Word: discern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...question is nonbinding, meaning that it only tries to discern public opinion on the issue and that representatives are not required to take any action on the outcome," said Philip Griffiths, assistant director of the Cambridge Election Commission...
That concert was several continents back. Since then, Rachlevsky has lived in Israel, Canada and the U.S., but in some ways the violinist, now bearded and barrel-chested, is still squinting into the audience to discern the identity of his benefactors. Lately, it seems, they are as elusive as his long-ago Moscow audience...
Surrounded by sometimes contradictory, some-times compatible impressions of the USSR, we found ourselves grappling with these disparate images of the "real" Soviet Union in an effort to define for ourselves the true nature of Soviet society. In our struggle to discern what was real and what was facade, what was planned and what was spontaneous, we naturally found ourselves confronting the second question: What about perestroika and glasnost? Could they really work...
...began badly for the team of American biblical scholars who had been granted a rare opportunity to examine and photograph a precious manuscript in Jerusalem's Shrine of the Book. Hunched over a swath of darkened and decomposing parchment with a powerful magnifying glass, they were barely able to discern a single letter. But that night, as they reviewed photo negatives still wet from the developing tank, their luck changed dramatically. Passages that had been invisible to the naked eye jumped out at them from the film. "It was a moment of exploding consciousness," recalls James Charlesworth, professor...
...time. In an era in which humming for the Harmonic Convergence is considered an act of social awareness, a phrase such as "socially conscious" must necessarily be taken with a grain of salt. But even so, the phrase is obviously inapplicable to U2, since anyone who can discern a socially redeeming message in U2's incomprehensible lyrics should have a go at deciphering the Democratic candidates' platforms...