Word: verbal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...past five years, and his finger pointing. "Sarcastic, belittling, patronizing," declared John Brademas, president of New York University and formerly a leading education advocate in Congress. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig notes that the number of students scoring above 450 in math and 500 in verbal on SATs has jumped 18% since 1983. "If this was the steel industry and we had an 18% gain in productivity, it would make headlines," says Honig. The downbeat report, he adds, "misleads the public...
...more rankling, look like fun. There is a price. His books sometimes show signs of having been written with one eye on an in-flight movie. His syndicated column occasionally follows the hasty recipe, ad hominem, mix and half-bake. Yet he possesses genuine literary gifts and first- strike verbal capabilities that are devastating in debate...
...require a standardized written exam as part of a "readiness assessment" that determines who passes and who fails kindergarten. Testing of various kinds is prevalent in three-fourths of the other states for evaluating aspiring first- graders. In Minneapolis, for example, kindergartners must answer a set of 56 verbal questions put to them on a one-to-one basis (last year 13% failed). Many Connecticut and Michigan youngsters face similar tests. But only Georgia asks all its tots -- in both public and private schools -- to sit down, No. 2 pencils in hand, and fill in the blanks...
...inventing or redefining terms. He does not bully the reader with tortuous grammar, or leave gaps and ambiguities in his logic as examples of the defects in language itself; his sentences are clear and simple. "There is a lightening of language," Calvino posits, "whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency...
...play of words that cannot be reconstructed into image, or of an interpretative unity. Calvino suggests, however, that these exceptions surreptitiously conform to the rules they appear to violate: for example, he discovers a "lightness of thoughtfulness" in the abstract descriptive prose of Henry James, despite James' verbal density...