Word: vastly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...found it: 240 miles to the northeast lay a lush valley of orchards and farms fed by the Owens River. Chandler and his friends quietly bought up the water and land rights from the prosperous, unsuspecting Owens farmers. In Washington, the syndicate got the U.S. Forest Service to declare vast portions of the Owens Valley a forest district, thus further weakening the water rights of the farmers. Meanwhile, Chandler & Co. privately bought up 108,000 cheap acres in the desolate San Fernando Valley, just across the Santa Monica Mountains from burgeoning, thirsty Los Angeles...
Then the group tipped its plan to the public: for $22.5 million, the city could build a 233-mile aqueduct from Owens Valley. The voters overwhelmingly approved a bond issue to pay for it. In 1913 the aqueduct was completed, spilled its water into the "vast stubble field" of the San Fernando Valley*-and to ensure the promise that the water would reach Los Angeles, the little city annexed the valley. In the years that followed, the Owens Valley dried out, San Fernando bloomed, and Los Angeles, which still gets 69% of its water from the aqueduct, crept beyond...
...they were milestones too, and history will so record them. West Germany took last week and France will take this week the crucial steps to declare themselves part of a Common Market that will enable these divided lands for the first time in modern history to have a vast, tariff-free trading zone comparable to the U.S., embracing six nations and 160 million people. At the same time (see below), the most powerful of Western European nations, West Germany, voted, to outlaw the return of cartels in favor of free enterprise and competition. It did so largely at the insistence...
Radio astronomy had its beginnings in the U.S., but it has been brought to its highest point in Britain, whose frequently leaden skies handicap optical telescopes. It is still a young science, with surprises coming thick and fast. A vast assortment of radio waves filters down from the sky. Some of the waves come from nearby planets and the sun. Others come from patches of faintly luminous gas, or from the clouds of cold hydrogen drifting among the stars. The new telescope is fitted for recording all these faint whispers on wave lengths from ten centimeters to about 20 meters...
...earth is a minor, insignificant planet in the vast universe, but it is important to its inhabitants, and it is an inconvenient object for them to study. It is too big to be observed from one or a few places. Its surface is covered with rapidly moving fluids. Its atmosphere swirls with big and little storms. Its oceans are stirred by currents. Its solid crust shakes like jelly, and its plastic interior probably flows slowly in largely unknown ways. Influence? from the sun and beyond the sun affect the passive earth. Cosmic rays from the depths of space beat upon...