Word: america
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kids today have scant time for such indulgences. Saddled with an out-of-school curriculum chock-full of Taekwondo lessons, ceramics workshops and bassoon practice, America's youngsters barely have time to check their e-mail before hunkering down with homework. On the whole, U.S. students come home with more schoolwork than ever before--and at a younger age. According to researchers at the University of Michigan, 6-to-9-year-olds in 1981 spent 44 min. a week on homework; in 1997 they did more than two hours' worth. The amount of time that 9-to-11-year-olds...
...America life expectancy is at an all-time high. Yet 63% of children ages 7 to 10 are worried about dying young, according to one study. This is not as paradoxical as it sounds. We have lengthened the human lifetime by declaring war against risk on fronts ranging from medicine to car design. And wars make people painfully conscious of the enemy...
...attuned to the absurdities of modern life as anyone, the British playwright Tom Stoppard nevertheless cannot believe something he has heard about Shakespeare in Love. "Is it true that in America you can't see this film if you're 15?" he asks, his understanding of an R rating only slightly off. "That glimpse of nipple, and we lose 10 million viewers...
...problems began in America--not in Salt Lake, but in Los Angeles. The 1976 Montreal Games had dutifully lost millions of dollars, and the 1980 Moscow Games, boycotted by the U.S., didn't make a ruble. The Winter Games, always staged in nice little Currier & Ives villages, had seldom turned a profit. Therefore, naturally, no sane city wanted to play host to the Games. Then, in 1984, Peter Ueberroth and his Los Angeles organizing committee put on a splashy, TV-friendly, penny-squeezing Olympics that netted $220 million. Suddenly suitors were turning handsprings before the I.O.C., each performing citius, altius...
Salt Lake City was already a player in this transitional era, and was learning, painfully, how the game was changing. In 1984 and '85, Mayor Ted Wilson oversaw Salt Lake's effort to become America's bid city (the U.S. Olympic Committee designates one town to be the U.S. contender before the I.O.C. picks a winner). The two finalists were Salt Lake and Anchorage, which frankly didn't have a snowball's chance of ultimately being chosen by the I.O.C. "We did very little entertaining because we had been told not even to contact U.S.O.C. members," Wilson recalls...