Why did Johnny Cade want to read Gone With the Wind at the hospital?

In The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, Johnny Cade and Ponyboy
are in major trouble and they have to leave town.  While they are hiding out they begin
reading Gone With The Wind.  When Johnny was injured and in the
hospital he wanted a copy of the novel because he liked how all of the men in the novel
sounded like gentlemen and heroes.  He wanted to be a hero.  He enjoyed that the
characters in Gone With The Wind always seemed to save people and are
genteel. 

Johnny came from a poor background where no one
really cared about him.  Yet, he wanted to amount to so much more.  He wanted to make a
difference in his life and the life of others.  The men in Gone With The
Wind were very different than the people he was used to so he enjoyed reading
about them.

Discuss filial ingratitude in King Lear.

There is a sense in which the whole play is dogged by Lear's
incredible lack of understanding of his daughters. Cordelia's truthful response of "I love your
Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less" is noteworthy in comparison with the flowery,
exaggerated and completely insincere declarations of love from Regan and Goneril, and yet Lear
wants his pride flattered and the love his daughters have for him to be overt and public. The way
in which he turns on the one true daughter who loves on him and surrenders himself into the hands
of Regan and Goneril indicates his own foolishness.

However, having
given away his authority to Regan and Goneril, he then goes on to see how his daughters only
squander that power and bring his kingdom into a state of chaos. Appearance and reality have been
confused by Lear, but it is only towards the end of the play that he is able to recognise how
true Cordelia has been towards him, raising an army to save him from her sisters. Note Cordelia's
words as she is finally reunited with her father in Act IV scene
7:

Restoration
hang

Thy medicine on my lips, and let this
kiss

Repair those violent harms that my two
sisters

Have in thy reverence
made!

Cordelia is a character who is
explicitly linked therefore with reconciliation and restoration. Just as with her sisters, her
true attitudes expose themselves during the course of the play and Lear comes to realise which of
his daughters he can really trust.

How is Maria from the Twelfth Night a stock character?In your answer, be sure to define stock character.

A stock character can be considered a stereotype, and in
drama, a playwright employs stock characters to further the complications of the story. 
Stock characters are used especially often in Comedies, as it is the recognizably
stereotypical human foibles that make for good comic characters and situations --
foibles like craftiness, dimwittedness, miserliness, and  being crazy-in-love or a
braggart.

Maria is an embodiment of the "crafty servant"
stock character.  This character was found in Comedies of ancient Rome, but more
contemporaneously to Shakespeare, the Commedia dell' Arte of Italy.  This comic and
improvisational theatre form allowed both male and female performers onstage and might
have been a very strong influence on Shakespeare's theatrical sensibilities.  The comic
servant from Commedia who can be associated with Maria is Colombina, the crafty servant
of the female lead of a play, a servant who also often had a love
interest.

For more on stock characters, Commedia, and
Maria, please follow the links below.

In All My Sons, what has really happened on the day the defective parts were sent from Keller's point of view?

We find out the answer to your question at the end of Act I when
Joe Keller tells "his" story to Ann Deever, Steve Deever's daughter and Joe's former partner on
whom Joe has conveniently blamed the defective parts. Joe's life is built around the fiction that
he did not know that the parts were defective and it was all Steve's fault, however at the end of
the play he is forced to confront his self-made fiction and admit that the 21 pilots that died
were "all his sons" and face his own guilt in the matter. However, at this stage in the play he
reveals to us how he views what happened:

readability="19">

Every half hour the Major callin' for cylinder heads,
they were whippin' us with the telephone. the trucks were hauling them away hot, damn near. I
mean just try to see it human, see it human. All of a sudden a batch comes out with a crack. That
happens, that's the business. A fine, hairline crack. All right, so - so he's a little man, your
father, always scared of loud voices. What'll the Major say? - Half a day's production shot...
What'll I say? You know what I mean? Human. So he takes out his tools and he - covers over the
cracks. All right - that's bad, it's wrong, but that's what a little man does... That's a
mistake, but it ain't murder.

Note how
in this dialogue Joe does his best to make Steve look better than he actually does, emphasising
the pressure they were under during war time and the way that Steve was a "little man" who
wouldn't be able to face up to either the General or Joe for the faulty cylinders. This is how
Joe presents the "truth" of what happened, and it is only gradually that the real truth is
exposed.

Two numbers are such that the first is half as large as the other. If the sum of the two numbers is 720, what are the numbers?

Let the first number be x and the second number be
y.

Given that x is half y

==> x
= y/2 .............(1)

Also, given that the sum of the numbers is
720.

==> x + y =
720.............(2)

Now we will substitute (1) into
(2).

==> (y/2) + y = 720

We will
multiply by 2.

==> y+ 2y =
1440

==> 3y = 1440

Now we will
divide by 3.

==> y= 1440/3 =
480

==> y= 480

==> x=
480/2 = 240

Then the numbers are 480 and
240.

In Fahrenheit 451, why does Bradbury describe the books as "pigeon-winged"?

You are of course referring to the opening chapter of this
classic dystopian novel that refers to Montag's penchant for fire and in particular the curious
way that the books themselves are described as Montag and his colleagues burn them. Note how the
books are given the qualities of living animals that are
slaughtered:

...while
the flapping, pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the
house.

The books are given life, but
this life is only to be extinguished when the firemen arrive and burn them. Likewise too when
they raid the woman who burns herself and her book collection, this imagery is repeated as "books
fell like slaughtered birds" and a book falls into Montag's
hands:

A book lit,
almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering
light, a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted
thereon.

This imagery is used
throughout the novel to make the crime of burning books and the destruction and loss of all the
ideas, culture and thought that they represent worse. By depicting the books as birds, killing
them is a much more heinous crime, as it helps us to see how books are not just inanimate objects
but real life beings.

Find the angle a if 2cos^2a+1=3cosa

The first step is to move all terms to the left
side:

2(cos a)^2- 3cos a + 1 =
0

Now, we'll use substitution technique to solve the
equation.

We'll note cos a = t and we'll re-write the
equation in t:

2t^2 - 3t + 1 =
0

Since it is a quadratic, we'll apply the quadratic
formula:

t1 = {-(-3) + sqrt[(-3)^2 -
4*2*1]}/2*2

t1 =
[3+sqrt(9-8)]/4

t1 =
(3+1)/4

t1 = 1

t2 =
(3-1)/4

t2 = 1/2

Now, we'll
put cos a = t1.

cos a= 1

Since
it is an elementary equation, we'll apply the formula:

cos
a = y

a = +/- arccos y +
2k*pi

In our case, y = 1:

a
=  +/-arccos 1 + 2k*pi

a = 0 +
2k*pi

a = 2k*pi

Now, we'll
put cos a = t2

cos a = 1/2

a =
+/- arccos 1/2 + 2k*pi

a = +/- (pi/3) +
2k*pi

a = 2k*pi + pi/3

a =
2k*pi - pi/3

The solutions of the equation
are:{  2k*pi}U{2k*pi - pi/3}U{2k*pi + pi/3}.