Word: monsoon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...find a board game under a tree one afternoon while their parents are out and take it home to play. When they roll the dice, strange events ensue: rhinoceroses stampede into the living room, monkeys trash the kitchen, an 8-ft. snake luxuriates on the living-room mantel. A monsoon erupts, and volcanic lava fills the house, until, on the brink of disaster, Peter and Judy manage to end the game before their parents come home. The house instantly returns to normal. But then neighboring children take the game to their own house to play, unaware of the dangers lurking...
Biologists have identified numerous "hot spots" where ecosystems are under attack and large numbers of unique species face an immediate threat of elimination. Among the troubled areas: Madagascar, where more than 90% of the original vegetation has disappeared; the monsoon forests of the Himalayan foothills that are being denuded by villagers in search of firewood, building materials and arable land; New Caledonia, 83% of whose plants occur nowhere else; the eastern slope of the Andes, as well as forests in East Africa, peninsular Malaysia, northeast Australia and along the Atlantic coast of Brazil...
...atmosphere in the Pacific. Normally the system functions as a giant heat pump, distributing energy from the equator to the higher latitudes through storms brewed over the warm western Pacific. In conjunction with the oceans, these climatic patterns affect much of the world's weather, ranging from the monsoon season in southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent to rainfall in South America and Africa...
India has averted the problem by building dikes to contain the monsoon- swollen rivers, but that has merely pushed the flood problem downstream. B.M. Abbas, a former minister of flood control in the Dhaka government who favors the construction of a vast system of Himalayan dams as a long-term solution, charges that "Bangladesh is being destroyed by its neighbors...
...Missionaries of Charity run an N.F.P. center in Calcutta in a former chemicals warehouse. The sisters have taught the method to 64,000 women in the Indian state of West Bengal. Teachers use everyday agricultural images to explain a woman's menstrual cycle: seeds are planted during the monsoon, when the soil is soft and moist; cows are inseminated when they produce mucus at the cervix, fertility's telltale sign. Some women who cannot afford pencil or paper dutifully chart their fertile days in simple symbols drawn with burned wood. In Brazil, Sister Cecilia heads an agency that runs...