170. Margaret Mead, the best-known anthropologist of the twentieth century, helped shape public opinion in such fundamentally important areas as attitudes toward children and families and the relative merits of competition and cooperation.
171. One of the primary distinctions between our intelligence and that of other primates may lie not so much in any specific skill as in our ability to extend knowledge gained in one context to new and different ones.
172. Introduced by Italian merchants resident in London during the sixteenth century, life insurance in England remained until the end of the seventeenth century a specialized contract between individual underwriters and their clients, typically ship owners, overseas merchants, or professional moneylenders.
173. The widely accepted big-bang theory holds that the universe began in an explosive instant 10 to 20 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since.
174. Often major economic shifts are so gradual as to be indistinguishable at first from ordinary fluctuations in the financial markets.
175. Experts estimate that ten times as much petroleum exists in such sources as tar sands, heavy oil, and perhaps even shale as conventional reservoirs.
176. For at least two decades before the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo died in 1770, he had been the most admired painter in Italy.
177. In her 26 years in the forests of Gombe, Jane Goodall collected data that proved that chimpanzees exhibit the kind of curiosity by which new patterns of behavior and expression can be passed on from one to another by imitation and practice.
178. Last week local shrimpers held a news conference to take some credit for the resurgence of the rare Kemp's ridley turtle, saying that their compliance with laws requiring turtle-excluder devices on shrimp nets is protecting adult sea turtles.
179. Unlike the independent candidacies of George Wallace in 1968 and John Anderson in 1980, H. Ross Perot's independent run for the presidency in 1992 arose not from an unsuccessful effort to gain a major party nomination but from a desire to establish a viable third party in American politics.
180. Noting that the Federal Reserve had raised a key short-term interest rate again last month, analysts said that they expected orders for durable goods to decline soon because rising interest rates make buying on credit more expensive.
181. The number of people flying first class on domestic flights rose sharply in 1990, doubling the increase of the previous year.
182. The organic food industry has organized a successful grassroots campaign—using Web sites, public meetings, and mass mailings—that has convinced the Department of Agriculture to change the proposed federal regulations for organically grown food.
183. Despite recent increases in sales and cash flow that have propelled automobile companies' common stocks to new highs, several industry analysts expect automakers, in order to conserve cash, to be more conservative than they have been in setting dividends.
184. Japan's abundant rainfall and the typically mild temperatures throughout most of the country have produced a lush vegetation cover and, despite the mountainous terrain and generally poor soils, have made it possible to raise a variety of crops.
185. Because the budget package in Congress promises a combination of higher taxes and reduced spending that may slow economic growth, many in the credit markets wonder whether the Federal Reserve will compensate and help the economy by keeping interest rates low, or perhaps even by pushing them lower.