Word: sweeping
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With such double-edged greetings blazoned on placards, the people of Burma last week greeted Tourist Chou En-lai to their shores. It was a cruel come-uppance for the Red Chinese Premier, whose sweep through neutralist Asia during the past few weeks had been marked throughout by the smiling affability of a hungry cat in a fish store. India had smiled right back at him, as had Cambodia. On his previous tour to Burma a year ago, Chou had been greeted by well-organized but nonetheless enthusiastic crowds. But since the Red Chinese forays across Burma's border...
...weather-adage type is at least as old as the Bible ("The north wind driveth away rain"; Proverbs 25:23), and knowledge of atmospheric behavior has accumulated slowly through the centuries. In the early 19th century, for instance, it was known that large areas of low atmospheric pressure sweep across the North Temperate Zone roughly from west to east and are apt to bring stormy weather. But this knowledge was useless for weather forecasting. The stormy "lows" or "cyclones"* move much faster than letters carried by stagecoaches, so in those days countries lying in their path could not be warned...
...About the time of World War I, Professor Vilhelm Bjerknes of Norway and his son Jacob decided that the fractious cyclones, though they may be 1,000 miles across, are only minor bit-players in the weather drama. The leading players are enormous masses of cold, dry air that sweep down from the polar regions at irregular intervals. The Bjerknes theory, emphasizing fronts and air masses rather than cyclones, lit up meteorology like a new sun rising, and upgraded it into a more exact science. It is still the basis of the familiar newspaper weather maps...
...tepid water of the Olympic swimming pool, where the Australians turned out to be not only dangerous, as expected, but downright homicidal to U.S. hopes. The U.S. woman most dramatically in the swim was the Walter Reed Swim Club's Shelley Mann, who led a U.S. sweep of the 100-meter "butterfly. U.S. men, expected to score heavily, were swamped in the foam of their hustling hosts. Murray Rose, a 17-year-old Aussie who tries a seaweed diet and even hypnotism to help him along, sliced through the water as if a shark were snapping at his toes...
...performed a final running full-twisting forward one-and-a-half somersault that was good enough to add the platform title to her springboard victory and make her the first diver ever to win both titles in two Olympics. This was slim pickings, indeed, compared to Russia's sweep of 11 of the 17 gold medals in gymnastics, three of which were won by lovely Larisa Latynina...