Read Do You Think You're Clever? for Free Online Page A

succeeded in making the same number of folds in paper. Britney went on to devise
    * 51 folds of 0.1 mm-thick paper would produce a wad 2.26 × 1011 metres thick, which is about the distance to the sun.
    a formula for calculating the length of paper you need to achieve a certain number of folds (
t
is the thickness of the paper,
n
is the number of folds and
L
is the length):
     
    Using this formula, Britney showed that you could get further by folding lengthways, but that twelve was pretty much the practical limit for folding paper. So it would be impossible to get more than a metre or so off the ground in practice, let alone all the way to the moon.

Can history stop the next war?
    (History, Cambridge)
    If the question was ‘
Will
history stop the next war?’, the answer must be almost certainly not. There are wars being fought all over the world right now, and almost all of them have their roots in historical issues. Some of the historical issues are in the recent past; some are fuelled by ancient, yet still burning resentments; some are a mix of both. The conflict between Israel and Arab Palestine, for instance, finds its origins both in ancient tribal and religious differences and in the more recent nature of the division of Palestine in the wake of the Second World War. The war in the Congo stems partly from the legacy of European colonialism. And it’s highly likely that historical issues will playa key role in whatever war starts next, whether it’s another skirmish between Georgia and neighbouring Russia, or between North Korea and the South.
    However, the question asks ‘can’ history stop the next war * ; in other words, might lessons learned from history reduce the chances of a war starting? It seems logical that they might. Surely people learn from their mistakes? The pessimist would say that there is no evidence that they do. If people did learn from history that war is a ‘bad thing’, then we would surely have seen the frequency and severity of wars decline throughout history as their appalling costs became clear. Yet the last hundred years have seen the most devastating wars of all time – and never a moment without conflict somewhere in the world. In some ways, you could say that the lesson people actually seem to have taken from history, despite what our moral side would like, is that war is not such a bad thing, or at least that it’s not so bad that it must be avoided in future. The costs seem never to
    * One of the interesting things about the Oxbridge questions is that they can be ambiguous, and often the key to providing a ‘clever’, original answer is to spot these ambiguities. Here, for instance, ‘can’ is an ambiguous word choice. The questioner could mean: has history the ability to stop the next war? And of course by itself it cannot; history is simply the story of what happened in the past. However, it’s a good bet the questioner is asking if lessons that people learn from history could stop the next war. It seems possible, but again the phrasing of the question implies that it almost certainly won’t. The next war is, by definition, a war that must start sometime, however near or far in the future, and it seems unlikely that lessons learned from history would ever stop a war once started.
    have been so high that they have ever made embarking on another war inconceivable.
    Yet there is a more optimistic way of looking at things. After the horror of the First World War, the victorious nations got together to form the League of Nations with the aim of preventing the outbreak of war in future. Yet they made the mistake of punishing Germany, the nation they held responsible for the war, too severely. The economic hardship and loss of national pride drove the Germans into the embrace of Hitler and took the world into an even more widespread and devastating war. After the Second World War, it seems enough people had learned the lessons of the previous disaster to avoid pressing the