Word: rampant
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Almost always, it seems, the Mexicans fall into success and then out of it before it does much toward eliminating the country's rampant poverty and underemployment. No sooner had Mexico begun to reap riches from vast new oil finds in the 1970s, for example, than the world's industrial economies became mired in recession, and unneeded oil was squirting out everywhere. Petroleum prices plummeted, deflating the hopes and dreams Mexico had fashioned for itself when it became the world's fourth largest oil producer...
...profits are increasingly hard to come by. More than 20 companies are now producing cartridges that play on Atari machines. While about 350 new game titles were released in all of 1982, dealers were inundated with 317 new ones in January of this year alone. Moreover, price cutting is rampant...
...theory, however, has not performed well in practice. Speculation is more rampant than ever; currency values can jump or dip by 2% in a single day. Some currencies shoot way out of line and stay there. Japan had a merchandise trade surplus last year of $18 billion, yet partly because of Japan's low interest rates, the yen remains weak against most other currencies. Economists estimate that the yen is undervalued by about 20% in relation to the dollar...
...problems with the hospital are not those of backwardness, but of modernization. Bureaucracy runs rampant, to the point where getting a small corridor painted requires hours of cajoling the bumbling and infantile painters, and assuring them that their fine workmanship is not going unappreciated. Actually saving a life proves all but impossible. One elderly patient undergoes an enthusiastic bout of fits and seizures while the hospital orderlies argue with a nurse over the incentives necessary to convince them to wheel away this ailing charge, who has had the audacity to collapse at the end of a shift. Anderson...
...Iraqi war effort. If such hopes are being nurtured in the Iranian capital of Tehran, they are unrealistic. Both sides in the Iran-Iraq war are, as a Western diplomat puts it, "obsessed with getting the maximum military and propaganda advantage" from the spill. Under the shadow of such rampant obstructionism, the nations of the gulf seem doomed to deal with an ever more visible oil glut...