To Tell The Truth

by Robert Sproule
Based on actual events
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"
"I do."
Carl Savinski stepped up to the witness stand.
Carl's parents had immigrated to Canada when Carl was one year old. They had started a small grocery store and had built it over the years into a major supermarket.
Carl now worked there full time. He helped with receiving, at checkout, did
accounts payable, and after a busy day helped restock the shelves--often until three or four in the morning.
He liked working at his parent's business; it was an honest business. He had
been brought up to be honest, to tell the truth, and more--he knew that there was such a thing as truth. He had never heard of reducing an argument to an absurdity as a method of proving the falsehood of a particular proposition--none of his high
school teachers had ever taught it. But, a year ago, his homeroom teacher had said in front of the whole class:
"There is no such thing as truth."
Carl Savinski had stood up and said, "That would make your statement false."
"Huh?"
"That would make your statement false," Carl had repeated. "If there is no such thing as truth, then your statement is not true. To say that there is no such thing as truth is absurd--you dumb piece of shit!"
Carl was expelled from school for two weeks. He didn't go back. He joined his parent's business instead.
In the past year he had learned that to be honest was not only the right thing to do but also the practical thing to do. He saw how his parents had built this business.
He saw that they had made reasonable rules for the staff and employed them equally without favouritism. The staff liked working there and his parents had gained a competent work force that cared about the future of the company. "The customer is always right" was not company policy--they seldom were--the staff knew what they were doing.
His parents had gained more customers by treating them honestly, by being fair, by giving them more value for their money. If produce was too old, they threw it out; they didn't sell three-day old bread as fresh. Their butcher trimmed more fat off the meat. And they hunted for value; they didn't handle sixteen-ounce cans that had to sell for more than twice the price of two eight-ounce cans.
They stuck to terms with their suppliers: if payment was required in thirty days, they paid in thirty days. If a supplier accidentally shipped more than they were invoiced for, they paid for the extra; if this happened too often, they changed
suppliers. They built up honest relationships with their suppliers. And they gained: they were first to be offered a commodity in short supply, and first to
receive a discount if a supplier was over stocked.
In the past year Carl Savinski saw with his own eyes, in his day-to-day job, that being honest paid. He saw that to be reasonable, to be honest, to tell the truth was practical--that one did not suffer a loss by being honest, but made a gain.
"Your name is Carl Savinski?" the prosecuting attorney asked.
"Yes."
"Do you work at Savinski's Supermarket?"
"Yes."
"Do you recognize the defendant?"
"Yes."
"Please describe the events of October twelfth that led to these proceedings."
"I was restocking shelves near the front entrance to our store when the sensors at the door set off the alarm. I stopped the defendant and asked her to step back through the sensors without her bags of groceries. The alarm went off again. I asked her to come into the office and to empty her pockets and her purse. In her purse was a tube of toothpaste still in its box. The defendant said she had no idea how it got there, that she was sorry, and offered to pay for the toothpaste. I said that she could not, and called the police."
"The prosecution rests, Your Honour."
His Honour was bored. This would be just another shoplifting case. It had long been the practice not to saddle shoplifters with a criminal record. Instead, he would order her to watch a movie whose message was that it was not nice to steal, that she should feel shame, and go away and never do this again.
"How does the alarm work?" asked the defence attorney.
The defence attorney looked slimy, thought Carl. Carl did not consider his first impression, good or bad, a valid means of judging a man's character--he wanted to know what a man said and did before forming an opinion. But still, the defence attorney did look slimy. This was the first person Carl had ever met that he disliked on sight.
"There's a tag on some of our merchandise. The tag sets off the alarm at the
door unless it has been deactivated at checkout."
"Is it possible to have a false alarm?"
Carl thought that this was irrelevant since this was obviously not a false alarm given the fact that the tagged toothpaste that had set it off was in the lady's purse.
But the defence attorney had not asked if this particular alarm could have occurred in error. He had simply asked if it's possible to have a false alarm, so Carl, who always told the truth, simply said, "Yes."
The judge, who sat higher than anyone else in the courtroom, sat up straight--there was something about this witness that was beginning to interest him.
"Is it possible for the checkout staff to miss deactivating a tagged product?"
Carl could not understand this line of questioning--it seemed pointless--and
he was beginning to get angry. He thought that the toothpaste had not been de-activated because it had not been paid for, that it was not listed on the defendant's
receipt, and she knew it, or she would not have offered to pay for it. He thought
that the real reason the toothpaste had not been deactivated was that the lady had
it in her purse!
"Yes, it's possible," Carl answered calmly.
" Describe the checkout process."
"The customer puts their merchandise on a conveyor belt. The checkout
person passes each product over an electronic device that reads a bar code. If an
item is tagged, the checkout person drops it in a bucket, presses a button, and the
tag is deactivated. The merchandise is then slid down a shoot where the customer
bags their own groceries."
"Is it possible that the toothpaste was under, let's say, a loaf of bread, and was passed down the shoot without being registered on the bill or deactivated?"
"Yes."
The defence attorney seemed to have a smirk on his face--this witness was
supposed to be a witness for the prosecution, but he could not have asked for a
better witness for the defence.
" Is it not then possible that the defendant, instead of putting the toothpaste in her bags with the rest of the groceries, thinking it had been paid for, put it in her
purse?"
"Yes."
Something is not right here, thought the judge--the prosecution's witness is
just allowing himself to be made to look like a fool.
"If this is, in fact, what happened at Savinski's Supermarket on October
twelfth, then the defendant could not possibly be guilty of shoplifting. That would be a contradiction, wouldn't it?"
"Yes."
"Huh."
"It would be a contradiction."
There it was--out in the open--"It would be a contradiction." But there can be no contradictions, and everyone in the courtroom knew it. In some form they all knew that it's a law--a law of reality--there can be no contradictions. There
was a certain uneasiness in the minds of most people in the courtroom--as if they
had been put on the spot and were now being asked to choose--guilty, or not
guilty--she could not be both.
Carl Savinski had simply said it, "It would be a contradiction," and thought:
there you go, there are no contradictions, it's your problem, you deal with it.
The defence attorney was dumbfounded. "Huh" was all he had managed to say.
He had expected the witness to concede the possibility of his client's innocence. He did not know what had gone wrong, why the problem had been thrown back in his lap, or how to deal with it. What he did know was that it was his turn to speak, that all eyes were on him, and that with each passing second, it was he who looked more and more like the fool. Knowing no other course of action, he started out again.
"Okay," he said, cupping his chin with his hand in a manner that suggested he had given the problem some thought, "isn't it just possible that my client had her purse open in the shopping cart and the toothpaste just happened to fall off the shelf and into her purse?"
Carl Savinski ignored the question and turned to the judge, who had been
watching with great intensity:
"Your Honour, do I have to engage...?"
The prosecuting attorney would not have to cross-examine the witness today.
He would not have to point out the contradictions in the defence attorney's
"toothpaste under the bread" story--why of all the dozens of items the accused
bagged that day was the toothpaste the only one she put in her purse, and if she had put it in her purse, why had she said that she had no idea how it got there. He would not have to point out that the "toothpaste falling into the open purse" story was beyond any reasonable possibility.
The judge, in all his years on the bench, had had his will prevail. There had
never been anything that a couple of thunderous blows with his gavel would not
fix. He had always been in control. He had always rendered his decision after
careful deliberation and in his own good time. But now, it was he who had been
put on the spot, and he didn't like it one bit.
"You don't have to do anything!" screamed the judge.
Even Carl Savinski was startled.
The judge was livid. He looked as if Carl Savinski had physically pushed him into a corner and then slapped his face--the problem had been taken from the
defence attorney and thrown at the judge.
The judge tried to calm himself, tried to regain control of his thinking:
"Yea, how did the toothpaste get into the purse?" he said out loud.
The attempt failed--and without a glance at the accused, the judge lashed out at the defense attorney. Pointing straight at him, he yelled, "She's guilty! She
has a criminal record!"
"I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." were the words Carl Savinski had always lived by. Today, walking out of a courtroom,
he marvelled at how well it works.







