Word: braking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MOBIL'S ingenious game puts 36 people at once in the driver's seat, sends them on a mock cross-country race to see who is the best driver. With a steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake to operate, the participant looks through his "windshield"-a 21-in. TV screen-onto a highway, soon finds himself swooping around curves, skidding past a train, then crash! smack into the truck ahead. The scores? Twenty-three is tops, but one fellow, who can't even drive a hard bargain, rated 19.8 just by sitting there too mixed...
Your car is traveling at 30 m.p.h. when the proverbial child dashes out in front of you. You hit the brake, of course. But with which foot? A few years ago, the question would have been ridiculous, but today the ubiquity of the automatic transmission with its clutchless floor board is making it the subject of a great debate among motor-vehicle bureaucracies. Some states encourage left-foot braking (among them, South Dakota and Michigan); some disqualify or penalize any license applicant who does it (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah). Most states have no policy at all. And there...
...other hand, a driver trained to use his left foot on the brake is a positive menace in a stick-shift car, where his instinctive reflex will land his foot on the clutch-where it will do worse than no good, since it robs him of even the minor braking action of the engine. Inexperienced drivers taught left-foot braking also sometimes freeze in an emergency on both brake and accelerator (one of the incidental advantages of right-foot braking is that the driver necessarily has to take his right foot off the accelerator...
...keep up. Stumbling, sliding, frantically pulling to free his arm, Walker was dragged to the end of the platform and slammed into a metal rail. As the train entered the tunnel, he was battered repeatedly against the concrete wall along the tracks. When a passenger finally pulled the emergency brake cord, Walker was dead...
...also clamped some price controls on food and manufactured goods, and Denmark has placed a 9%-sales tax on most nonfood products. In Italy the government's austerity program aims at raising taxes on cars and gasoline, restricting installment purchases. Some manufacturers protest that such measures may brake Europe's boom too hard, but political leaders insist that drastic action is needed to stop the rise in export prices and narrow the trade deficits that have been growing dangerously in Italy and Britain...