疯了的绿咬鹃对《Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder》的笔记(30)

The moment the bishop had finished his benediction, she squeezed quickly out of her row and darted out the cathedral's side entrance.

An anonymous benefactor had given $15 million to establish an ecological institute at the university.

Living in a trailer in near-poverty, she received word in the mail that her father had died, naming her as the sole beneficiary of his life-insurance policy.

In those financially desperate years, the young couple was saved only by the benevolence of her elderly great-uncle.

Their relations with their in-laws were generally amicable, despite some bickering during the holidays.

Rebecca quickly became enamored of the town's rustic surroundings. its slow pace, and its eccentric characters.

It turned out that the amorous Congressman had gotten his girlfriend a good job and was paying for her apartment.

He had been coming to the house for two years before her brothers realized that he was actually the paramour of their shy and withdrawn sister.

When World War I was over, the French nobility found it impossible to return to their extravagant antebellum way of life.

The more bellicose party always got elected whenever there was tension along the border and the public believed that military action would bead to security.

The belligerence in Turner's voice told them that the warning was a serious threat.

A student rebellion that afternoon in Room 13 resulted in the new substitute teacher racing out of the building in tears.

It took the police hours to pacify the angry demonstrators.

Her grandfather had fought in the Marines in World War II, but in his later years he had become almost a pacifist, opposing every war for one reason or another.

The girls made a pact never to reveal what had happened on that terrifying night in the abandoned house.

She had only three husbands, pace some Hollywood historians who claim she had as many as six.

His growing interest in criminology led him to become a probation officer.

An angry debate over decriminalizing doctor-assisted suicide raged all day in the statehouse.

The muddy tracks leading to and from the cookie jar were enough to incriminate them.

Their failure to find help led to endless and pointless recriminations over responsibility for the accident.

The senate signaled its approbation of the new plan by voting for it unanimously.

When her father died, she thought she would be able to avoid probate, but she wasn't that lucky.

Her unquestioned probity helped win her the respect of her fellow judges.

His wife finally left him, claiming he was a reprobate who would disappear for weeks at a time, gambling and drinking away all his money.

We realized that the situation was grave and that the slightest incident could spark all-out war.

The head of the committee never failed to carry herself with the gravitas she felt was appropriate to her office.

On hot evenings, the town's social life gravitated toward the lakefront, where you could stroll the long piers eating ice cream or dance at the old Casino.

She went back to the soccer team before the knee was completely healed, which naturally aggravated the injury.

Cold compresses can alleviated the pain of the physical injury, but only time could alleviate the effect of the insult.

Her doctor is concerned about the elevation of her blood pressure since her last visit.

The house's deck, supported by cantilevers, jutted out dramatically over the rocky slope, and looking over the edge made him dizzy.

The Puritan elders tried to ban levity of all sorts from the community's meetings, but found it increasingly difficult to control the younger generation.

On Crete they sought out a highly recommended cicerone, hoping to receive the best possible introduction to the noteworthy historical sites.

He would swagger around the apartment entrance with his friends and hector the terrified inhabitants going in and out.

In her new spirit of hedonism, she went out for a massage, picked up champagne and chocolate truffles, and made a date that evening with an old boyfriend.

The guest of honor was a nestor among journalists, and after dinner he shared some of his wisdom with the audience,

When he was single, he had lived a spartan life in a tiny, undecorated apartment with one chair, a table, and a bed.

Even without a microphone, his stentorian voice was clearly audible in the last rows of the auditorium.

She bore the pain of her broken leg with such stoic patience that most of us had no idea she was suffering.

When I knew them they were living a sybaritic existence - hopping from resort to resort, each more splendid than the last - but a year later the money ran out.

Kleptomania leads its sufferers to steal items of little value that they don't need anyway.

She didn't like the word alcoholic being applied to her, and liked dipsomaniac even less.

When the governor started calling for arming his National Guard with nuclear weapons, the voters finally realized they had elected a megalomaniac.

He's a completely unimpressive person, but that doesn't keep him from being an egomaniac.

Analysts are constantly trying to understand the nation's psyche and why the U.S. often behaves so differently from other countries.

In her only psychedelic experience, back in 1970, she had watched with horror as the walls began crawling with bizarrely colored creatures.

Her doctor assumed her stomach problems were psychosomatic but give her some harmless medication anyway.

He's getting medication from a psychiatrist, but it's his sessions with the psychotherapist that he really values.

Although the reception of her plan by the board of directors was enthusiastic, is was months before anything was done about it.

The explosives had been intercepted by police just before being loaded onto the jet.

