Word: spurs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...more impressive given that it isn't a very sporty nation. I remember jogging in Beijing several years ago only to have people look behind me to see whom I was running away from. But China's leaders have a long tradition of using sports as a spur to national pride. Consider the country's decades-long dominance of table tennis. This supremacy had little to do with a national passion for wooden paddles and plastic balls. China decided to develop star paddlers largely because the International Table Tennis Federation was, in 1953, one of the first sports organizations...
...real per capita income, the productivity resurgence since the mid-1990s has been accompanied by a pickup in real income growth. One measure of average living standards, real consumption per capita, is nearly 35 percent higher today than in 1995. In addition, the flood of innovation that helped spur the productivity resurgence has created many new job opportunities, and more than a few fortunes. But changing technology has also reduced job opportunities for some others--bank tellers and assembly-line workers, for example. And that is the crux of a whole new set of challenges...
...recipient of the 1955 Nobel Prize for Physics for his work describing the structure of the hydrogen atom, Willis Lamb helped spur the development of key theories underpinning modern physics. Lamb was once a student of the Manhattan Project's Robert Oppenheimer, and Lamb's discovery that different energy levels existed among electrons in hydrogen atoms catalyzed a new understanding of quantum mechanics. His work has also advanced the study of lasers and electromagnetism...
...government stance in Sadr City, some hope, will break the militia's hold on the local economy and spur badly needed reconstruction and development in the area. But any reconstruction effort will be a massive undertaking. Iraqi army forces viewed scenes of widespread destruction as they entered Sadr City. Roughly 10,000 Iraqi troops moved through block after block of burnt and shattered buildings. Iraqi army Humvees slogged through pools of standing water that could come to pose a serious health threat in the densely packed urban area as well...
...donated at least 50,000 metric tons of food aid to Pyongyang. With the Olympics in August and a crackdown on North Korean refugees sneaking into China already well under way, Beijing wants nothing to do with the exodus from the North a growing food crisis would inevitably spur...