TIGER
The tiger (Panthera tigris) is a member of the Felidae family; the largest and the most powerful of the four "big cats" in the genus Panthera.[4] Native to much of eastern and southern Asia, the tiger is an apex predator and an obligate carnivore. Reaching up to 4 metres (13 ft) in total length and weighing up to 300 kilograms (660 pounds), the larger tiger subspecies are comparable in size to the biggest extinct felids.[5][6] Aside from their great bulk and power, their most recognizable feature is the pattern of dark vertical stripes that overlays near-white to reddish-orange fur, with lighter underparts. The largest subspecies of tiger is the Siberian tiger.
Highly adaptable, tigers range from the Siberian taiga, to open grasslands, to tropical mangrove swamps. They are territorial and generally solitary animals, often requiring large contiguous areas of habitat that support their prey demands. This, coupled with the fact that they are endemic to some of the more densely populated places on earth, has caused significant conflicts with humans. Of the nine subspecies of modern tiger, three are extinct and the remaining six are classified as endangered, some critically so. The primary direct causes are habitat destruction and fragmentation, and hunting. Their historical range, which once reached from Mesopotamia and the Caucasus through most of South and East Asia, has been radically reduced. While all surviving species are under formal protection, poaching, habitat destruction and inbreeding depression continue to be threats.
Nonetheless, tigers are among the most recognizable and popular of the world's charismatic megafauna. They have featured prominently in ancient mythology and folklore, and continue to be depicted in modern films and literature. Tigers appear on many flags and coats of arms, as mascots for sporting teams, and as the national animal of several Asian nations.
MOSQUITOES
Mosquitoes are insects in the family Culicidae. They have a pair of scaled wings, a pair of halteres, a slender body, and long legs. The females of most mosquito species suck blood (hematophagy) from other animals, which has made them the most deadly disease vector known, killing millions of people over thousands of years and continuing to kill millions per year by the spread of diseases.
Length varies but is rarely greater than 16 mm (0.6 inch), and weight up to 2.5 mg (0.04 grain). A mosquito can fly for 1 to 4 hours continuously at up to 1–2 km/h travelling up to 10 km in a night. Most species are nocturnal or crepuscular (dawn or dusk) feeders. During the heat of the day most mosquitoes rest in a cool place and wait for the evenings. They may still bite if disturbed. Mosquitos are adept at infiltration and have been known to find their way into homes via deactivated air conditioning units.
LIBRARY
A library is a place which collects records of what people have thought and done.
It preserves those records, and it ,makes them available to us, so that we can learn about many things. In the world of library, we can entertain ourselves, teach ourselves, and be inspired by the ideas that we might never have dreamed ot otherwise.
A library has many sections. Commonly, a library has a reading room, a catalogue section, a newspaper and magazine section, books section, and a librarian desk which deals with book circulation. The books are classified based on the subjects, such as fiction, science, psychology, etc. They are arranged on the bookshelves.
1. Suramadu Bridge