Her changes in attitude toward him was barely perceptible, and he couldn't be sure he wasn't just imaging it.

She impressed everyone immediately with her intelligence, so they're now highly susceptible to her influence and usually go along with anything she proposes.

He had heard the bad news from the CEO, but when he spoke to his employees he confined his remarks to a few hints that sales had slipped.

The team's brilliant research provided a definitive description of the virus and its strange mutation patterns.

Her ambitions were infinite, but her wealth was finite.

Looking more closely at the research data, he now saw an odd pattern of changes so infinitesimal that they hadn't been noticed before.

His anger was growing as he listened to the conversation, and every so often he would interject a crude comment.

He was last heard of in Bogota, and they conjectured that he had met his end in the Andes at the hands of guerrillas.

The president has been hearing different deficit projections all week from the members of his economic team.

Considering the likely range, trajectory, and accuracy of a bullet fired from a cheap handgun at 1000 yards, the murder seemed incredible.

The spinning wheels were getting no traction on the ice, and we began to slip backward down the hill.

She was forced to retract her comment about her opponent after it was condemned in the press.

No one was looking forward to a protracted struggle for custody of the baby.

Corruption in the army was the country's intractable problem, and for many years all foreign aid had ended up in the colonels' pockets.

She found the atmosphere in the quiet cafe conductive to study and even to creative thinking.

Foretelling the future by deduction based on a political or economic theory has proved to be extremely difficult.

To induce him to make the call we had to promise we wouldn't do it again.

The company began its campaign of seduction of the smaller firm by inviting its top management to a series of weekends at expensive resorts.

In writing the history of the revolution, his challenge was to put all the events of those fateful days in proper sequential order.

Through all her subsequent love affairs, she never stopped thinking about the man who got away.

None of our discussions thus far has been very consequential; next week's meeting will be the important one.

Rattled by the question, his mind went black, and he blurted out a non sequitur that fetched a few laughs from members of the audience.

After a century of Romantic emotion, some composers adopted a more Apollonian style, producing clearly patterned pieces that avoided extremes of all kinds.

The bacchanalian partying on graduation night resulted in three wrecked cars, two lawsuits by unamused parents, and more new experiences than most of the participants could remember the next day,

All she could get from the strange old woman were a few delphic comments that left her more confused than ever about the missing documents.

Only in the tropics did such festivals become truly Dionysian, he said, which was why he was booking his flight to Rio.

Their grandfather was as jovial and sociable as their grandmother was quiet and withdrawn.

His mother's always mercurial temper became even more unpredictable, to the point where the slightest thing would trigger a violent fit.

Now 77, he moved slowly and spoke to the younger lawyers in Olympian tones, but his college friends could remember when he was a brash, crazy risk-taker.

In the 19th century syphilis especially was often fatal, and venereal diseases killed some of the greatest figures of the time.

Successful politicians are good at giving ambiguous answers to questions on difficult issues.

The ambient lighting in the restaurant was low, and there was a bright candle at each table.

He was ambivalent about the trip: he badly wanted to travel but hated to miss the summer activities at home.

The treatment of farm animals generally falls outside the ambit of animal-cruelty laws in the U.S.

Her editor told her the book really needed an epilogue, to tell where each member of the family is today.

The strangler fig begins life as an epiphyte on a tree branch, drops its tendrils to take root in the ground around the trunk, and slowly covers and strangles the tree to death.

The great architect Christopher Wren designed London's majestic St. Paul's Cathedral, the site of his tomb and epitaph: "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice" ("If you seek your monument, look around you").

King Richard I of England earned the epithet "Lionhearted", while his brother, King John, was given the epithet "Lackland".

Hercule Poirot, the detective hero of the Agatha Christie mysteries, is a notorious hypochondriac, always trying to protect himself from drafts.

She had been controlling her hypoglycemia through diet and vitamins, but she now realized she needed to add daily exercise as well.

By the time rescuers were able to pull the boy from the pond's icy waters, hypothermia had reached a life-threatening stage.

The candidate refused to say what she would do if faced with a hypothetical military crisis.

A special weave called thermal weave traps insulating air in little pockets to increase the warmth of long underwear and blankets.

With his college major in electrical engineering, he assumed it would be an easy step to a graduate-school concentration in thermodynamics.

In the 1950s and '60s, anxious American families built thousands of underground "fallout shelters" to protect themselves from the radiation of a thermonuclear blast.

Wood-stove manufacturers complete with each other in their claims of how many British thermal units of heat output their stoves can produce.

She had a polyp removed from her throat, and for two weeks afterward she could only whisper.

