Word: ton
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...beneath those miracle plants the precious mantle of topsoil is washing away, some 13 tons per acre every year. The experts say a tolerable limit is a five-ton loss. So if nothing more is done, in less than 50 years the great resource on which rests our national strength and confidence will begin to ebb. And we could lose more than that, says Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. A thousand years ago, the Mayan civilization in the Guatemalan lowlands disappeared in a few decades after 17 centuries of development. Modern analysis found that this agriculture-intensive...
...tide in the rough waters of the North Sea, it looked like a dead whale floating on its belly. But the Mont Louis, a 4,210-ton French container ship that sank on Aug. 25 after colliding with a German passenger ferry eleven miles from the Belgian coast, was very much alive with frenzied activity. Three tugboats buzzed noisily around it, while black dinghies delivered wet-suited divers. The focus of their labors: 360 tons of uranium hexafluoride, raw material from which nuclear fuel is made and which is not a severe radiation danger. Three barrels, however, contained uranium that...
...near the continent's southern tip, the Chilean government urged private industry to become involved in defense contracting. One firm that responded was Explosives Industrials Cardoen, a small company that was then producing explosives for use in mining. After developing an armored personnel carrier based on the 24.5-ton Swiss-made Mowag, Cardoen started building a 500-lb. cluster bomb. Before reaching the ground, it releases up to 300 bomblets that can cover an area the size of ten football fields...
...nearly a second, sulked on the victory stand after winning a gold in the 200 meters. This was Rick Carey of the U.S., who had cockily promised a world record, and then failed to swim it by almost a second and a half, which is to say by a ton or so. On the way out of the stadium he did not wave at the crowd or acknowledge the cheers of his teammates. He got booed. Carey later issued a written apology to fans. A few days later he got another gold, in the 100 meters, and though this...
Below all the other layers of workers come the pepenadores, the rubbish pickers, who swarm like rats through the reeking mountains of garbage in the main city dump, the Santa Fe. There are about 2,500 regulars there, roughly one for each ton of trash dumped daily. By picking through the pile for resalable bits of metal or plastic, they, hope to earn enough to survive. Says Pablo Téllez Falcón, 45, the chief of the dump: "They regard us as the shabby people who work in the slime with a bottle of tequila in the back...