Word: conundrum
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...across the political spectrum, the problem of how to end a nuclear A war is recognized as a conundrum second in urgency and difficulty only to the challenge of avoiding the war in the first place. Some nuclear-freeze advocates argue that no matter how the war started, it would end only by burning itself out?and burning the whole world up. The Pentagon's Ikle, who made his reputation as a strategist partly on the basis of a book published eleven years ago titled Every War Must End, now admits, "War can be very difficult to stop. There...
...Fewer than 5 percent of the first wave of students took the opportunity, but it was enough to give the folks at the Board some sleepless nights. From two zealous post-test takers came successful challenges--one straightforward and stupid mistake concerning positive and negative integers, and one conundrum in three-dimensional geometry, which threw the entire Department of Access Services into a tizzy. "Pyramids," my supervisor was still groaning last summer, months after the third and fourth possible solutions to the question had hit the national press. "Do these people know what they've done to me? I have...
...create inversions, and the analogies to his inversions that exist in music, art, and linguistics. Staying clear of jargon and specialized knowledge, these essays deftly challenge a great deal of what we take for granted about reading, and seeing in general. For instance, Kim poses the following "classical conundrum...
...pedigree of raves and awards, and just enough sex to set the toes acurl-with all these assets, a movie version of The French Lieutenant's Woman might have seemed inevitable and immediate. It was not to be. For Fowles had cloaked Sarah and Charles in a cunning conundrum. This Victorian novel is also a meditation on the novel form, and on a hundred other subjects that occupy the teeming mind of the book's 20th century narrator. He sprinkles references throughout, not just to Marx and Darwin but to latter-day prophets like Roland Barthes...
...between investors and the American savings and loan associations is in trouble. This year S and Ls may lose $5 billion of their $32 billion in net capitalization. To stem the flight of depositors, they have had to offer new savings instruments with higher and higher interest rates. The conundrum: at the same time that they carry huge portfolios of old mortgages, including some that were made in the 1960s and yield 6% or 7%, S and Ls must pay 15% or more for new deposits. As a result, earnings have been squeezed, and more and more once stout...