As trade between countries increases, there is more need for polyglots who can act as negotiators.

Nylon, a polymer commercially introduced in 1938, can be spun and woven into fabrics or cast as tough, elastic blocks.

My brother-in-law is completely law-abiding, but he's such a nervous type that he's failed two polygraph tests at job interviews.

There was always a primal pleasure in listening to the rain beat on the roof at night and dropping off to sleep in front of the fire.

She announced that she'd be passing out a primer on mutual funds at the end of the talk.

Dr. Leakey sent three young women to work with individual primates: Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with the gorillas, and Birute Galdakis with the orangutans.

Many astronomers think the universe is continuing to evolve from a primordial cloud of gas.

The pool of "a pool of water" and the pool of "a game of pool" are homonyms.

Though she was raised in a small town, she found the city more interesting because its population was less homogeneous.

Arms and wings are homologous structures that reveal the ancient relationship between birds and four-legged animals.

By now the suburb had gotten so homogenized that he couldn't tell the families on his street apart.

The thought of danger he might be facing on the journey makes her uneasy, and she's trying to dissuade him from going.

By now the hikers were completely disoriented, and darkness was falling fast.

His book had been thoroughly discredited by scholars, and his reputation was badly damaged.

Senators are attempting to dislodge the bill from the committee, where the chairman has failed to act on it for five months.

The faculty formed an ad hoc committee to deal with the question of First Amendment rights on campus.

Presidential campaigns have often relied on ad hominem attacks rather than serious discussion of important issues.

The White House chief of staff is a political alter ego, who knows, or should know, who and what the President considers most important.

Although there was never a general declaration of war, the two countries were at war in a de facto sense for almost a decade.

He did something very nice for me years ago, so getting him that job was really a quid pro quo.

When Carl tells us his "reasons" for why he behaved badly, they're nothing but ex post facto excuses for impulsive behavior.

A criminal who commits repeated crimes can often be identified by his modus operandi.

During the budget crisis, the Democratic governor and the Republican legislature established a good working modus vivendi.

He'd gotten tired of his vegetarian guinea pigs and decided he preferred carnivorous pets such as ferrets.

In spite of their frightening appearance, marine iguanas are peaceable herbivorous animals that feed mostly on seaweed.

Their rather odd 12-year-old son kept insectivorous plants in his bedroom and fed them live flies.

One of the hardest parts of dieting is watching skinny people with voracious appetites consume large amount of food without gaining weight.

Countries around the world appealed to all sides of the conflict to stop the carnage of the war in Bosnia.

The news stories about students on Spring Break tend to focus on the carnal pleasures associated with the annual ritual.

For the rest of his life, he would regard his childhood nanny as goodness incarnate.

Even as a child he struck everyone as a reincarnation of his grandfather, not in his features but in his manner and personality.

He scoffed and said no one still gives any credence to the story of the Loch Ness monster.

Because of her past criminal record, the defense lawyers knew she wouldn't be a credible witness.

Thrillers and action movies only succeed if they don't strain our credulity too much.

She claims she made her money on Wall Street just by following the old credo "Buy low, sell high."

The whole family had signed affidavits stating that they believed the will to be valid.

He always found it a struggle to get his most diffident students to speak in front of the class.

Pension-fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility to invest the pension's funds for the sole benefit of those who will receive the pensions.

While working for the CIA he was lured into becoming a double agent, and it seems he paid a high price for his perfidy.

The killer was sentenced to serve three concurrent life terms in prison.

Having spent the weekend going to parties, she had only given the chapter a cursory reading before class on Monday.

Some days he allowed himself to write long discursive essays in his diary instead of his usual simple reporting of the day's events.

Scientists are trying to identify special geological activity that may be a precursor to an earthquake, which will help them predict the quake's size, time, and location.

She always tells her friends that their farm has five kinds of quadrupeds: sheep, goats, cows, horses, and pigs.

She talks a lot about her pedigree, but never mentions that a couple of her uncles spent time in prison.

Her poorly developed verbal ability was the most serious impediment to her advancement.

While politicians endlessly discussed the great issues facing Russia, the Russians worried about such pedestrian concerns as finding enough food, shelter, and clothing.

The stealth technology used on bombers and fighter jets works by deflecting radar energy, making them "invisible".

He likes action movies and going out drinking with friends, but when you get to know him you realize he's basically reflective and serious.

At religious shrines in China, pilgrims may not only genuflect but actually lie down flat on the ground.

She couldn't understand her grandfather's words, but she knew from his inflection that he was asking a question.

In human posterior and dorsal can both refer to the back, but in a fish posterior refers to the tail area.

