Word: skim
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Although hovercraft are still a novelty in North America and in most other parts of the world, they are becoming familiar in Britain, where they work as ferries between coastal resort towns and ply the cross-Channel route between England and France. Experimental military and civilian hovercraft skim along waterways and across marshes in Britain. And the hovercraft principle of using a thin layer of air to move heavy loads is finding increasing applications in British industry and transportation...
Before long, several British firms had produced working prototypes of the peripheral-air-wall hovercraft, lifted by pressure produced by the air stream from horizontally mounted fans and driven laterally by aircraft-type propellers. Although the ingenious craft could skim almost effortlessly along smooth highways and waterways at automobile speeds, even the most powerful could not rise more than a foot above the sur face; the air curtain could not effectively contain pressurized air above this height. As a result, hovercraft could not operate over choppy seas or rough ground, where they might smash into jutting rocks or wave tops...
Running would not skim along as effortlessly as it does if the cast did not slalom through the comedy with such dazzling grace. Martin Balsam, in particular, can be wacky, pathetic, puzzled and convulsive in sequence. Whenever Playwright Anderson's comic invention turns paper thin, Director Alan Schneider unfurls it with blinding finesse so that the show remains a ticker-tape blizzard of hilarity...
...knew him, "was always trying to prove himself to himself and to his father and to the world." Last week, on Coniston Water, a small, deep lake in northwest England, Donald Campbell, 45, tried for yet another water-speed record in a jet-powered Bluebird hydroplane designed to skim the surface on two 6-in. sponsons fastened to the pontoons. His goal: 300 m.p.h., a speed realm that no one had ever touched. Playing solitaire on the night before his record attempt, Campbell turned up the ace and queen of spades in succession. "Mary Queen of Scots had the same...
...colonizers did nothing to alter the compadre system under which a Filipino bureaucrat was permitted to skim the cream from his tax collections and distribute it to his poor friends and relations; as a result, graft and corruption are still the Manila way of life. Nor did the Americans break up the vast estates of the principalia, the Filipino elite; peasants today still pay up to 30% of their crop to absentee landlords, and the rest often goes to local loan sharks. By granting free tariffs to Philippine producers of sugar, lumber and hemp, the U.S. reinforced a backward primary...