Word: brighter
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Paradoxically, all the hard work is easier than it looks. "The students are no brighter," says veteran French Teacher Lawrence Garrett of Denver's East High School. "They have the benefit of better guidance, testing and prodding." New "discovery" approaches in math, physics and chemistry, for example, make learning more alluring. TV has apparently boosted vocabularies and widened horizons. Cheap paperbacks have put poets and philosophers in any hip pocket. Along with language labs that make drill palatable go new courses in the techniques of studying. "They have learned how to read rapidly, how to summarize...
...prospects for a tunnel grew brighter and brighter, French truckers became alarmed that the rail-only link might cut their earnings by forcing them to piggyback through the tunnel. Joined by British and French steelmakers, who stand to sell about 800,000 tons of steel if a bridge is built, the truckers set up a pro-bridge group headed by shrewd, forceful Jules Moch, last Interior Minister of France under the Fourth Republic...
...hope springs eternal and all that, and this year's rendition of Coach Floyd Wilson's dauntless dribblers appears to have a brighter future than its predecessors...
From all this, the brighter students, though short on the three Rs, get a disturbing sophistication. "I couldn't go back to public school," said one boy. "My teachers didn't understand me." Another, asked why he took no interest in mathematics if he wished to become an inventor, said: "I'll get mechanical brains to do that kind of stuff...
Nonetheless, from A to zyzzogeton (a genus of South American leaf hoppers), Merriam-Webster's Third Edition is lighter and brighter than its immediate predecessor. It weighs 13½ v. 16½ Ibs., has 2,662 v. 3,194 pages, contains 450,000 v. 600,000 entries. Gone are the gazetteer, the biographical dictionary, and 100,000 obsolete or nonlexical terms, such as the names of characters in Dickens. In are 100,000 brand-new terms, from astronaut, beatnik, boo-boo, countdown, den mother and drip-dry, to footsie, hard sell, mccarthyism, no-show, schlemiel, sit-in, wage dividend...