Though Van Gogh scarcely sold a single painting during his lifetime, he rose to posthumous fame as one of the world's great artists.

The postmodern AT&T building in New York, with the "Chippendale" top that reminds viewers of an antique dresser, aroused a storm of criticism.

In their postmortem discussion of the election, the reporters tried to explain how the polls and predictions could have been so completely wrong.

If you take a Caribbean vacation in December, you end up listening to a lot of Christmas carols played to a calypso beat.

Their six-month camping trip around the country was an odyssey they would always remember.

Most wedding rings today are simple bands of gold, platinum, or palladium.

Critics of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 1990s would perhaps have preferred her to be a Penelope, quietly tending the White House and staying out of politics.

The school's procrustean approach seemed to assume that all children learned in the same way and at the same rate.

A protean athlete, he left college with offers from the professional leagues to play baseball, football, and basketball.

The villagers told him about an aged woman who lived alone in a hut on a nearby mountain, a sibyl who knew the future and would prophesy under the right conditions.

Reporters treated her like a sex symbol, but she lacked the graceful presence and air of mystery of a real siren.

Captain Ahab sees Moby Dick not simply as a whale but as a powerfully malevolent foe.

The boys didn't take the apples with any malicious intent; they were just hungry and didn't know any better.

Captain Bligh of the Bounty may be one of the most unjustly maligned figures in British naval history.

When they finally found the children in the locked cabin, the were pale and malnourished but unharmed.

World War 1 was a great cataclysm in modern history, marking the end of the old European social and political order.

The early Christian catacombs of Rome provide a striking glimpse into the ancient past for modern-day visitors.

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 turned out to be the catalyst for World War I.

After an hour, extreme boredom had produced a catatonic stupor in those of the audience who were still awake.

Macbeth is the ruthlessly ambitious protagonist of Shakespeare's play, but it is his wife who pull the strings.

The guests at the governor's dinner were introduced and seated according to the strict protocol governing such occasions.

A mixture of organic and inorganic substances, such as protein and water, protoplasm is regarded as the physical basis of life.

There was great excitement when, after years of top-secret development, the prototype of the new Stealth bomber first took to the skies.

The antechamber of the lawyer's office was both elegant and comfortable, designed to inspire trust and confidence.

Nantucket Island has hundreds of beautifully preserved houses that antedate the Civil War.

As I remember, she said "My uncle is taking my father, and he's staying overnight," but I'm not sure what the antecedent of "he" was.

When she moved up to join the first-class passengers in the plane's anterior section, she was delighted to recognize the governor in the next seat.

A specialty in orthodontics would require three more years of study after completing her dentistry degree.

The O'Briens remain orthodox Catholics, faithfully observing the time-honored rituals of their church.

For surgery to correct the child's spinal curvature, they were referred to the hospital's orthopedics section.

Even such eloquent writers as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were deficient in skill of orthography.

The school superintendent was stern and not terribly popular, but no one questioned her moral rectitude.

The college is moving to rectify this unfortunate situation before anyone else gets hurt.

After admiring Frank Lloyd Wright's rectilinear buildings for years, the public was astonished by the giant spiral of the Guggenheim Museum.

At the very beginning of the administration, the cabinet secretary had sent out a directive to all border-patrol personnel.

Eugenic techniques have been part of sheep breeding for many years.

The Victorians, uncomfortable with the physical side of human existence, had euphemisms for most bodily functions.

Swept up in the euphoria of a Super Bowl victory, the whole city seemed to have poured out into the streets.

The book was a fond eulogy to the 1950s, when Americans had joined social organizations of all kinds.

For a 10-year-old British boy, boarding school could be a grim dystopia, with no comforts, harsh punishments, and constant bullying.

She managed to deal with her dyslexia through careful tutoring all throughout elementary school.

For decades the dyspeptic columnist served as the newspaper's - and the city's - resident grouch.

The infant was born with minor hip dysplasia, which was fixed by a routine operation.

If the drug users are going to be subject to mandatory sentences, then, a fortiori, drug dealers should be subject to them also.

Most Presidents will come to the a posteriori conclusion that a booming economy is entirely due to their own economic policies.

Her colleagues rejected the a priori argument because it rested on assumptions they felt weren't necessarily true.

According to the broker, they've made a bona fide offer to buy the property.

When he learned the phrase "Carpe diem" in high-school Latin class, he knew he'd found the motto he would live by for the rest of his life.

The best rule to keep in mind when buying anything from a pushcart is :"Caveat emptor."

The police believed they had solved the crime, but couldn't prove their case without the corpus delicti.

