Word: winnow
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...strove one day last week to save what passes for peace in the Middle East. From the Jordan delegates sitting on his left and the Israelis on his right came a steady barrage of accusations and complaints. Commander Hutchison, chairman of the U.N. Mixed Armistice Commission, tried patiently to winnow the facts from the frenzy. The problem was to fix responsibility for the cold-blooded massacre of eleven Israelis at Scorpion's Pass (TIME, March...
Booby-Trapped. One answer to all this, says I.P.I., is to maintain a "Russian desk," staffed with experts who know Russia intimately and whose job is to winnow all Russian publications (including correspondents' censored dispatches) for the significance that lies behind the distorted facts. For, concludes I.P.I., "there is no 'news' of the Soviet Union as such, but only information indeterminate in quantity and undigested in character." Only experts, trained as journalists, can digest it and tell newspaper readers what the loaded story really means...
Teachers were willing to admit that the tests could winnow out the bright and the quick. But they still did not pick out the hard-working or the talented. They gave no quarter to the late bloomers, made no allowances for children who happened to be overwrought during the exam. Cried one parent last week: "The test gets the child so worked up. My Patricia went out of the house white as a sheet, and couldn't eat any breakfast." Added another: "It's terrible to think that what a boy does at eleven will govern his whole...
...Sample from a recent select-the-best phrase question: "In trying to renew old recollections, we cannot unfold the whole web of our existence; we must 1) winnow the wheat from the chaff, 2) pick out the single threads, 3) scrap the flotsam and jetsam, 4) isolate the relevant factors, 5) distinguish between the warp and the woof." Students who ticked off No. 2 got it right...
...movement to winnow out "subversive teachers" from New York State schools scored a success on March 30, when the Assembly passed the Feinberg Bill by a vote...