Word: herculean
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...well over a decade, the Dazhai production brigade in China's Shanxi province was the object of nothing less than a cult. The small, 40-family work unit, whose herculean labors were said to have produced astounding grain yields on steep hills, was held up as a model for all of rural China. LEARN FROM DAZHAI was the slogan that covered walls and farm buildings from northeastern Heilongjiang province to Yunnan in the southwest...
...assembly plant in Mahwah, N.J., shut down smaller operations in Dearborn, Mich., and Windsor, Ont, and cut 15,000 blue-and white-collar jobs. Time may be running short for Chrysler. Sales are off 26% from 1979's already depressed levels, and the company is making a herculean cost-cutting and consolidation effort in order to qualify for $1.5 billion in federal guaranteed loans. Even mighty General Motors last week put 12,000 more workers on indefinite layoff...
While tackling the herculean tasks, capitalism must demonstrate anew the daring and flexibility that were once its hallmarks. Plainly, capitalism is not working well enough. But there is no evidence to show that the fault is in the system ? or that there is a better alternative. Though neither comfortable nor easy, free enterprise contains the protean potential that will be needed in the coming diffi cult years. For all its obvious blemishes and needed reforms, capitalism alone holds out the most creative and dynamic force that any civilization has ever dis covered: the power of the free, ambitious individual...
...matter how Ylvisaker defines the readjustment of programs and goals presently underway, he and his colleagues face a Herculean task; many American schools will need more than tinkering before they again provide a satisfactory education. Those in Longfellow and Larsen Hall who lament the "decline in American education" often point to tight budgets and decreasing respect for the field. "The Proposition 13 mentality has been turning the faucet off on education," says Ylvisaker. Falling enrollments in suburbia and over-crowded classrooms in the city plague both communities, and, or course, there is the fiercely debated effect of television...
Carter's herculean task in drafting and then selling another anti-inflation program is to propose measures sufficiently tight that they will break the inflationary psychology. He must prove to the U.S. public that sharply rising prices have not become a permanent part of the American way of life. If the President fails, the consequences would be serious, both politically and economically. Says former Carter Economic Adviser Nordhaus: "If this keeps up, we're going to be living in a world of 10% or 11% inflation indefinitely." In fact, if present trends continue, inflation at those levels could...