Word: burnish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Altogether, 201 nations, territories and city-states?plus the island of Taiwan, which competes under the nebulous title of "Chinese Taipei"?joined the parade of athletes in last Friday's Opening Ceremony of the 28th Olympiad. Some, including the Americans, Russians and Chinese, are hoping to burnish their countries' reputations with bulging medal counts. Others, including Bhutan and East Timor, which is competing for the first time, are simply happy to wave their flags. Unlike high-profile gold-medal hopefuls, many of whom travel with their own personal trainers and a fridge full of optimal training food, athletes from these...
...Already this month, Shanghai has obliged 500 factories in the city to move their production to off-peak hours. Yet it still requires buildings in the top commercial districts to keep their interior lights on all night to burnish Shanghai's image as an international financial capital. According to one building manager from the Xujiahui district, this requirement has led to doubled electricity consumption, not only from the lights themselves but from the air-conditioning needed during the day to cool the overheated building. All in all, Shanghai's much-vaunted nocturnal skyline?100 times brighter than the Australian capital...
Answering these questions has been difficult because, unlike the bulk of my Kennedy School classmates—some of whom are younger than me by four decades—I did not come to KSG to burnish existing skills to do my current job better, nor to learn new skills in order to break from the past and embark on a new career...
...self-critical. When one of her movies is mentioned, she asks: "Don't you think I looked like I was trying a little hard?" She is ranked third on Forbes' China Celebrity List (after basketball superstar Yao Ming and actress Zhang Ziyi), yet such accolades have done nothing to burnish her image of herself. "Sometimes it's very difficult to get a sense of myself. I need other people to be my mirror...
...leadership cadre nonetheless proclaim their affiliation with al-Qaeda, because that association amplifies the meaning of a specific action - the bombing of a hotel in Istanbul or an embassy in Baghdad - by tying it to a global jihad. Claiming the "al-Qaeda" imprimatur also allows such groups to burnish their appeal among local malcontents, whose anti-American sentiment is at an all-time high...