Word: old
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Americans have ever felt entirely comfortable with their Government's support for clearly and often cruelly undemocratic regimes. When an old fascist like Spain's Francisco Franco died in 1975, thus finally permitting the restoration of democracy, or when the junta of Greek Colonels self-destructed in 1974 by instigating an abortive coup in Cyprus and made way for the return of Constantine Caramanlis, the U.S. reacted with general relief. Still, the world is full of dictatorships, the U.S. has to deal with most of them, and simply condemning them on moral grounds is not a policy. Support...
Cross-cultural testing can show widely different patterns in answering IQ questions, but no such differences show up between black and white children in the U.S., according to Jensen. Says he: "There is no way to discriminate or distinguish between the average ten-year-old black and the average 8½-year-old white. The tests look the same, but the black child has a lower mental age. It looks more like a developmental lag than a cultural difference...
...fourth of the nation's 17-year-old students cannot multiply 671 by 402 and get the right answer: 269,742. And the same multiplication problem baffles one-third of all 13-year-olds. Of course, young Americans may prosper without ever solving that particular problem, provided they never have to print up enough tickets to admit 671 people to exactly 402 rock concerts. But the problem makes a point for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nonprofit organization, which included it, along with hundreds of others, in the latest N.A.E.P. survey of the nation's math...
...Examining 3.8 billion-year-old rocks found in Greenland's Isua (Eskimo for "the farthest we can go") region, Ponnamperuma and other scientists found evidence of compounds called hydrocarbons, which are of major importance in organic chemistry. To discover whether these hydrocarbons had a biological origin, scientists analyzed the ratio of two isotopes, or forms, of carbon. They found that the amount of carbon 12, the isotope most utilized in biological processes, was high in relation to carbon 13. This indicates that the hydrocarbons were produced by photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds...
...salty tourist trap the city is today. For almost 200 years, starting with the capture of Constantinople in 1453, the Turks had been snapping off the Venetian colonies in the eastern Mediterranean. Portuguese caravels, rounding the tip of Africa in increasing numbers, had taken away Venice's old monopoly of the spice trade. Venice was turning from an imperial power into a cultural artifact. As such, she was one of the most visited cities of Europe. For an artist, a trip to see the Bellinis and Titians was an obligatory part of his education-as necessary, if he wanted...