1. Thelonious Monk, who was a jazz pianist and composer, produced a body of work both rooted in the stride-piano tradition of Willie (The Lion) Smith and Duke Ellington, yet in many ways he stood apart from the mainstream jazz repertory.

2. Nobody knows exactly how many languages there are in the world, partly because of the difficulty of distinguishing between a language and the sublanguages or dialects within it, but those who have tried to count typically have found about five thousand.

3. Although a number of excellent studies narrate the development of domestic technology and its impact on housewifery, these works do not discuss the contributions of the women employed by manufacturers and utility companies as product demonstrators and publicists, who initially promoted new and unfamiliar technology to female consumers.

4. The absence from business and financial records of the nineteenth century of statistics about women leave us with no record of the jobs that were performed by women and how they survived economically.

5. Heating-oil prices are expected to be higher this year than last because refiners are paving about $5 a barrel more for crude oil than they were last year.

6. Even though Clovis points, spear points with longitudinal grooves chipped onto their faces, have been found all over North America, they are named for the New Mexico site where they were first discovered in 1932.

7. Heavy commitment by an executive to a course of action especially if it has worked well in the past, makes it likely to miss signs of incipient trouble or misinterpret them when they do appear.

8. According to recent studies comparing the nutritional value of meat from wild animals and meat from domesticated animals, wild animals have less total fat than do livestock fed on grain and more of a kind of fat they think is good for cardiac health.

9. Yellow jackets number among the 900 or so species of the world’s social wasps, wasps living in a highly cooperative and organized society where they consist almost entirely of females-the queen and her sterile female workers.

10. Before 1988, insurance companies in California were free to charge whatever rates the market would bear, needing no approval from regulators before raising rates.