The Suramadu Bridge (Indonesian: Jembatan Suramadu), also known as the Surabaya–Madura Bridge, is a bridge with three cable-stayed sections constructed between Surabaya on the island of Java and the town of Bangkalan on the island of Madura in Indonesia. Opened on June 10, 2009, the 5.4-km bridge is the longest in Indonesia and the first bridge to cross the Madura Strait.
The cable-stayed portion has three spans with lengths 192 m, 434 m and 192 m. The bridge has two lanes in each direction plus an emergency lane and a dedicated lane for motorcycles. The first toll bridge in Indonesia, fares have been initially set at Rp. 30,000 (US$3 in 2009) for four-wheeled vehicles and Rp. 3,000 (US$0.30) for two-wheelers.
The bridge was built by a consortium of Indonesian companies PT Adhi Karya and PT Waskita Karya working with China Road and Bridge Corp. and China Harbor Engineering Co. Ltd. The total cost of the project, including connecting roads, has been estimated at 4.5 trillion rupiah (US$445 million).
Construction was started on August 20, 2003. In July 2004, a girder collapsed, killing one worker and injuring nine others. Work on the bridge halted at the end of 2004 due to lack of funds, but was restarted in November 2005. The main span of the bridge was connected on March 31, 2009, and the bridge was opened to the public in June 10, 2009.Within a week of the opening, it was discovered that nuts and bolts as well as maintenance lamps had been stolen and that there was evidence of vandalism of cables supporting the main span.
2. Batik

