Word: coal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strapping six-footer, Bi "got into the weight-lifting craze about two years ago, when it was big." He still pumps iron each morning before breakfast, which he takes at a local restaurant with four colleagues. Eating out is actually cheaper than cooking at home for Bi, since coal is very expensive. Besides, Bi is saving for new eyeglasses. He hates his thick lenses and believes he would not need them if he had grown up in the West. "Until about five years ago, we didn't have electricity," he says. "I read by candlelight till then. My eyes...
...good way to catch a reader's attention is to start off with a bang. This book does so. Chapter 1, first sentence: "The most perilous work in America is the harvest by hand of sugarcane in South Florida." Holy mackerel, stop the presses! A lot of coal miners will certainly be relieved to learn this, not to mention scads of military test pilots. And just how perilous is this work, which is principally performed by laborers brought in from the Caribbean? An answer is tucked in at the end of a paragraph 245 pages later...
...Grand Canyon have long complained that smog is ruining the view. A National Park Service study tracked winter weather patterns and the sources of the haze. The main culprit: Arizona's Navajo Generating Station, an electrical plant 80 miles away. The plant, burning 24,000 tons of coal daily and releasing an estimated 12 to 13 tons of sulfur dioxide from its smokestacks every hour, was found responsible for about half the Grand Canyon's pollution...
Although virtually everyone in Poland recognizes the need for economic reforms, the country lacks the money, and has failed so far to demonstrate the political will, to make them. Old factories and unproductive coal mines must be closed, meaning the loss of thousands of jobs. The Communist-dominated bureaucracy and army need to be cut back. Most problematical of all, as Mazowiecki said, living conditions will have to get even worse if they are ever to get better...
...Allied terms at Versailles were harsh. France would regain Alsace and Lorraine, as well as a trusteeship over the rich coal mines of the Saar. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires would be chopped up into a goulash of new nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A newly independent Poland acquired parts of the German industrial area of Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, providing it with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Germany alone would be disarmed, forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or have any major warships, submarines, warplanes or tanks. Germany would have to admit formally...