Word: cement
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Bill and Laurie Nelson were among the quietest couples on Bethany Home Road, a well-tailored neighborhood just outside the city limits of Phoenix. Ariz. They owned their home, a rambling ranch house trimmed with apple-green cement blocks; they were surrounded by tasteful but not lavish trappings-Louis XIV-style furniture, a collection of miniature ivory elephants, a lantana-and-plumbago hedge planted and tended by Bill Nelson himself...
...First National City Bank, the city's leading maker of personal loans, hiked interest rates from $3.83 per $100 to $4.25, the first rise since 1937. The Chase National Bank also boosted its rates. Prices started to edge up for a growing number of basic materials-steel pipe, cement, nickel, platinum, shellac, plumbing fixtures-and increases loomed for dinnerware, pots and pans, drapes, rugs, toys, refrigerators, washing machines. Retailers, trying to hold the price line, warned that unless the pressure eases, they will have to give way and also boost retail prices...
...surface, the record has been amazing. Setting aside half its budget for defense. Turkey has put 22 divisions into NATO, doubled its output of steel, cement, textiles. It has built 7,000 miles of road and started a dozen multipurpose dam projects. Its most spectacular gain has been in agriculture, where, with the help of subsidies and 40,000 imported tractors, it has doubled the tilled land and turned the country into an exporter of wheat and cotton...
...bulldozing roads, planting new crops, nobody found time or talent to coordinate and manage all the projects. Factories were located in one part of the country, the electric power to operate them in another. Sugar mills seemed to get built near voters, not beet fields. As soon as new cement plants got into production, their output poured off into the walls of speculative apartment houses in Istanbul instead of more urgently needed factory floors. When Turkey's huge new wheat crops poured to market, no facilities were there for cleaning the grain, and the wheat had to be downgraded...
...undertaker changed was the old "wooden overcoat." In an age when the grave robber and the medical student were supposedly working hand in glove, "safe" coffins, made at first of iron, came in vogue. Soon there were models in zinc, glass terra cotta, papier-mâché, hydraulic cement and vulcanized rubber. The coffin torpedo, marketed in 1878, was the final answer to body snatchers-it featured a bomb that was triggered to go off when the coffin lid was lifted. However, the triumph of sepulchral gadgeteering was the "life signal," which offered mechanical surcease for the widespread terror...