Batik is cloth which traditionally uses a manual wax-resist dyeing technique. Due to modern advances in the textile industry, the term has been extended to include fabrics which incorporate traditional batik patterns even if they are not produced using the wax-resist dyeing techniques. Silk batik is especially popular.
Javanese traditional batik, especially from Yogyakarta and Surakarta, has special meanings rooted to the Javanese conceptualization of the universe. Traditional colors include indigo, dark brown, and white which represent the three major Hindu Gods (Brahm?, Visnu, and ?iva). This is related to the fact that natural dyes are only available in indigo and brown. Certain patterns can only be worn by nobility; traditionally, wider stripes or wavy lines of greater width indicated higher rank. Consequently, during Javanese ceremonies, one could determine the royal lineage of a person by the cloth he or she was wearing.
Other regions of Indonesia have their own unique patterns which normally take themes from everyday lives, incorporating patterns such as flowers, nature, animals, folklore or people. The colors of pesisir batik, from the coastal cities of northern Java, is especially vibrant, and it absorbs influence from the Javanese, Arab, Chinese and Dutch culture. In the colonial times pesisir batik was a favorite of the Peranakan Chinese, Dutch and Eurasians.
UNESCO designated Indonesian batik, as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity on October 2, 2009.In return of the acknowledgment, UNESCO demanded Indonesia to preserve their heritage.
Batik or fabrics with the traditional batik patterns are also found in several countries such as Malaysia, Japan, China, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and Singapore. Malaysian batik often displays plants and flowers in basic patterns.


3. Facebook

Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.
Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website's membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 300 million active users worldwide.
Facebook has met with some controversy. It has been blocked intermittently in several countries including Syria, China and Iran,although Iran later unblocked Facebook in 2009. It has also been banned at many places of work to discourage employees from wasting time using the service. Privacy has also been an issue, and it has been compromised several times. Facebook is also facing several lawsuits from a number of Zuckerberg's former classmates, who claim that Facebook had stolen their source code and other intellectual property.
A January 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.

4. Kecak Dance

Kecak (pronounced [?ket?ak]) is a form of Balinese music drama, originated in the 1930s and is performed primarily by men. Also known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, the piece, performed by a circle of 100 or more performers wearing checked cloth around their waists, percussively chanting "cak" and throwing up their arms, depicts a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight the evil King Ravana. However, Kecak has roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance.
Kecak was originally a trance ritual accompanied by male chorus. German painter and musician Walter Spies became deeply interested in the ritual while living in Bali in the 1930s and worked to recreate it into a drama, based on the Hindu Ramayana and including dance, intended to be presented to Western tourist audiences. This transformation is an example of what James Clifford describes as part of the "modern art-culture system" in which, "the West or the central power adopts, transforms, and consumes non-Western or peripheral cultural elements, while making 'art' which was once embedded in the culture as a whole, into a separate entity."Spies worked with Wayan Limbak and Limbak popularized the dance by traveling throughout the world with Balinese performance groups. These travels have helped to make the Kecak famous throughout the world.
Performer, choreographer, and scholar I Wayan Dibia cites a contrasting theory that the Balinese where already developing the form when Spies arrived on the island. For example, well-known dancer I Limbak had incorporated Baris movements into the cak leader role during the 1920s. "Spies liked this innovation," and it suggested that Limbak, "devise a spectacle based on the Ramayana," accompanied by cak chorus rather than gamelan, as would have been usual.

5. Gamelan Music

A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included.
The term refers more to the set of instruments than to the players of those instruments. A gamelan is a set of instruments as a distinct entity, built and tuned to stay together — instruments from different gamelan are generally not interchangeable.
The word "gamelan" comes from the Javanese word "gamel", meaning to strike or hammer, and the suffix "an", which makes the root a collective noun. Real hammers are not used to play these instruments as heavy iron hammers would break the delicate instruments.

