Word: swathe
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Beyond the sound barrier, the main obstacle to commercial supersonic flight is the miles-wide swath of broken windows, cracked plaster, frazzled nerves and aching eardrums that might be left behind by sonic boom. Resigned to it, airlines are planning either routes over water and desert or subsonic speeds over populated areas. Either solution could cut deeply into the time-distance economies that could otherwise be gained by flying huge planes faster than the speed of sound...
...archaeological sites. Fire, Martin speculates, was used by the early African hunters to encircle entire herds of animals. With this technique, they destroyed more animals than they needed for food and clothing-a primitive version of overkill. In North America, the musk ox suddenly died out in a large swath across what is now Canada and the U.S. between 10,500 and 12,000 years ago-around the time that the Stone Age hunters were migrating along this route after crossing the Bering Strait. But in northerly areas of Canada and Greenland that were untouched by glaciation yet isolated from...
...summer of 1831, a force of 60 Negroes led by a mad, messianic slave named Nat Turner cut a red swath through the Virginia Tidewater country, slaughtering every white man, woman and child in their path. Although it was suppressed in two days, the rebellion claimed 55 victims. Its leader died on the gallows with 16 of his men. His body was flayed and the flesh rendered into grease; some souvenir-minded Virginian sliced a money purse out of the skin...
Barrier Post. Con Thien is also important because it is likely to be one of the posts along the barrier that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said would be constructed south of the DMZ. Already it is the western terminus of a 600-yd.-wide swath that was bulldozed for eleven miles through the scrub brush and elephant grass earlier in the year to serve as a free-fire zone in which anything that moves is shot at. Though details of the new barrier remain secret, it is assumed that it will be an extension of the present line over...
...long-unawaited debut as a producer, Warren Beatty has searched out the familiar saga of the scruffy, sleazy desperadoes who cut a staccato swath from Iowa to Texas and were ambushed and shot down near Arcadia La., on May 23, 1934. But Producer Beatty and Director Arthur Penn have elected to tell their tale of bullets and blood in a strange and purposeless mingling of fact and claptrap that teeters uneasily on the brink of burlesque. Like Bonnie and Clyde themselves, the film rides off'in all directions and ends up full of holes...