Word: aridity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...West Bank. His outpost - named Havat Gilad after an elder brother killed by Palestinians - consists of a dozen shabby metal shacks and trailers inhabited by 20 families, with 40 to 50 children among them. A plastic slide and swing set stand on a weedy corner of the arid hilltop. Havat Gilad gets electricity from generators and water from a hilltop tank. The Israeli government evacuated the settlement five years ago but recently agreed to transport its children to school. "We are on a mission," Zar tells TIME. "We didn't come here for fun, although we have fun sometimes. When...
...Outback? Yes indeed. There are estimated to be over a million of these ungulates roaming at will through the desert, descendants of the original camel caravans led by Afghan drivers in the 1860s and 1870s. It was these migrant cameleers who helped opened up the continent's arid interior to travelers. The country's most famous train, the Ghan, www.gsr.com.au, is named in their honor. (See pictures of Australia's hidden islands...
...Confused, "the more rules they're gonna try to get you to follow. You just gotta keep livin' man, L-I-V-I-N." That edict has nurtured McConaughey from his early prominence, in the John Grisham drama A Time to Kill, through some ragged adventure sagas (the arid Sahara) to a welcome cameo as Ben Stiller's agent in Tropic Thunder. As McConaughey scholar (and my niece) Diana White tells me, he's more than the sum of dimples and muscles. But anybody can be an actor; it's tough to be an icon. McConaughey sustains his status...
...film’s sensitive curiosity about this divide is reflected in the complex dualities depicted on screen. The yellow earth is the farmers’ sole mode of sustenance, yet simultaneously it is an oppressive, arid land that binds them to scarcity and poverty. Likewise, the Yellow River symbolizes life and nourishment, but it also eliminates life—when Cuiqiao tries to escape her village by swimming across the river, her singing abruptly ends...
...Chief among them are Shan's parents, Mrs. Gu, devastated by her loss, and Teacher Gu, bewildered by the nature and personality of the child he has fathered and retreating further into the arid haven of his intellect in order to cope with her demise. But there are less obvious people the death marks: Kai, a public announcer on a government radio station that spews out continuous propaganda; Kai's husband Han, a man on the make in the provincial government, who harbors dreams of greater influence; and Nini, a deformed girl, eldest of six daughters, who is nothing more...