Word: drifting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Fourteen years ago, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, those college entrance exams taken with dread each year by a million high school students, began to drift downward-after holding steady for decades. The mean score for verbal ability, measured on the SAT'S 200 to 800 scale, dropped gradually from 478 in the 1962-63 academic year into the 430s. The median mathematics score slipped from 502 into the 470s. In 1975, when the combined score plunged eleven points in just one year, alarmed parents and educators demanded to know why. The widespread concern prompted the College Entrance...
...surprisingly modest office on the Times building's 14th floor?part of a suite that includes a bedroom, bath, conference room and study?is dominated by a massive walnut desk that he commandeered from the Times archivist. Sulzberger is at that desk by 8 a.m. (many Times editors drift in around 11 a.m.; Sulzberger used to be known around the office as "the farm boy"), and spends an hour reading and answering mail. Following the lead of his wife, acquaintances of recent years call him Arthur instead of Punch, and he often has to ask his secretary how long...
...languishing in American high schools. The number of students taking it dropped precipitously from 626,199 in 1965 to 184,445 in 1974, and courses were deleted as being too dry and dusty. But the appeal of the arcanum shows signs of reviving Latin, along with the current educational drift back to basics. New courses in mythology and literature in translation have attracted students too. One innovative, popular program-used in ghetto schools to reinforce basic English grammar-even teaches conversational Latin by audiovisual methods. Besides, says Minter, "the classics still have a snob appeal-which we try to play...
Flight Talk. The phenomenon reflects both cold economics and some fevered concern about political and social malaise abroad. Canadians fret about increasing tensions between the French-and English-speaking communities. Middle Easterners are apprehensive about what they see as political and economic drift in the European countries, where they have traditionally salted away their wealth. Says Dr. Nazmi Abdel Hamid, former governor of Egypt's Central Bank and now an adviser to the Arab-European Bank: "Increasingly...
...this is historically unlikely, since the church served as one of the main instruments of colonization in Latin America--he might have helped the audience understand the conquistadors better. As it is, however, there is almost no internal tension in Aguirre: for the most part, we watch the band drift down the river with little more understanding than we had when we watched them emerge at the beginning of the film from the green, cloud-covered mountains...