Word: topsoil
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade factory. Between the buildings green lawns grow in topsoil trucked in from Algiers. In its three staff dining rooms white-jacketed waiters serve meals worthy of a three-star Paris restaurant, from pate to four kinds of cheese...
...Perkins' day, medical charlatanism has made great strides, notes Dr. William H. Gordon in the medical magazine GP. Frequently the quackery is keyed to news of medical progress. Use of radioactive isotopes in medicine, for example, inspired some Comanche County, Texas entrepreneurs to sell packages of their local topsoil, which contained faint traces of uranium. Patients were supposed to sit with their feet in the topsoil for relief of rheumatism and other ailments...
...Black topsoil, rolling 350 miles west and south of Buenos Aires, has nourished Argentina's agricultural past; but for its heavy-industrial future, Argentina is looking toward continent's-end Patagonia. Outwardly, Patagonia seems little more than 300,000 sq. mi. of wasteland lashed by 60-m.p.h. antarctic winds, blinded by spinning dust devils, cursed by endless drought that is relieved by only 5 in. of rain a year. Its 500,000 inhabitants earn a rugged living by running 18 million sheep and 1,500,000 goats on scrub grass...
...with the brains to take advantage of Ecuador's rich soil, it brought the boom. As the dread Panama disease, a killing blight, ravaged older banana plantations through Central America, Galo Plaza spent every dollar his government could spare to open up the virgin coastal plain, where rich topsoil lay three feet thick. In ten years Ecuador built 1,600 miles of road. United Fruit opened a 7,000-acre plantation. Poor settlers from the highlands joined in and got 124 acres of government land free. Now Ecuador is the world's biggest banana exporter, with shipments...
...stone and earth crashed into the caverns, the three tunnel mouths spouted out flying stone and dust like miniature volcanoes. Screaming men and women ran bloodily from the caves, dragging with them other workers who had been knocked unconscious. Groping through the thick fog, slipping on the wet clay topsoil, they screamed for help. The village priest and the schoolteacher spread the alarm, and fare brigades soon arrived from the Belgian cities of Hasselt and Tongres. and from the nearby Dutch city of Maastricht. They saw with horror that the hill was still moving convulsively, with craters 10 ft. wide...