Word: aridity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...often called culturally arid, had ten symphony orchestras in 1900; today it has more than 1,000. More than 100 of them sprouted in the past two years alone. Most are community or college orchestras whose budgets are less than $125,000 a year and whose players earn their livings outside the ranks. The orchestras grew out of a deep and often overlooked cultural need in their communities...
...only one night, Ben Youssef abruptly announced that he was moving on to Paris (wailed the maitre d'hotel: "A 24-hour season! I have never seen anything like it!"). Hastily, the French government ordered the swank Hotel Pavilion Henri IV, twelve miles outside Paris, cleared of guests arid Ben Youssef moved in with his entourage...
Endlessly westward from the 97th meridian stretch the Great Plains of the state of North Dakota, fertile in places, arid in others, baked by the summer sun and blown by the winter wind. Here wheat is grown, hard red and durum, and herds of beef cattle meander across far-ranging pastures, silhouetted against low horizons; here more than 40,000 shining combines work 63,000 well-kept farms. The farmers are apt to feel sensitive when casual visitors from lusher and more verdant places refer to their hard-worked land as a desert...
...ordinary air traveler winging across the U.S. Southwest, the great American desert still seems an arid and forbidding waste of sand, dry lake beds and jagged rock mountains. But to the observant, a careful look reveals surprising signs of a new civilization rising among the ocotillos and greasewood. Thin asphalt ribbons stretch across the sand, linking black and white dots of clustered homes, blue bands of irrigation canals and rectangles of bright green new farms. From California's southern coastal ranges inland 375 miles to the central Arizona cities of Phoenix and Tucson, the searing desert, long a shunned...
...settlers are permitted to own land there. Forty-three thousand whites share about 12,000 sq. mi. of the Highlands, while the colony's 5,300,000 Africans are crowded into 52,000 sq. mi. of less desirable farmlands down below, or scrabble for their living in the arid, underdeveloped "Crown Lands" -a euphemism for wilderness. For many years the million-strong Kikuyu tribe, less uneducated than most and peacefully inclined, talked hopefully of expanding their holdings into the White Highlands; instead, the white settlers told them to go expand into the Crown Lands, and vaguely talked of irrigation...