Word: problem
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Department; three times Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin slipped into a private elevator and rode up to the seventh-floor office of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. After each meeting, both diplomats avoided reporters' questions. There had already been far too much threatening and ill-considered rhetoric about the problem that confronted them: the controversial role of Soviet combat troops in Cuba...
Although the rest of the world has denounced the scheme and refused to recognize these "children of apartheid," Pretoria continues to push its homelands policy as the ultimate "solution to the racial problem in South Africa." Besides the three homelands that are now nominally independent, seven are in transitional stages on the road to autonomy. But that road is fraught with difficulties. Only three of the homelands, Ciskei, Qwaqwa and KaNgwane, are unitary territories; the rest are fragmented enclaves, surrounded by land reserved for whites. Only Transkei possesses a deep-water seaport. Apart from BophuthaTswana and Lebowa, which have rich...
...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...
...fact that if the company were to close down, the nearly $1 billion in unfunded pension obligations that it would leave be hind could exhaust the private-pension rescue fund that the Government maintains. Before long, the combined pressures of inflation and the changing U.S. demographics will force the problem of supporting the retired into the forefront of the nation's social concerns...
This bleak demographic problem has been compounded by rising prices and the trend toward earlier retirement. Inflation erodes the real worth of the $280 billion that companies and unions have built up in private pension funds and increases the payout needed to keep the elderly out of poverty. A person who began contributing to a pension fund when he was earning a respectable $2,000 per year in 1939 may now be receiving $6,000 a year from that fund and finding it mighty hard to make do. Earlier retirement, mean while, is shortening the period during which people contribute...