Word: distinctives
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just plain middle class, but I talk as if my family live in a stately home and don't have to work. My ancestors were mainly teachers, vicars, profs and bishops - careers which might require a top-of-the-range voice. That may explain why I speak a distinctly upmarket version of received pronunciation (RP) - shorthand for the standard English of bbc newsreaders. Which is fine if you want to marry a landowner or work in a top art auction house, but not so much fun if you just want to fade into the background. People make assumptions: men think...
...this was consistent with what many (though not all) historians understand to be the larger pattern of Islamic conquest. Although treatment of "unbelievers"-notably those on the Indian subcontinent-could be brutal, ?People of the Book,? as Christians and Jews were known, often maintained their distinct religious communities. True, they were regarded as second class citizens and had to pay a poll tax and a land tax. It could be a demeaning life, and many converted, but others did not, as is indicated by large Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim states today...
...bright youngster for the intellectual rigors of life, right? Not really, writes Quart, now 34, in her new book, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press). "Having been built in the fashion I was as a child - created and then deflated - has left me with a distinct feeling of failure." Quart is unflinchingly honest about her unusual childhood experience. "My father would have bristled at the notion that he was an overbearing puppet master. If I sat absolutely quietly and wrote lyrical verse about tree-tops, I was peachy. My father was hell-bent on bettering...
...survey is packed with fascinating findings, some surprising (a stunning proportion of whites--77%--say their race has a distinct culture that should be preserved) and some less so (whites view their role in the social hierarchy more benignly than blacks and Hispanics do). Whites are more likely to say prejudice and discrimination put blacks at a disadvantage than to say those factors contribute to white advantage. And they are much less likely than nonwhites to attribute inequality to bias in the legal system...
...latest issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), experts from the U.S., Indonesia and Australia have dashed cold water on the hobbit hypothesis. Based on their first-hand examination of the bones, the scientists concluded that Flores man isn't a member of a distinct human species. They claim instead that the specimen is the remains of an unfortunate pygmy with a form of microcephaly, a developmental disorder that shrinks the head and brain. Homo floresiensis "are just like hobbits," sniffs archaeologist Alan Thorne, one of the authors of the PNAS paper. "They...