The job advertisement asked for an up-to-date curriculum vitae and three recommendations.

Her friends thought it odd that such an equable woman had married a man so moody and unpredictable.

Environmentalists doubt the adequacy of these regulations to protect the wilderness areas.

The news had come as a shock, and it took him several minutes to recover his equilibrium.

She and her friends got together for an equinox party twice a year to celebrate the arrival of the fall and the spring.

The President's first choice for the job turned him down, fearing the Senate hearings would turn into an inquisition into her past.

A new car, a big house, and yearly trips to Europe were among the perquisites that made the presidency of Wyndam College such an attractive position.

With each year the couple became more madly acquisitive, buying jewelry, a huge yacht, and two country estates.

The teachers had grown impatient with having to submit a requisition for even routine classroom supplies.

For the convention's plenary session, five thousand members gathered to hear a star speaker.

On the committee, the two young people provided an energetic complement to the older members.

Years of farming on the same small plot of land had left the soil depleted of minerals.

The professor's autobiography was replete with scandalous anecdotes about campus life in the 1950s.

Americans have resisted using the metric system for years, but are now slowly getting accustomed to a few of the metric units.

The basic meter of the piece was 3/4, but its rhythms were so complicated that the 3/4 was sometimes hard to hear.

Jennifer watched the odometer to see how far she would have to drive to her new job.

Even though one purpose of a tachometer is to help drivers keep their engine speeds down, some of us occasionally try to see how high we can make the needle go.

It seems impossible that so many banks could have gotten into so much trouble if their auditors had been doing their jobs.

With the "surround-sound" systems in most theaters, going to a movie is now an auditory experience as much as a visual one.

Auditions for Broadway shows attract so many hopeful unknown performers that everyone in the business calls them "cattle calls."

The coach spoke to her in a low voice that was inaudible to the rest of the gymnastics team.

A sonic depth finder can easily determine the depth of a lake by bouncing a sound signal off the bottom.

Critics of the health-care plan pointed to its two seemingly dissonant goals: cost containment, which would try to control spending, and universal coverage, which could increase spending.

The resonance of James Earl Jone's vocal tones in such roles as Darth Vader made his voice one of the most recognizable of its time.

My grandfather's dog is always pricking up its ears at some ultrasonic signal, while he himself is so deaf he can't even hear a bird singing.

Modern-day cowboys have been known to use the helicopters to spot errant calves.

Sullivan's increasingly aberrant behavior was leading his friends to question his mental stability.

In the 1993 World Series, the Phillies weren't helped by the erratic performance of their ace relief pitcher, "Wild Thing."

For years her parents had had an erroneous idea of her intelligence, because she didn't begin to talk until the age of six.

Their 88-year-old father reluctantly ceded control over his finances to two of the children this year.

To his friends, Senator Beasley concedes that his reelection campaign was badly run and that he made several damaging errors.

This time Congress refused to accede to the demands of the president, and began cutting the funding for the war.

When Judy bought Christmas presents for all her relatives one year, she claimed that it set no precedent, but it did.

Leaders of many of the newly formed nations of Eastern Europe found that the old governments of their countries had become Augean stables that they must now clean out.

Warren Buffett's extraordinary record of acquiring and investing made him an American Croesus.

Many experts believed that, in invading a Middle Eastern country that hadn't attacked us, we were sowing dragon's teeth.

In a dramatic scene, he crawls up out of the ground coated in black petroleum as though emerging from Hades.

Once again the long Sunday dinner had left most of the family feeling stuffed and lethargic.

Investors are always looking for an investment adviser with the Midas touch, but after a couple of good years each adviser's brilliance usually seems to vanish.

That win turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, since our best players sustained injuries that would sideline them for weeks.

When the power went out in the building, the halls and stairwells were plunged in stygian darkness.

The economic vista for the next two years looks excellent, according to a poll of business economists.

Many financial reports worry about the loss of U.S. economic strength vis-a-vis our principal trading partners.

His followers regarded him as an inspired visionary; his opponents saw him as either a con man or a lunatic.

A mere three weeks after they had started dating, the two were already arguing, and none of us could envisage the relationship lasting for long.

Many experts believe the mental aspect of distance racing is more important than the physical aspect.

There was little prospect of a breakthrough in the negotiations before the elections.

From the perspective of the lowly soldier, the war looked very different.

The prospectus for the mutual fund says nothing about how its profit forecasts were calculated.

As the company directors continued to equivocate, the union prepared to return to the picket lines.

She had told him she wasn't going to see him again, but he couldn't believe her decision was irrevocable.

Our lawyer is advocating a suit against the state, but most of us would rather try some other approaches first.

