Word: rationalize
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Last week, as Lady Day approached once again in wheat-short Britain, dark, handsome Sir Anthony Doughty-Tichborne, the latest in the line, hied himself to Britain's Food Ministry to ask permission to buy flour for his tenants with 14,000 ration coupons he had collected from them. He needed the flour, he said, to hold off the family curse imposed by his resolute ancestress. In Britain, where curses have a longer history than rationing, the request was granted...
...executive council of the Polish Socialist Party was sent to a gold-mining camp in eastern Siberia. The work day was 12 to 15 hours long. Since the ground was frozen most of the time, the mining was done largely with crowbars and chisels. The size of the bread ration depended on the amount of work performed. Feeble, inefficient or unwilling workers were taken aside and shot...
...promised in addition," said Heisenberg, "50 pounds of fresh meat a month, a ration of 3,500 calories of food a day for each of my six young children, and a comfortable, well-furnished house with many amenities...
...almost as hard to destroy ration coupons as to get them...
From the time the first ration book was issued (1942), the Wartime Prices & Trade Board had been very careful. Used coupons returned to its audit office from suppliers and wholesalers were carefully checked, then stuck on gummed sheets to be destroyed. First, WPTB tried burning the sheets in a furnace. They clinkered and left unburned coupons inside. Next a blast furnace was used. Unburned coupons sometimes blasted right up the stack and out again; unscrupulous finders might pick them up and use them. At last WPTB hit on a system that looked foolproof. They sacked the coupons, sent them along...