Word: dire
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...therefores" continued into the 19th century, when several experts asserted that a new invention known as the railroad would kill all of its passengers. Anyone traveling at 30 m.p.h., they reasoned, could not breathe and would die of suffocation. This was only a foretaste of the dire warnings that awaited the inventors of the airplane. "The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force can be united in a practical [flying] machine seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact...
...issued since 1966, some 130,000 people who were granted permits before that time are still waiting to join the 600,000 Cubans who have departed for what Castro scornfully calls "the dolce vita and the consumer society." What the critics do suggest is that socialist Cuba is in dire trouble. They argue that Castro's charisma has worn thin and that his reliance on Russian aid will not solve his problems. "One wonders," says Karol flatly, "if he has not mortgaged the entire future of the revolution...
After six days of a wildcat walkout, the biggest police strike in the U.S. since Boston's in 1919, more than 20,000 New York patrolmen returned to their jobs last week. Somehow, as they usually do, New Yorkers had muddled through. Crime did not rise, despite dire predictions that every gangster and petty criminal would have a field day, and traffic was no more snarled than usual. The fact that detectives, sergeants and ranking officers stayed on the job and that the weather was bitterly cold helped keep things quiet. One psychologist praised the "incredible selfdiscipline...
...world's most tightly compacted cities. Singapore Harbor, the world's fourth busiest, is jammed with freighters and oil tankers. Jurong Industrial Estate contains 275 plants that turn out everything from ships to toothbrushes. Another 112 factories are planned or under construction. But despite such dire pollution indicators, Singapore is a breath of fresh air in the miasma of Asian cities, some of which are among the dirtiest on earth...
...rule. In studies of the relation of socioeconomic factors to disease in the population of Washington County, Md., Comstock and his colleagues made an incidental but fascinating discovery. Regular churchgoing, and the clean living that often goes with it, appear to help people avoid a whole bagful of dire ailments and disasters. Among them: heart disease, cirrhosis of the liver, tuberculosis, cancer of the cervix, chronic bronchitis, fatal one-car accidents and suicides...