Word: rare
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Those lines are written on a map of the world on display at the Library of Congress in Washington through April. The map is so rare - only six copies are known to exist - that to a fan of cartography, its exhibition is a bit like giving a devout Christian a chance to hold the Holy Grail. Prepared for the court of Emperor Wanli of the Ming dynasty by Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in Beijing, the map places China at the center of the world, just where Chinese scholars thought (and think) appropriate. It was purchased last year...
...know it as an outfit that delivers the goods, but for UPS it's becoming less important that the folks in the brown trucks make the final handoff. Delivering a package efficiently is what it gets paid for. And the company is getting paid more often. "It's very rare to hear such bold statements from UPS management," says Helane Becker, transportation analyst for Jesup & Lamont Securities. "So we can take this to mean they truly believe the worst is behind us and UPS is ready to move forward...
...group, an elected body comprised of 86 clerics, most of them well into senior citizenship, is tasked with, among other things, overseeing the actions of the Supreme Leader, though it has never used that power. Referring to the post-election turmoil, Rafsanjani took no clear sides but made a rare acknowledgment of wrongdoing by regime forces, stating that "unfortunate incidents occurred that were unprecedented in our country, and these incidents caused disputes and in some instances hostilities, and events took place that no Muslim heart could accept. The families of both protesters and officers were harmed, and one must sympathize...
...understand why the mark was long thought impossible, consider the odds against it happening. In a one-day game, each side gets to bat 50 six-ball overs - that's 300 balls or, in American baseball terms, "pitches." It's rare that a single batsman gets more than 150 pitches, so the batsman would need a hit rate higher than 100% to get to 200 runs. Tendulkar got his 200 runs in 147 pitches, a hitting rate of 136.5. Very few players have scored at a faster rate, and none had the combination of patience and skill to score fast...
Tendulkar's one of those rare success stories that were entirely predictable from the get-go. He was a child prodigy, breaking records as a schoolboy cricketer in Mumbai back in the late 1980s; greatness was plainly his destiny. So there are literally millions of cricket fans (not all of them Indians) who can honestly respond to every new Tendulkar record by saying, "I told...