Whenever the referee at these soccer games makes a questionable call, you hear vociferous protests from half the parents.

My son's school switched to phonics instruction several years ago, and reading achievement in the early grades has been improving.

In almost every Spanish word the pronunciation is clear from the spelling, so the phonetic part of learning Spanish isn't usually a big challenge.

Whenever he needed something calming, he would put on some quiet polyphonic music from the Renaissance and just let the voices waft over him.

In New York she was often dragged off by her boyfriend to downtown jazz concerts, where she struggled to make sense of what sounded like nothing but cacophony.

As soon as the antibiotic entered his system, he imagined he could begin to feel its curative effects.

In recent decades, zoo curators have tried to make the animals' surroundings more and more like their natural homes.

Investigators were looking into the question of how the governor had procured such a huge loan at such a favorable rate.

The job of Dean of Students at any college is no sinecure; the hours can be long and the work draining.

In a medieval siege, an army would surround the perimeter of a city's high walls, denying the population any food from outside as it assaulted the walls with catapults and battering rams.

Years of bad living had filled his teeth with cavities, but it was periodontal disease that finished them off.

She spent her early adult years as a peripatetic musician, traveling from one engagement to another.

Like most good fourth-grade teachers, he had excellent peripheral vision, and the kids were convinced that he had eyes in the back of his head.

The outdoor lights are triggered by a motion sensor that detects changes in infrared energy given off by moving human bodies.

Even squeamish nursing students report becoming desensitized to the sight of blood after a few months of training.

A kind of extrasensory capacity seems to tell some soldiers when danger is near.

Part of what audiences loved about her was the delight she took in the sensuous pleasures of well-prepared food.

For lawyers and politicians, the practice of sophistry from time to time is almost unavoidable.

In Woman of the Year, Katharine Hepburn plays a sophisticated journalist who can handle everything expect Spencer Tracy.

We can't even listen to those sophomoric songs of his, with their attempts at profound wisdom that just demonstrate how little he knows about life.

He had experimented with a number of faiths, starting with Buddhism and ending with a mixture of Eastern and Western thought that could best be called theosophy.

By now his rival for the Senate seat had discovered his Achilles' heel, the court records of the terrible divorce he had gone through ten years earlier.

The Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania are a vacationer's arcadia.

They used to call him a Cassandra because he often expected the worst, but his predictions tended to come true.

They 're imagining a new medical center on a cyclopean scale - a vast ten-block campus with thirty high-rise buildings.

The severe punishments carried out in Saudi Arabia, including flogging for drunkenness, hand amputation for robbery, and beheading for drug trafficking, strike most of the world as draconian.

To an American, these soldiers were like myrmidons, all too eager to do the Beloved Leader's bidding.

During the 1970s and '80s, Japanese carmakers became the nemesis of the U.S. auto industry.

Researchers are working on a kind of Trojan horse that will be welcomed into the diseased cells and then destroy them from within.

The only portage on the whole canoe route would be the one around the great waterfall on our second day.

In those days, a graphic artist who had recently moved to New York would just schlep his portfolio around to every magazine office in the city.

This new evidence comports with everything we know about what happened that night.

At social events she would constantly sneak glances at Alexandra, in quiet admiration of her elegant and graceful deportment.

Around her neck she was wearing the antique French pendant he had given her, with its three rubies set in silver filigree.

She appended to the memo a list of the specific items that the school was most in need of.

She often complained that she felt like a mere appendage of her husband when they socialized with his business partners.

The country has been suspended from the major trade organizations, and the effects on its economy are beginning to be felt.

Educational reform is sometimes viewed as the panacea for all of society's problems.

Pandemonium erupted in the stadium as the ball shot past the goalie into the net.

Most of her students seemed to accept a vague kind of pantheism, without any real belief that God had ever appeared in human form.

The full panoply of a royal coronation was a thrilling sight for the throngs of sidewalk onlookers and the millions of television viewers.

Picked up by the Colorado police for burglary, he's being extradited to Mississippi to face trial for murder.

Economists predict future buying trends partly by extrapolating from current economic data.

These parties are always full of loud extroverts, and I always find myself hiding in a corner with my drink.

Be sure your essays are well focused, with any discussion of extraneous topics kept to a minimum.

They wanted to avoid the kind of smoke detector that uses radioactive materials, so they've installed the photoelectric kind instead.

Photovoltaic technology is being applied to thin film that can produce as much energy as solar cells while using far less semiconducting material.

The idea that light consists of photons is difficult until you begin to think of a ray of light as being caused by a stream of tiny particles.

