1.
Division of Korea
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The division of Korea between North and South Korea was the result of the Allied victory in World War II in 1945, ending the Empire of Japans 35-year rule of Korea. The United States and the Soviet Union occupied the country, with the boundary between their zones of control along the 38th parallel, with the onset of the Cold War, negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union failed to lead to an independent, unified Korea. In 1948, UN-supervised elections were held in the US-occupied south only and this led to the establishment of the Republic of Korea in South Korea, which was promptly followed by the establishment of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in North Korea. The United States supported the South, and the Soviet Union supported the North, the Korean War left the two Koreas separated by the Korean Demilitarized Zone in the later part of the Cold War and beyond. When the Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905 Korea became a protectorate of. The Korean king Gojong was removed, in the following decades, nationalist and radical groups emerged, mostly in exile, to struggle for independence. Divergent in their outlooks and approaches, these failed to unite in one national movement. The Korean Provisional Government in China failed to obtain widespread recognition, in the declaration after this conference, Korea was mentioned for the first time. The three powers declared that they were, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945, on August 8,1945, after three months to the day, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. Soviet troops advanced rapidly, and the US government became anxious that they would occupy the whole of Korea, on August 10,1945 two young officers – Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel – were assigned to define an American occupation zone. Working on extremely short notice and completely unprepared, they used a National Geographic map to decide on the 38th parallel and they chose it because it divided the country approximately in half but would place the capital Seoul under American control. No experts on Korea were consulted, the two men were unaware that forty years before, Japan and Russia had discussed sharing Korea along the same parallel. Rusk later said that had he known, he almost surely would have chosen a different line, the division placed sixteen million Koreans in the American zone and nine million in the Soviet zone. To the surprise of the Americans, the Soviet Union immediately accepted the division, the agreement was incorporated into General Order No.1 for the surrender of Japan. Soviet forces began amphibious landings in Korea by August 14 and rapidly took over the north-east of the country, on August 24, the Red Army reached Pyongyang. General Abe Nobuyuki, the last Japanese Governor-General of Korea, had established contact with a number of influential Koreans since the beginning of August 1945 to prepare the hand-over of power. Throughout August, Koreans organized peoples committee branches for the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, headed by Lyuh Woon-hyung, on September 6,1945, a congress of representatives was convened in Seoul and founded the short-lived Peoples Republic of Korea
2.
Korean Demilitarized Zone
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The Korean Demilitarized Zone is a highly militarized strip of land running across the Korean Peninsula. It was established at the end of the Korean War to serve as a zone between the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea. The DMZ is a de facto border barrier that divides the Korean Peninsula roughly in half and it was created by agreement between North Korea, China and the United Nations in 1953. The DMZ is 250 kilometres long, and about 4 kilometres wide, within the DMZ is a meeting-point between the two nations in the small Joint Security Area near the western end of the zone, where negotiations take place. There have been incidents in and around the DMZ, with military. Several tunnels are claimed to have built as an invasion route for the North Koreans. The Korean Demilitarized Zone intersects but does not follow the 38th parallel north and it crosses the parallel on an angle, with the west end of the DMZ lying south of the parallel and the east end lying north of it. The DMZ is 250 kilometres long, approximately 4 km wide, though the zone separating both sides is demilitarized, beyond that strip the border is one of the most heavily militarized borders in the world. The Northern Limit Line, or NLL, is the disputed maritime demarcation line between North and South Korea in the Yellow Sea, not agreed in the armistice, the coastline and islands on both sides of the NLL are also heavily militarized. Upon the creation of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea in 1948, it became a de facto international border, both the North and the South remained dependent on their sponsor states from 1948 to the outbreak of the Korean War. In the Armistice Agreement of 27 July 1953, the DMZ was created as each side agreed to move their troops back 2,000 m from the front line, creating a buffer zone 4 km wide. The Military Demarcation Line goes through the center of the DMZ, the armistice agreement explains exactly how many military personnel and what kind of weapons are allowed in the DMZ. Sporadic outbreaks of violence have killed over 500 South Korean soldiers,50 US soldiers and 250 soldiers from DPRK along the DMZ between 1953 and 1999, Daeseong-dong and Kijŏng-dong are the only settlements allowed by the armistice committee to remain within the boundaries of the DMZ. Residents of Tae Sung Dong are governed and protected by the United Nations Command and are required to spend at least 240 nights per year in the village to maintain their residency. In 2008, the village had a population of 218 people, the villagers of Tae Sung Dong are direct descendants of people who owned the land before the 1950–53 Korean War. To continue to deter North Korean incursion, in 2014 the United States government exempted the Korean DMZ from its pledge to eliminate anti-personnel landmines, inside the DMZ, near the western coast of the peninsula, Panmunjom is the home of the Joint Security Area. There are several buildings on both the north and the side of the Military Demarcation Line, and there have been some built on top of it. The JSA is the location where all negotiations since 1953 have been held, including statements of Korean solidarity, the MDL goes through the conference rooms and down the middle of the conference tables where the North Koreans and the United Nations Command meet face to face
3.
