Word: downright
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...methods for adding and multiplying two-digit numbers, and for larger numbers, let them use calculators. One determined reformer puts it decisively: "It's time to acknowledge that continuing to teach these skills (i.e., pencil-and-paper computational algorithms) to our students is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive and downright dangerous...
Maybe it's just a response to endless complaints about suburban traffic jams, but U.S. politicians are starting to pay attention to the sprawl problem. Presidential candidate Al Gore has raised the subject, and Maryland Governor Parris Glendening sounds downright alarmed. "Every time we cut down one more forest or sell off another acre of farmland, we have permanently lost more of our finite natural resources," says Glendening. "Sprawl costs taxpayers dollars to support new infrastructure, costs natural resources that we know are not unlimited, and costs us as a society in lost opportunities to invest in our existing communities...
...University of Adelaide was even more fascinating than usual. Searching a boulder-strewn, fast-flowing creek in an Australian rain forest, Tyler spotted a frog unlike any he'd ever encountered. While its appearance--brown back and cream-colored underside--was nothing special, its reproductive behavior proved to be downright bizarre. The female swallowed her own eggs, incubated them in her stomach and gave birth through her mouth. A single mother coughed up 21 offspring in the same litter...
...every era, this concept has been a volatile mix of aspiration and ambition, ignorance and illusion--an abstraction that the majority of the country is "supposedly" striving for, but which in the corporal world is so elusive as to often be downright fictitious. Though the scenery undoubtedly changes with the century, (by societal standards, "making it" is no longer measured by indoor plumbing and a fashionable buggy, but by a Mercedes and a company in the Valley--Silicon, of course), the latent content of the Dream remains the same. It's a rags-to-riches story, where ambition and fate...
...violence too heinous for language. But what takes the place of these lost elements is equally intriguing. The Ohio State Murders in its current production is a lyric exploration of emptiness, an absolutely breathtaking amalgam of hauntingly lonely lighting, pale-colored costumes and a score that's downright chilling in its simple beauty. (Kudos to John Ambrosone, Viola Mackenthun and Christopher Walker for their respective designs.) Underneath the surface, however, this enrapturing meditation on emptiness is really a study of absence. Forced absence. The only books on stage lie on the desk of Professor Robert Hampshire, Suzanne's teacher...