6. Sydney Opera House

The Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre on Bennelong Point in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was conceived and largely built by Danish architect J?rn Utzon, who in 2003 received the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour.[1] The citation stated There is no doubt that the Sydney Opera House is his masterpiece. It is one of the great iconic buildings of the 20th century, an image of great beauty that has become known throughout the world – a symbol for not only a city, but a whole country and continent.
The Opera House was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007.[2] It is one of the 20th century's most distinctive buildings, and one of the most famous performing arts centres in the world.
The Sydney Opera House is situated on Bennelong Point in Sydney Harbour, close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. It sits at the north-eastern tip of the Sydney central business district (the CBD), surrounded on three sides by the harbour (Sydney Cove and Farm Cove), and neighboured by the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Contrary to its name, the building houses several separate venues rather than a single opera theatre, the two main venues, the Opera Theatre and the Concert Hall, being housed in the two larger sets of shells. The Sydney Opera House is a major presenting venue for Opera Australia, The Australian Ballet, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Sydney Symphony, as well as hosting many touring productions in a variety of performance genres, and is a major tourist attraction. It is administered by the Sydney Opera House Trust, under the New South Wales Ministry of the Arts.
The Sydney Opera House is a modern expressionist design,with a series of large precast concrete 'shells',[3] each composed of sections of a hemisphere of the same radius, forming the roofs of the structure, set on a monumental podium. The building covers 1.8 hectares (4.5 acres) of land, and is 183 metres (605 ft) long and 120 metres (388 ft) wide at its widest point. It is supported on 588 concrete piers sunk as much as 25 metres below sea level. Its power supply is equivalent to that of a town of 25,000 people, and is distributed by 645.5 kilometres (401 miles) of electrical cable.[citation needed]
The roofs of the House are covered in a subtle chevron pattern with 1,056,006 glossy white and matte cream colored Swedish-made tiles from H?gan?s AB,[4] though from a distance the shells appear a uniform white. Despite the tiles' self-cleaning nature, they do require periodic maintenance and replacement.[citation needed]
The Concert Hall is located within the western group of shells, the Opera Theatre within the eastern group. The scale of the shells was chosen to reflect the internal height requirements, with low entrance spaces, rising over the seating areas and up to the high stage towers. The minor venues (Drama Theatre, Playhouse, and The Studio) are located beneath the Concert Hall, as part of the western shell group. A much smaller group of shells set to one side of the Monumental Steps houses the Bennelong Restaurant. Although the roof structures of the Sydney Opera House are commonly referred to as shells (as they are in this article), they are in fact not shells in a strictly structural sense, but are instead precast concrete panels supported by precast concrete ribs.

7. The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower (French: Tour Eiffel, [tu? ?f?l]) is a 19th century iron lattice tower located on the Champ de Mars in Paris that has become both a global icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world. The Eiffel Tower, which is the tallest building in Paris, is the single most visited paid monument in the world; millions of people ascend it every year. Named after its designer, engineer Gustave Eiffel, the tower was built as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair.
The tower stands at 324 m (1,063 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-story building. It was the tallest structure in the world from its completion until 1930, when it was eclipsed by the Chrysler Building in New York City. Not including broadcast antennas, it is the second-tallest structure in France, behind the Millau Viaduct, completed in 2004. And while the Eiffel Tower is a steel structure, and weighs approximately 10,000 tonnes, it actually has a relatively low density, weighing less than a cylinder of air occupying the same dimensions as the tower.
The tower has three levels for visitors. Tickets can be purchased to ascend either on stairs or lifts to the first and second levels. The walk to the first level is over 300 steps, as is the walk from the first to the second level. The third and highest level is only accessible by lift. Both the first and second levels feature restaurants.
The tower has become the most prominent symbol of both Paris and France. The tower is a featured part of the backdrop in literally scores of movies that take place in Paris. Its iconic status is so established that it even serves as a symbol for the entire nation of France, such as when it was used as the logo for the French bid to host the 1992 Summer Olympics.
The metal structure of the Eiffel Tower weighs 7,300 tonnes while the entire structure including non-metal components is approximately 10,000 tonnes. Depending on the ambient temperature, the top of the tower may shift away from the sun by up to 18 cm (7.1 in) because of thermal expansion of the metal on the side facing the sun. As demonstration of the economy of design, if the 7300 tonnes of the metal structure were melted down it would fill the 125 meter square base to a depth of only 6 cm (2.36 in), assuming a density of the metal to be 7.8 tonnes per cubic meter. The tower has a mass less than the mass of the air contained in a cylinder of the same dimensions, that is 324 meters high and 88.3 meters in radius. The weight of the tower is 10,100 tonnes compared to 10,265 tonnes of air.
More than 200,000,000 people have visited the tower since its construction in 1889, including 6,719,200 in 2006, making it the most visited paid monument in the world.

