Word: downward
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...take classes at a local community college. Watterson discovered last year that she would be forced to deny many of her students the opportunity to take college courses because the state would no longer subsidize the costs for them. For one student she described, this meant a rapid downward spiral—one week the teenager was a happy and successful student, and the next she was on a bus back to Mexico. Thanks to an aggressive fundraising campaign, Watterson has managed to raise enough money to pay for these subsidies for her affected students for the next year...
...immediately occurs; It's because of AnnaSophia Robb's performance. When we meet her she's a closed-off and cynical girl. In her relatively short life she already witnessed a lifetime of human fecklessness, and we sense that she is on the edge of following her mother's downward path. Yet, stubbornly, she continues to love her. Better still, she reluctantly begins to bond with her uncle. He may have neither the life-skills nor the ambition to lift himself off the road to nowhere, but he is a good-natured man with the ability to make his niece...
...individual happiness levels, we all tend to fall into a larger, cross-cultural and global pattern of joy. According to survey data representing 2 million people in more than 70 countries, happiness typically follows a U-shaped curve: among people in their mid-40s and younger, happiness trends downward with age, then climbs back up among older people. (That shift doesn't necessarily hold for the very old with severe health problems.) Across the world, people in their 40s generally claim to be less happy than those who are younger or older, and the global happiness nadir appears...
...These scandals are clearly eroding Sarkozy’s credibility in the eyes of the French people. His approval ratings plummeted to below 50 percent for the first time since his election in May 2007. Sarkozy’s approval ratings have followed a definite downward trend since the series of large-scale strikes against his labor and education reforms in the fall of 2007. Various groups of public employees including teachers, civil servants, and public transport workers responded with anger to Sarkozy’s plan to slash France’s generous pensions. Perhaps their anger had something...
...Iraq, says Mosul's first real plunge into violence came in 2004, after he handed over command of the area. The police force collapsed, and insurgents moved in. "Once the roots go in, then you have a real challenge," Petraeus says of the insurgency. "You just start to spiral downward...