Sagebrush survives in harsh climates because it's capable of carrying on photosynthesis at very low temperatures.

On his last visit he had noticed that his elderly mother hadn't seemed completely lucid.

A good doctor should always be willing to elucidate any medical jargon he or she uses.

Our professor admitted that he wasn't looking forward to reading through any more of our lucubrations on novels that no one enjoyed.

Architects today often use industrial glass bricks in their home designs, because translucent walls admit daylight while guarding privacy.

Mortality rates were highest among those who lived closest to the plant.

Church attendance in Britain has fallen in recent years, but no one would say the Anglican church is moribund.

For tax purposes, they chose to amortize most of the business's start-up costs over a three-year period.

Our 14-year-old is mortified whenever he sees us dancing, especially if any of his school friends are around.

After a month in a hospital bed, my father required a round of physical therapy to deal with his muscular atrophy.

Opponents claimed that the Defense Department, after years of being given too much money by the Congress, was now suffering from hypertrophy.

The most common of the muscular dystrophies affects only males, who rarely live to the age of 40.

Local naturalists are getting worried about the increasing eutrophication they've been noticing in the lake.

Poets have long been fascinated by the aeolian harp, the only instrument that produces music without a human performer.

Near the club's dance floor, a young rock star was hanging out, the cynosure of a small crowd of admirers.

Action-film scripts usually seem to call for laconic leading men who avoid conversion but get the job done.

Sales-training courses recommend various mnemonic devices as a way of remembering people's names.

The male and female leads in sitcoms often keep their relationship platonic for the first few seasons, but romance almost always wins out in the end.

The Roman poets Catullus and Horace composed wonderful love poems in sapphic verse.

She challenges her students by using the Socratic method, requiring them to think and respond constantly in every class.

The poor boy committed his first solecism immediately on entering by tracking mud over the Persian rug in the dining room.

The general's adherents heavily outnumbered his opponents and managed to shout them down repeatedly.

His novels never really cohere; the chapters always seem like separate short stories.

The police had found him in an abandoned warehouse, and they reported that he was dirty, hungry and incoherent.

A guiding belief behind our Constitution is that individuals have certain inherent rights that can't be taken away.

Their favorite carnival ride was the Round-up, in which centrifugal force flattened them against the outer wall of a rapidly spinning cage.

Caught in the storm by surprise, they took refuge in an abandoned barn.

For his debut on the church's new organ, the organist chose a fugue by J. S. Bach.

The conservatives' subterfuge of funding a liberal third-party candidate in order to take votes away from the main liberal candidate almost worked that year.

The astronomer, the biologist, and the philosopher all try in their own ways to make sense of the cosmos.

New Age teachers propose a cosmology quite unlike the traditional Jewish, Christian, or Islamic ways of viewing the universe.

The large hippie communities of the 1960s and '70s were microcosms of socialist systems, with most of socialism's advantages and disadvantages.

New York, like most cosmopolitan cities, offers a wonderful array of restaurants featuring foods from around the world.

New employees should be especially conscientious about turning in all their assignments on time.

About once every class period, my political-science professor would angrily denounce the nescience of the American public.

For years she had read the Wall Street Journal every morning, looking for prescient warnings about crashes, crises, and catastrophes on the horizon.

When the facts about how the cigarette industry had lied about its practices for decades finally came out, most Americans found the behavior unconscionable.

The architect claims his design for the new Islamic Museum represents a juncture of Muslim and Western culture.

All technical-school students learn that classroom instruction can be a valuable adjunct to hands-on training.

By now she realized there was a serious disjunction between the accounts of his personal life that his two best friends were giving her.

Politics and religion were conjunct in 18th-century England, and the American colonists were intent on separating the two.

The report is a bipartite document, and all the important findings are in the second section.

Representatives of labor and management agreed to have the matter decided by an impartial third party.

In the phrase "the crying child," "crying" is a present participle; in "satisfaction guaranteed," "guaranteed" is a past participle.

Throughout his career on the Supreme Court, he had been a forthright partisan of the cause of free speech.

She considers it her mission to prevent unwanted puppies and kittens from being born.

North American missionaries have been working in the Central America for decades, and you can find their churches in even the most remote jungle regions.

Now in his 70s, he had served over many years as a presidential emissary to many troubled regions of the world.

Even in the Middle Ages, transmission of news of a ruler's death across the Asian continent could be accomplished by sun reflectors within 24 hours.

After returning from the lecture, the felt compelled to contribute to one of the refugee relief agencies.

For repeatedly ignoring important agreements over several years, the two countries were eventually expelled from the trade organization.