8. Lake Toba

Lake Toba (Indonesian: Danau Toba) is a lake and super volcano, 100 kilometer long and 30 kilometer wide, and 505 meter (1,666 ft) at its deepest point. Located in the middle of the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra with a surface elevation of about 900 meter (2,953 ft), the lake stretches from 2°53?N 98°31?E? / ?2.88°N 98.52°E? / 2.88; 98.52 to 2°21?N 99°06?E? / ?2.35°N 99.1°E? / 2.35; 99.1. It is the largest volcanic lake in the world.[1] In addition, it is the site of a super volcanic eruption that occurred about 74,000 years ago,[2] a massive climate-changing event. The eruption is believed to have had a VEI intensity of 8. This eruption, believed to have been the largest anywhere on Earth in the last 25 million years, may have had catastrophic consequences globally; some anthropologists and archeologists believe that it killed most humans then alive, creating a population bottleneck in Central Eastern Africa and India that affected the genetic inheritance of all humans today.
Most of the people who live around Lake Toba are ethnically Bataks. Traditional Batak houses are noted for their distinctive roofs (which curve upwards at each end, as a boat's hull does) and their colorful decor.
Lake Toba offers a nurturing environment for fish such as the tilapia mossambica, aplocheilus pachax, lebistes reticulatus, osphronemus goramy, trichogaster trichopterus, channa striata, chana gachua, clarias batrachus, clarias nieuhofi, clarias. sp., nemachilus fasciatus, cyprinus carpio, puntius javanicus, puntius binotatus, osteochilus nasselti, lissochilus sp., labeobarbus sora, and rasbora sp.[17]
Many other types of plants and animals live within the boundaries of Lake Toba. Flora organisms include various types of phytoplankton, emerged macrophytes, floating macrophytes, and submerged macrophytes. Fauna include several variations of zooplankton and benthos.

9. The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China (simplified Chinese: ??; traditional Chinese: ??; pinyin: Ch?ngchéng; literally "long city/fortress") or (simplified Chinese: ????; traditional Chinese: ????; pinyin: Wànl? Ch?ngchéng; literally "The long wall of 10,000 Li (?)"[1]) is a series of stone and earthen fortifications in northern China, built, rebuilt, and maintained between the 5th century BC and the 16th century to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire from Xiongnu attacks during various successive dynasties. Since the 5th century BC, several walls have been built that were referred to as the Great Wall. One of the most famous is the wall built between 220–206 BC by the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. Little of that wall remains; the majority of the existing wall were built during the Ming Dynasty.
The Great Wall stretches from Shanhaiguan in the east to Lop Nur in the west, along an arc that roughly delineates the southern edge of Inner Mongolia. The most comprehensive archaeological survey, using advanced technologies, has recently concluded that the entire Great Wall, with all of its branches, stretches for 8,851.8 km (5,500.3 mi). This is made up of 6,259.6 km (3,889.5 mi) of sections of actual wall, 359.7 km (223.5 mi) of trenches and 2,232.5 km (1,387.2 mi) of natural defensive barriers such as hills and rivers.
Before the use of bricks, the Great Wall was mainly built from Earth or Taipa, stones, and wood.
During the Ming Dynasty, however, bricks were heavily used in many areas of the wall, as were materials such as tiles, lime, and stone. The size and weight of the bricks made them easier to work with than earth and stone, so construction quickened. Additionally, bricks could bear more weight and endure better than rammed earth. Stone can hold under its own weight better than brick, but is more difficult to use. Consequently, stones cut in rectangular shapes were used for the foundation, inner and outer brims, and gateways of the wall. Battlements line the uppermost portion of the vast majority of the wall, with defensive gaps a little over 30 cm (one foot) tall, and about 23 cm (9 inches) wide.