Word: skins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...more obvious to experts. World trade has doubled over the past decade, but reserves to finance it have grown only 40%. Last year hoarders squirreled away almost as much gold as the world mined; with increasing industrial demand for the metal (for everything from computer diodes to the skin of Titan III), the store of gold in the free world's central banks actually dwindled for the first time in modern history. So far, the U.S. and British balance-of-payments deficits have covered the gap, but if and when the deficits are brought under control, the resulting shortage...
...human species into anywhere from two to 200 races; some anthropologists maintain that humanity cannot or should not be subdivided into races at all. The debate does not particularly concern the great majority of nonexperts. Man's eyes tell him that the species comes in three predominant skin shades, which are chromatically though imperfectly described as white, yellow and black. From much the same evidence, three major divisions are frequently deduced: Caucasian, Mongolian and Negroid...
...every human being fits neatly into one of those three categories, but most of them do. The system is at least workable, all the more so because the physical disparities in man are not limited to the color of his skin. The so-called Mongolian race, for example, can also be distinguished by the epicanthic fold that gives some Asian peoples, among them the Japanese and the Chinese, a slant-eyed look. Evolutionary hypothesis has traced this feature to its probable source. The predominant theory is that it developed from a mutation-a random change in the elaborate chemistry...
...dark skin that usually, though not invariably, characterizes members of the Negroid race may also be a protective device. If man was first born in tropical Africa, as some anthropologists now suggest, then it is possible that his skin, whatever color it may have been to begin with, took on added pigment-again, starting with chance mutation-as a screen against harmful radiation from the sun. It is a fact that Negroes seldom have skin cancer, though its incidence is rising noticeably in the white population of the U.S. The same pigment, by filtering solar radiation, impedes synthesis of vitamin...
...bonds, has ever since been classified in some quarters as a member of an intellectually inferior race. The attitude is not without historical precedent. Segregationists of the U.S. South often quote the Book of Genesis 9:25, which relates that Canaan, the son of Ham-whose skin was believed to be black-is ac cursed throughout time: "A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume suspected "Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites." Several U.S. Presidents, among them Jefferson and Lincoln, shared the same opinion, at least for a while...