Word: modeste
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MEASURED on a human Richter scale, the Managua earthquake ranks as one of history's more modest seismic upheavals. In 1556 a quake collapsed thousands of cave dwellings in the cliffs of China's Shensi province, killing an estimated 830,000 peasants. In 1755 more than 50,000 died in a series of tremors that destroyed the city of Lisbon and inspired Voltaire to compose his moving Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake...
...chocolate purchased in Mendoza helped keep the survivors alive for 20 days, but then the modest supply ran out. Their stomachs gnawing, the half-frozen members of the group finally made a dreadful decision. They hacked off sections of the dead bodies, thawed them on the warm metal of the aircraft, sliced them into small pieces with a razor, and ate the pieces raw because there was no fuel for a fire. The choice of cadavers was circumscribed: no relatives, no one with injuries that might have become infected...
Comfort. In spite of enduring contradictions, there is an overwhelming impression in Bulgaria of modest but widespread comfort, prosperity in the villages around the capital and impressive organization in agriculture. Sofia is striking for its many sumptuously planted parks, its wide-domed churches brightly lit at night and the yellow cobblestones that pave the main boulevards. City residents, proud of their distinctive cobblestones, have successfully persuaded the municipal authorities to abandon plans to replace them with asphalt. One woman journalist explained, "We couldn't let them tear up our streets," adding, "after all, they're paved in gold...
After dozens of skyjackings, after the letter bombs, after the Munich massacre, the proposal before the United Nations seemed modest enough: to organize an international conference that would draw up a convention aimed at curbing such atrocities...
Wyke has the opportunity to actualize a macabre mastery when he invites Milo Tindle the lover of his wife Marguerite, to his isolated house late one evening. Wyke convinces Tindle that his modest income as a travel agent--best known for 'Tindle's Tours to Jamaica"--will not keep Marguerite living in the style to which she is accustomed. He persuades Tindle to steal a cache of jewels worth 100.000 pounds hidden in the cellar. Tindle will keep the tiresome Marguerite permanently, and Wyke will collect the insurance. Together they plan the artificial robbery, carefully obeying Wyke's insistence that...