Word: penchant
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...among us who have what is diplomatically referred to as "a short fuse" are three times more likely to have a heart attack than are our more placid peers. And this isn't true only for rage that's combined with a pack-a-day smoking habit or a penchant for pastries, as the researchers were quick to point out. Even when other heart-battering behaviors were taken into account, a causative effect between anger and heart attacks was apparent during the course of the investigation, which took place over six years at the University of North Carolina?Chapel Hill...
...your alternative to putting on the ring, get ready to live with a few little white lies. Dreamboat, unfortunately, doesn't deny a thing. He leads his governess-turned-love interest up the stairs to their attic, where Jane makes the acquaintance of Bertha, a homicidal maniac with a penchant for matches and a very valid marriage certificate to Rochester. This is what we in the humanities call a "character conflict." With women like Bertha in the attic, who needs skeletons in the closet...
...sketch, from the hand of an eight-year-old with a penchant for nasty temper tantrums, was drawn only days after a six-year-old in Michigan fatally shot a classmate, so school officials decided to be on the safe side. They brought the drawing to the attention of Gary Underwood, chief of police for the city's public schools, who ran the child's case through the department's new computer "threat-assessment" program, called Mosaic-2000. With a battery of 42 questions--Is the student harassed by peers? Has the student recently experienced rejection?--Mosaic purports to calculate...
...most interest-sensitive components of the economy, and tend to be a particularly prescient overall financial indicator. "When interest rates go up, as they have been," says Baumohl, "the first sectors to register a slowdown are car and housing purchases." In other words, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan's penchant for quarter-point hikes may have finally eased the American public's seemingly insatiable taste for big-ticket items like new real estate. And this, despite its overtones of recession, says Baumohl, can be seen as very good news: The Federal Reserve may be able to lay off its series...
Even if we did manage--against all odds--to rid a city of roaches, they would still do just fine. What the species really has going for it is wanderlust--and a penchant for traveling with people. That is how cockroaches first colonized the world, and that's how they're spreading today, hitchhiking on trains, planes, automobiles--even up the trousers of unknowing tourists. In Taiwan, for example, where it would have been a curiosity only 30 years ago, the German cockroach is happily entrenched. "The last living thing on the planet," says entomologist Roger Gold of Texas...