How did geography influence the development of civilizations in the fertile crescent

How did geography positively/negatively impact Mesopotamian development? Fertility & Rivers: Flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers created fertile soil suitable for productive agriculture.

the correct answer is: (1) affected by gerrymandering; (2) not affected by gerrymandering.

gerrymandering is known as a practice that intends to establish a some kind of political advantage for a particular party or group. to do this district boundaries are manipulated. the new resulting district is named a gerrymandering.

in other words, what gerrymandering does is to draw the boundaries of electoral districts trying to benefit the party who is doing it. sometimes, the party controlling the legislature will redraw it so they can maximize the number of districts they are likely to control.

a hypothesis is an expected answer to a question, usually based on some theory or prior research. hypothesis testing is a method of determining the viability of a hypothesis. let’s use the us presidential election as an example. there are many hypotheses (questions) about how people feel or whom they will vote for. the only way to know the 100% “truth” about the answers to these questions is to ask every single possible voter – something that is impossible, expensive, time consuming etc. instead, we take samples and use statistics to make “best guesses” about the answer to a particular hypothesis. we never know for sure if our conclusion is right at the time we accept/reject it, but these techniques, when used appropriately can get us close to the truth most of the time (which is a lot better than guessing, flipping coins or throwing darts to get answers).

the tricky part about hypothesis testing is that we have to think somewhat backwards about it – we have to test what is known as the “null hypothesis”. as an example, the hypothesis might be “obama is more popular than romney” while the null hypothesis is “there is no difference in popularity between obama and romney”. we focus on the null hypothesis because it tells us exactly what the expected value of our tests should be (obama popularity = romney popularity) and we can collect data and see if it comes out that way (see next section on “significance”). if it does, then we “accept the null hypothesis” and reject our original hypothesis. if the null hypothesis is disproven, we look at the data to see if our original hypothesis holds (obama> romney).