Word: gobi
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...former herders like Bayarsakhan, the transition to city living has been wrenching. He grew up in Gobi-Altai province to the south, where his family had raised livestock for generations. Four summers ago, however, a severe drought was followed by an early frost, then a brutal winter with high winds. Mongolians have a name for this: the dzud. The historical norm has been roughly one dzud every half-decade, making for a tough season before more-manageable weather returns. But it's now happening for a fourth consecutive year. The dzud means less grass grows and animals can't fatten...
...Stranded in a roadless region of Gobi-Altai that had been rendered inaccessible by snowdrifts, Bayarsakhan's family herd of 500 dwindled to 10. After a while, the family even stopped disposing of the corpses, instead piling them around their ger?a felt-covered Mongolian dwelling?for extra insulation. They burned furniture to keep warm. "If you don't have animals," says Bayarsakhan, "you have nothing." To survive, he left everything he'd ever known for a place where people dressed oddly, behaved differently and used paper money instead of bartering. His wife and infant son came with...
...second-division team Gansu Tianma (Heavenly Horses). Better known as Gazza (Jia Jia in Chinese), Gascoigne has been plagued by weight and drinking problems in recent years and failed to sign with an English club this season. He will move to his new club's home, Lanzhou, near the Gobi Desert, this month. "It's a great challenge," he said...
...dearth of such conveniences as electricity and phones makes Mongolia a challenge, but that's part of the attraction. A growing number of outfitters supply amenities that range from adequate to near opulent for adventures like hiking and fly-fishing in the Altai Mountains, traversing the moonscape of the Gobi Desert by Range Rover and exploring the Flaming Cliffs, one of the world's premier dinosaur-fossil sites, in the company of a paleontologist...
...only a little. Earlier this year, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study of 102 near-daily marijuana users who wanted to quit. The authors found that the longer subjects had toked up, the worse their memories and attention spans. But they were hardly like Gobi, the Saturday Night Live wastoid who is so ruined he can barely talk. Participants who had used cannabis regularly for an average of 10 years fared significantly worse on only two of 40 indices of cognitive functioning (they had particular trouble estimating how much time had passed during a test). Those...