people lead alienated and empty lives.
• United Nations Confirms Use of Chemical Weapons in Syria: Chemical weapons have been used in the ongoing conflict between the parties in the Syrian Arab Republic, also against civilians, including children, on a relatively large scale

Question 11

Hero

Answer 11

• Martin Luther. King: Racial equality
• Gandhi
• Nelson Mandela
• Galileo
• Charles Darwin
• Homer
• Dante