Word: abstract
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Throughout all this, a sociologist (IIana Hardesty) lectures to us about the plight of the poor. Her well-presented platitudes about repressed people raise the plot to an abstract level. We see the connections between her generalizations of the poor and the three victims, but her role diverts our real focus. Hardesty's performance could equal any Harvard professor's lecture. But in this plot based heavily on talking, watching her talk from her podium tires...
...world could not prepare the President, or any council of wise men, to cope adequately with the pressures of those few moments. Nor could they be sure that the commanders down the line, to say nothing of their machines, would behave in a way that fits the anodyne, abstract concept of a limited strike, aimed exclusively at Soviet military targets...
...This gloomy landscape pullulates with symbols: the broken tree over the dark brook, suggesting a bridge across the Styx; the wan rainbow; the ruins, the air of desolation, transience and decay; and the crystalline, stony geometry of the tombs. Their purity interested Goethe, who would later design an abstract memorial for himself. "Even in their ruined state," he declared, Ruisdael's monuments "point to a past beyond the past; they are tombs of themselves," abstractions of an abstraction...
...natural male domain. With Researcher Sharon Senk, Professor Zalman Usiskin, a specialist in high school mathematics curriculums and an author of several math texts, studied 1,366 tenth-graders. They were selected from geometry classes and tested on their ability to solve geometry proofs, a subject requiring both abstract reasoning and spatial ability. Says Usiskin: "If you're a math whiz or a computer bug, you're going to pick up equations and formulas that will help you with tests like the SAT. But geometry proof is never learned outside of school." The conclusion reached by Usiskin...
...upon her return wrote the following: "When love enters into the substance of social relations, the connection of people to a single party need not be dehumanizing. Though it's second nature for me to suspect the government of a Communist country of being oppressive and rigid...(against) that abstract suspiciousness I must set (and be overruled by) what I actually saw when I was there--that the North Vietnamese genuinely love and admire their leaders; and, even more inconceivable to us, that the government loves the people. "So when she addresses Poland, when she declares that all communism...