4. What did the Chinese want from the Europeans? The Jesuits, led by a man named Matteo Ricci, demonstrated their ability to predict solar eclipses which were important in Chinese culture, they also showed off inventions like the clock, prism, eyeglasses, and musical instruments. Most of these “European inventions” were derived from earlier Chinese and Middle Eastern breakthroughs that reached Europe through trade. In some cases, the Portuguese presented the Ming and Qing officials with innovations of technology that started centuries before in China. Matteo Ricci learned to speak and write classical Chinese and was the first European allowed into the emperor’s Forbidden City. The Portuguese in return learned a great deal from their Chinese hosts and brought their observations of Chinese culture back to Europe which spurred more interest in travel to and trade with East Asia.

the growing interconnectedness of the world through communication, trade, and the exchange of ideas is an important theme in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries.

explanation:

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).

its a !