Hangul
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The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and as Chosŏngŭl/Chosŏn Muntcha in North Korea is the alphabet that has been used to write the Korean language since the 15th century. It was created during the Joseon Dynasty in 1443 by King Sejong the Great, in South Korea, Hangul is used primarily to write the Korean language as using Hanja in typical Korean writing had fallen out of common usage during the late 1990s. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 19 consonant and 21 vowel letters, however, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable 한 han may look like a single character, each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. Each Korean word consists of one or more syllables, hence one or more blocks, of the 11,172 possible Hangul syllables, the most frequent 256 have a cumulative frequency of 88. 2%, with the top 512, it reaches 99. 9%. The modern name Hangul was coined by Ju Sigyeong in 1912, han meant great in archaic Korean, and geul is the native Korean word for script. Taken together, then, the meaning is great script, as the word han had also become one way of indicating Korea as a whole the name could also potentially be interpreted as Korean script. Korean 한글 is pronounced, and in English as /ˈhɑːn. ɡʊl/ or /ˈhɑːŋɡʊl/, when used as an English word, it is often rendered without the diacritics, hangul, and it is often capitalized as Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries. Hankul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies, North Koreans call it Chosŏngŭl, after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea. Because of objections to the names Hangeul, Chosŏngŭl, and urigeul by Koreans in China, until the early 20th century, Hangul was denigrated as vulgar by the literate elite, who preferred the traditional hanja writing system. They gave it such names as these, Achimgeul, in the original Hanja, it is rendered as 故智者不終朝而會，愚者可浹旬而學。 Gugmun Eonmun Amgeul. Am is a prefix that signifies a noun is feminine Ahaetgeul or Ahaegeul Hangul was promulgated by Sejong the Great, the Hall of Worthies, a group of scholars who worked with Sejong to develop and refine the new alphabet, is often credited for the work. The project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, the publication date of the Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent, Chosongul Day, is on January 15, various speculations about the creation process were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics, to assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women, the late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul, with gasa literature and later sijo flourishing. In the 17th century, Hangul novels became a major genre, by this point spelling had become quite irregular
4.
Hanja
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Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. Borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation, hanja-mal or hanja-eo refers to words that can be written with hanja, and hanmun refers to Classical Chinese writing, although hanja is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese, only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding hanja characters. Today, a working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts. Learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—hanja-eo —are written with the hangul alphabet most of the time. A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism, the major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun. One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems was to represent native Korean grammatical particles, for example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word hăni, in modern Korean, that means does, and so. However, in Chinese, the characters are read as the expression wéi ní. This is an example of Gugyeol words where the radical is read in Korean for its meaning. Hanja was the means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun and it was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949, additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are a number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North. The replacement has been less total in South Korea where, although usage has declined over time, some remains in common usage in some contexts. Each hanja is composed of one of 214 radicals plus in most cases one or more additional elements, the vast majority of hanja use the additional elements to indicate the sound of the character, but a few hanja are purely pictographic, and some were formed in other ways. This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called eumhun, the word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used. South Korean primary schools abandoned the teaching of hanja in 1971 and it is taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, separately from the normal Korean-language curriculum
5.
Circle of latitude
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A circle of latitude on the Earth is an abstract east–west circle connecting all locations around the earth at a given latitude. Circles of latitude are called parallels because they are parallel to each other – that is. A locations position along a circle of latitude is given by its longitude and their length can be calculated by a common sine or cosine function. The 60th circle of latitude is half as long as the equator, a circle of latitude is perpendicular to all meridians. The latitude of the circle is approximately the angle between the equator and the circle, with the vertex at the Earths centre. The equator is at 0°, and the North and South poles are at 90° north, the Equator is the longest circle of latitude and is the only circle of latitude which also is a great circle. There is no limit to how precisely latitude can be measured, on a map, the circles of latitude may or may not be parallel, and their spacing may vary, depending on which projection is used to map the surface of the Earth onto a plane. On an equirectangular projection, centered on the equator, the circles of latitude are horizontal, parallel, on other cylindrical and pseudocylindrical projections, the circles of latitude are horizontal and parallel, but may be spaced unevenly to give the map useful characteristics. On most non-cylindrical and non-pseudocylindrical projections, the circles of latitude are neither straight nor parallel, North American nations and states have also mostly been created by straight lines, which are often parts of circles of latitudes. For instance, the border of Colorado is at 41°N while the southern border is at 37°N. Roughly half the length of border between the United States and Canada follows 49°N, there are five major circles of latitude, listed below from north to south. The position of the Equator is fixed but the latitudes of the other circles depend on the tilt of this axis relative to the plane of the Earths orbit, the equator is the circle that is equidistant from the North Pole and South Pole. It divides the Earth into the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere, of the parallels or circles of latitude, it is the longest, and the only great circle. All the other parallels are smaller and centered only on the earths axis, the Arctic Circle is the southernmost latitude in the Northern Hemisphere at which the sun can remain continuously above or below the horizon for 24 hours. Similarly, the Antarctic Circle marks the northernmost latitude in the Southern Hemisphere at which the sun can remain continuously above or below the horizon for 24 hours. The Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn mark the northernmost and southernmost latitudes at which the sun may be directly overhead. The latitude of the circles is equal to the Earths axial tilt. In 2000 the mean value of the tilt was about 23° 26′ 21″, the main long-term cycle causes the axial tilt to fluctuate between about 22. 1° and 24. 5° with a period of 41,000 years
6.