As the meeting were on without any real progress being made, she felt impelled to stand and speak.

Her son, knowing how she was repelled by rats and snakes, had started keeping them in his bedroom.

His interest in arachnids began when, as a child, he would watch spiders build their gorgeous webs in the corners of the porch.

The town's old calliope, with its unmistakable sound, summoned them to the fair every summer.

The ancient Greek's love of trees can be seen in their belief that every tree contained a dryad, which died when the tree was cut.

The larger fauna of the country include coyotes, black bear, deer, moose, wild turkey, hawks, and vultures.

Scientists are busily identifying the flora of the Amazon rain forest before the rapid expansion of commercial interests consumes it.

Accomplishing all the things he promised during the presidential campaign will be a herculean task.

In a thundering speech, he predicted that, if the bill was passed, the new policy would open a Pandora's box of economic problems.

Doctors and patients who need to calculate the ideal dosage of the medication, knowing how it can trigger a different dangerous condition, often feel caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

The 15th-century prince Vlad the Impaler is reputed to have inspired the character Dracula, though in fact, evil though Vlad was, Dracula's creator only borrowed his nickname.

The family had fallen into disrepute after the conviction and imprisonment of his father and uncle.

The British imputed motives of piracy to American ships trying to prevent them from interfering with American trade during the War of 1812.

To strengthen the case for the defense, a putative expert took the stand.

For students planning to go to medical school, the university's most popular major is Human Physiology.

Some researchers claimed that Dr. Keller's methodology was sloppy and had led to unreliable conclusions.

By the time she turned 19, she realized she no longer believed in her family's political ideology.

After his heart attack, he actually bought himself a cardiology textbook and set about learning everything he could about his unreliable organ.

The city's park boasts a beautiful parterre with many varieties of roses.

In Carlsbad Caverns National Park there is an astonishing subterranean chamber over half a mile long.

When no one was watching, they dropped their snake in the fifth-grade terrarium, and then waited in the hall to hear the screams.

The roadrunner, although a largely terrestrial bird, can take flight for short periods when necessary.

The coast of Florida has marinas all along it for the use of anything from flimsy sailboats to enormous yachts.

Many of the houses on the Italian Riviera are painted aquamarine to match the Mediterranean.

When he signed on as a mariner, the young Ishmael never suspected that the ship would be pursuing a great white whale.

As a result of the ocean, Canada's Maritime Provinces--New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island--have a late spring but a mild winter.

The pathos of the blind child beggars she had seen in India could still keep her awake at night.

His apathetic response to the victory bewildered his friends.

Her maternal empathy was so strong that she often seemed to be living her son's life emotionally.

After ten years of marriage, their communication is virtually telepathic, and each always seems to know what the other is thinking.

The classic novels Les Miserables and The Count of Monte Cristo portray the terrible conditions in French penal institutions in the 19th century.

Under the flag of truce, the soldier crossed the field with impunity.

In the Middle Ages bands of pilgrims would trudge to distant holy sites as penance for their sins.

The least popular teachers are usually the ones with punitive attitudes, those who seem to enjoy punishing more than teaching.

It's quite possible that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of maternity, and that the painting marks the recent birth of her child Andrea.

Every August all the grown children and their families are summoned to the estate by the matriarch.

Many of the peoples of Ghana in Africa trace their family through matrilineal connections.

The country's political matrix is so complex that no one who hasn't lived there could possibly understand it.

The farming of oysters by the Romans was an early form of aquaculture that has continued to the present day.

Each scientist at the laboratory spent two weeks a year as an aquanaut living in the deep-sea station.

Roman aqueducts were built throughout the empire, and their spectacular arches can still be seen in Greece, France, Spain, and North Africa.

Cities without access to a nearby lake or river must rely on underground aquifers to meet their water needs.

Rice is the main food cereal of Asia, whereas wheat and corn are the main food cereals of the West.

In 1876, as a centennial gift, the French sent to America a massive statue of a robed Junoesque figure representing Liberty, to be erected in New York Harbor.

The stirring, martial strains of "The British Grenadiers" echoed down the snowy street just as dawn was breaking.

Beginning in the 1950s, the little Asian countries of South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore began to display a Promethean energy that would become one of the marvels of the modern world.

After twenty years, many researchers had began to think that defeating the virus was a Sisyphean task that would never succeed.

The titanic floods of 1993 destroyed whole towns on the Mississippi River.

In the corner of the painting, a robust Triton emerges from the sea with his conch to announce the coming of the radiant queen.

The native islanders had even discovered how to vulcanize the rubber from the local trees in a primitive way.