Read the following passage. The following testimony of the Boston Massacre was given by Captain Thomas Preston during court hearings on the event on March 13, 1770.

I saw the people in great commotion and heard them use the most cruel and horrid threats against the troops. They immediately surrounded the sentry . . . and with clubs and other weapons threatened to execute their vengeance on him. I was soon informed by a townsman their intention was to carry off the soldier from his post and probably murder him . . . I immediately sent a non-commissioned officer and 12 men to protect both the sentry and the king's money, and very soon followed myself to prevent, if possible, all disorder . . . They soon rushed through the people, and by charging their bayonets in half-circles, kept them at a little distance. . . . The mob still increased and were more outrageous, striking their clubs or bludgeons one against another, and calling out, “come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, G-d d*** you, fire and be d***ed, we know you dare not,” and much more such language was used. At this time I was between the soldiers and the mob, parleying with, and endeavoring all in my power to persuade them to retire peaceably, but to no purpose. . . .

The whole of this melancholy affair was transacted in almost 20 minutes. On my asking the soldiers why they fired without orders, they said they heard the word fire and supposed it came from me. This might be the case as many of the mob called out fire, fire, but I assured the men that I gave no such order; that my words were, don't fire, stop your firing. In short, it was scarcely possible for the soldiers to know who said fire, or don't fire, or stop your firing.

What is the main idea or topic being expressed?

roosevelt believed that in light of the country's recent military successes, it was unnecessary to use force to achieve foreign policy goals, so long as the military could threaten force. this belief, and his strategy of “speaking softly and carrying a big stick,” shaped much of roosevelt's foreign policy.

sorry i tried to but i didn’t get it

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).