Word: breakdown
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Broome eight years to ferret out the guinea pigs' secret. These animals, and a few closely related species such as the agouti, have in their blood the enzyme L-asparaginase, so called because it effects a chemical breakdown of the amino acid L-asparagine.*Many of the body's cells need asparagine as a source of nourishment, and normal cells manufacture it within themselves. But some types of cancer cells, which also need it, cannot make it. So they steal it from healthy cells...
...military commission announced that the army will take over all civil airports, aviation institutes and Red China's 51-plane airline. The take over was ostensibly a move "to prepare for war," but it was more likely a Mao move to try to head off a total breakdown of transportation. That was not all the army took over. The military commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party announced that the army would take control of the municipal, security and police posts in Peking to ensure "the maintenance of revolutionary order." It was a sweeping grant of powers...
...Total Immersion technique, as Berlitz officials unashamedly admit, is suspiciously close to that of brainwashing. "What we try to do," says New York Berlitz Director Emanuel Huarte, "is to break students down mentally until they lose the ability to resist and are receptive to fresh ideas." The breakdown begins to the clang of an 8:15 a.m. bell in a windowless classroom, where the student faces one of his four alternating instructors. Student and teacher speak nothing but the foreign language during eleven 40-minute periods, relieved only by five-minute English breaks. All day long, the instructor points...
...midafternoon, the dazed student begins to show fatigue. At that point, another instructor joins in, grills him on the day's words. In this "breakdown" period, the student may rebel, laugh, refuse to talk, curse his tormentor-but it is a time, insist the teachers, in which he can almost unconsciously absorb the toughest problem of a new language, such as complex tenses. The day ends at 6 p.m., after a 20-minute review. Then the student takes home two more hours' worth of reading and composition assignments...
...former Czech who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1955 and become a citizen, discovered that Communist hospitality can still be highly uneven. Returning to the U.S. via Paris, Kazan's Soviet Aeroflot jetliner made an unscheduled stop in Prague for what Czech authorities said was a "radar breakdown." When it took off again, Kazan's seat was empty; the Czechs had arrested...