Degree (angle)
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A degree, usually denoted by °, is a measurement of a plane angle, defined so that a full rotation is 360 degrees. It is not an SI unit, as the SI unit of measure is the radian. Because a full rotation equals 2π radians, one degree is equivalent to π/180 radians, the original motivation for choosing the degree as a unit of rotations and angles is unknown. One theory states that it is related to the fact that 360 is approximately the number of days in a year. Ancient astronomers noticed that the sun, which follows through the path over the course of the year. Some ancient calendars, such as the Persian calendar, used 360 days for a year, the use of a calendar with 360 days may be related to the use of sexagesimal numbers. The earliest trigonometry, used by the Babylonian astronomers and their Greek successors, was based on chords of a circle, a chord of length equal to the radius made a natural base quantity. One sixtieth of this, using their standard sexagesimal divisions, was a degree, Aristarchus of Samos and Hipparchus seem to have been among the first Greek scientists to exploit Babylonian astronomical knowledge and techniques systematically. Timocharis, Aristarchus, Aristillus, Archimedes, and Hipparchus were the first Greeks known to divide the circle in 360 degrees of 60 arc minutes, eratosthenes used a simpler sexagesimal system dividing a circle into 60 parts. Furthermore, it is divisible by every number from 1 to 10 except 7 and this property has many useful applications, such as dividing the world into 24 time zones, each of which is nominally 15° of longitude, to correlate with the established 24-hour day convention. Finally, it may be the case more than one of these factors has come into play. For many practical purposes, a degree is a small enough angle that whole degrees provide sufficient precision. When this is not the case, as in astronomy or for geographic coordinates, degree measurements may be written using decimal degrees, with the symbol behind the decimals. Alternatively, the sexagesimal unit subdivisions can be used. One degree is divided into 60 minutes, and one minute into 60 seconds, use of degrees-minutes-seconds is also called DMS notation. These subdivisions, also called the arcminute and arcsecond, are represented by a single and double prime. For example,40. 1875° = 40° 11′ 15″, or, using quotation mark characters, additional precision can be provided using decimals for the arcseconds component. The older system of thirds, fourths, etc. which continues the sexagesimal unit subdivision, was used by al-Kashi and other ancient astronomers, but is rarely used today
7.
Equator
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The Equator usually refers to an imaginary line on the Earths surface equidistant from the North Pole and South Pole, dividing the Earth into the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere. The Equator is about 40,075 kilometres long, some 78. 7% lies across water and 21. 3% over land, other planets and astronomical bodies have equators similarly defined. Generally, an equator is the intersection of the surface of a sphere with the plane that is perpendicular to the spheres axis of rotation. The latitude of the Earths equator is by definition 0° of arc, the equator is the only line of latitude which is also a great circle — that is, one whose plane passes through the center of the globe. The plane of Earths equator when projected outwards to the celestial sphere defines the celestial equator, in the cycle of Earths seasons, the plane of the equator passes through the Sun twice per year, at the March and September equinoxes. To an observer on the Earth, the Sun appears to travel North or South over the equator at these times, light rays from the center of the Sun are perpendicular to the surface of the Earth at the point of solar noon on the Equator. Locations on the Equator experience the quickest sunrises and sunsets because the sun moves nearly perpendicular to the horizon for most of the year. The Earth bulges slightly at the Equator, the diameter of the Earth is 12,750 kilometres. Because the Earth spins to the east, spacecraft must also launch to the east to take advantage of this Earth-boost of speed, seasons result from the yearly revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the tilt of the Earths axis relative to the plane of revolution. During the year the northern and southern hemispheres are inclined toward or away from the sun according to Earths position in its orbit, the hemisphere inclined toward the sun receives more sunlight and is in summer, while the other hemisphere receives less sun and is in winter. At the equinoxes, the Earths axis is not tilted toward the sun, instead it is perpendicular to the sun meaning that the day is about 12 hours long, as is the night, across the whole of the Earth. Near the Equator there is distinction between summer, winter, autumn, or spring. The temperatures are usually high year-round—with the exception of high mountains in South America, the temperature at the Equator can plummet during rainstorms. In many tropical regions people identify two seasons, the wet season and the dry season, but many places close to the Equator are on the oceans or rainy throughout the year, the seasons can vary depending on elevation and proximity to an ocean. The Equator lies mostly on the three largest oceans, the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. The highest point on the Equator is at the elevation of 4,690 metres, at 0°0′0″N 77°59′31″W and this is slightly above the snow line, and is the only place on the Equator where snow lies on the ground. At the Equator the snow line is around 1,000 metres lower than on Mount Everest, the Equator traverses the land of 11 countries, it also passes through two island nations, though without making a landfall in either. Starting at the Prime Meridian and heading eastwards, the Equator passes through, Despite its name, however, its island of Annobón is 155 km south of the Equator, and the rest of the country lies to the north
