Word: closely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Schools contribute to the problem. Often a disastrous report card is the first signal parents have that Johnny or Mary has been sailing too close to the academic shoals. Education specialists say that parents should receive progress notes throughout the year, and that report cards should praise a child's strengths and indicate a plan for dealing with weaknesses...
...celestial intruder was nearly half a million miles away, but considering the devastation a direct hit could have caused, the flyby was too close for comfort...
Where were you on the night of March 23? Out dancing, perhaps, or attending a PTA meeting or just sitting at home watching L.A. Law? If so, you did not realize how close you came to disaster. While you were blissfully unaware of the danger, a huge asteroid whizzed past the earth, coming closer than any other such heavenly body seen in 52 years. If the giant clump of rock -- half a mile across by one estimate -- had hit the planet, it would have packed the wallop of thousands of H-bombs and possibly killed millions of people...
Before you become alarmed, however, you should understand that this was a close encounter only in a relative sense. At its closest, the asteroid was about 450,000 miles away, roughly twice the distance between the earth and the moon. Still, in cosmic terms it was virtually a direct hit. No asteroid has been sighted so near since 1937, when Hermes, a minor planet nearly half a mile in diameter, passed by at about the same distance...
...adjunct professor of geology at Northern Arizona University. That was in late March, after it was already moving safely away from earth. Holt spotted the speeding intruder in photographs taken through an 18-in. telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, during a systematic search for asteroids passing close by, which scientists call earth grazers. Holt figures that 1989FC may be in Hermes' league, but other astronomers dispute the claim, saying the new asteroid may be only 100 yds. across. Even if the smaller size is correct, no one would want to have 1989FC land in the backyard...