Word: alphabetization
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...read. Britain is worried that 30% of its seven-year-olds still cannot read after two years of school; one-quarter of its 15-year-olds are semiliterate; and 5% cannot read at all. On the theory that one facet of the problem is the exception-ridden English alphabet, 1,000 first-graders in 24 schools next fall will tackle reading with a strictly phonetic alphabet. If successful, it may revolutionize ingish...
Invented by a seven-man committee, including Conservative M. P. Isaac James Pitman (grandson of shorthand's Sir Isaac Pitman), the all-lower-case new alphabet is longer than the old one. While eliminating q and x, it retains all other conventional letters and adds 19 new sound symbols (e.g., ae in the first line of the sample above). In theory, this reduces some 2,000 letter sounds in the regular alphabet to a piano-sized 88. Using the new system, a few retarded readers have already been rapidly cured. But the obvious problem is what happens later, when...
...Totally objective, they are as clear and crisp and perfectly shaped as icicles, as sharp as splinters of glass. Seldom if ever before has a writer been able to cut so deeply into life with the 26 carving tools of the English alphabet...
Israel's first rocket was labeled the second-Shavit Shtayim, or Comet II. Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres explained that this prevented the rocket from becoming known as Shavit Aleph. First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph is a symbol of the government Mapai Party. "We would be accused of making propaganda for the Mapai," explained Peres. Israel boasted that the rocket was "planned, constructed and fired by Israeli scientists and technicians," claimed that most of the raw materials were local...
...brown-eyed, curly-haired Florence Jacobs is at an awkward age-too young for kindergarten and too old for alphabet blocks. Since she was eleven months old. Florence has been able to recite the alphabet. She can also tick off, alphabetically, in singsong style, the 50 states, the countries of Latin America, the planets and their satellites. She can spell Mississippi and hippopotamus. A child of the space age. Florence warns that an astronaut's hazards include "cosmic rays, micrometeorites, ultraviolet rays and infra-red emissions.'' Last week Florence earned what for her age is the Nobel...