Word: asphalts
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Noise can be controlled to an extent, depending on the source. Some of the biggest sources of ambient noise are highways and roads, but the cause is less honking horns or gunning engines--though those play a role--than tires hitting pavement. Pliable rubber making contact with asphalt doesn't seem as if it would produce a lot of noise but in fact it does, and in a lot of ways. As any spot on the tire strikes the highway, it hits with the thunk of a little rubber hammer. Also, the patch of tire that's in contact with...
...walk seems instead to be a side-effect of our late-20th-century upbringing. We come, many of us, from a sidewalk-less, SUV-saturated suburbia that is famously inhospitable to walkers. Acquiring our cars was a rite of passage; our high schools were flanked by expanses of asphalt. Most of our walking was done at saunter, as we described long, lazy circuits of the mall. In my hometown, walking seems a dangerous eccentricity; when, at home over winter break, I walked to the end of Main Street, a high-school classmate I hadn’t seen in years...
Everyone’s goal is to get to the top, and once one kid gets to the top, everyone gangs up to knock the kid to the bottom. It usually ends with Danny on the asphalt with a bloody nose and a nun yelling, “That’s what you get for horseplay! Now, go inside and write the Nicene Creed on the board…in Latin...
Look back at nearly every campaign trail to the White House, and you will find embedded in the asphalt the flattened form of a once captivating outsider. The story line plays out as follows: he seizes the imagination with a compelling message and personality; he upsets the dynamic of the race; the media lavish attention and praise on him (there is talk that he has created a phenomenon that will change politics); he makes a rookie mistake or two under the TV lights; the reporters turn on him; his fanatical legions realize he wasn't the guy they thought...
...dive shop. Rooms, which range from $250 to $500, are luxurious if scarcely distinguishable from what you might find, say, on Grand Cayman. And the air conditioning is so ubiquitous and powerful that it reaches icy fingers to you even as you approach the reception building across sun-baked asphalt...