Word: driftful
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...mortality rates down. Thus for a while the population increases. Eventually, however, modernization causes the birth rate to drift downward. Children are not needed to till the land. Parents need not produce a dozen children in the hope that a few will survive to maturity. Modernization also prolongs schooling and postpones the time at which women marry and begin having families, thus shortening their child-bearing years. By this pattern, according to the much discussed theory of "demographic transition," societies in the process of becoming industrialized will move from high birth and death rates to a new equilibrium...
Little has been done to halt the country's serious economic drift. The leaders of the Armed Forces Movement (A.F.M.) inherited a high rate of inflation (currently 30% a year) and a chronic balance of trade deficit (expected to be $500 million this year), when they took power in April. But since then lack of confidence in the political future has made the problem worse. "Business hates a system where the rules of the game are not known," complains a leading Lisbon oil executive. "The government holds marathon sessions and argues and argues, but it never makes a decision...
...Arctic Ocean to Antarctica. Last week, as the scientists who took part in FAMOUS (for French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study) returned home from their expedition to the bottom of the sea, they reported that their little craft had discovered important new clues to the secrets of continental drift...
About 150 million years ago, during the breakup of a supercontinent that geologists call Gondwanaland,* South America and Africa began to drift apart, creating the Atlantic Ocean. There is convincing evidence for the once controversial theory that the two continents were once joined; geological features and fossil remains on opposite sides of the ocean show a remarkable match, and the shelves, or underwater plateaus, extending from each of the continents into the Atlantic form a near perfect fit, like adjacent pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. One piece of the puzzle, however, seemed to be missing. There was a deep indentation...
...Italian immigrant worker, Rodino was raised in the fiercely ethnic Little Italy section of Newark, in a neighborhood so rough that he recalls shootings in the streets. Rodino wrote an unpublished novel about his upbringing entitled Drift Street. At one time, Rodino had hopes of becoming a poet-he still loves to recite Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley and Keats-but he diligently worked his way through the University of Newark Law School...