186. Laos has a land area comparable to that of Great Britain but a population of only 4 million people, many of whom are members of hill tribes ensconced in the virtually inaccessible mountain valleys of the north.
187. United States Senator Daniel Inouye was appointed to several posts within the Democratic party during his first term, including assistant majority whip and vice-chair of the Democratic Senatorial Committee.
188. Neuroscientists, having amassed a wealth of knowledge over the past twenty years about the brain and its development from birth to adulthood, are now drawing solid conclusions about how the human brain grows and how babies acquire language.
189. Less successful after she emigrated to New York than she had been in her native Germany, photographer Lotte Jacobi nevertheless earned a small group of discerning admirers, and her photographs were eventually exhibited in prestigious galleries across the United States.
190. The thirteen original British colonies in North America, some formed as commercial ventures, others as religious havens, each had a written charter that set forth its form of government and the rights of the colonists.
191. The loan company announced it would soon lend money to borrowers with proven records of not paying back their loans on time, a group, collectively known as the subprime lending market.
192. In 1988, the Council on Economic Priorities began publishing Shopping for a Better World, whose thesis was simple: consumers have the power to change companies by the simple expedient of refusing to buy.
193. New equipment and other improvements reduced the amount of time—from eleven hours in 1982 to six in 1988—workers needed to produce a ton of steel.
194. Whereas the honeybee’s stinger is heavily barbed and cannot be retracted from the skin, the yellow jacket’s stinger is comparatively smooth, and can therefore be pulled out and used again.
195. (GWD-7-Q13) Like the grassy fields and old pastures that the upland sandpiper needs for feeding and nesting when it returns in May after wintering in the Argentine Pampas, the bird itself is vanishing in the northeastern United States as a result of residential and industrial development and of changes in farming practices.
196. (T-9-Q26) There are several ways to build solid walls using just mud or clay, but the most extensively used method has been to form the mud or clay into bricks, and, after some preliminary air drying or sun drying, to lay them in the wall in mud mortar.
197. (GWD-8-Q20) The systematic clearing of forests in the United States created farmland (especially in the Northeast) and gave consumers relatively inexpensive houses and furniture, but it also caused erosion and very quickly deforested whole regions.
198. (GWD-1-Q23) Past assessments of the Brazilian rain forest have used satellite images to tally deforested areas, where farmers and ranchers have clear-cut and burned all the trees, but such work has not addressed either logging, which removes only selected trees, or surface fires that burn down individual trees but do not denude the forest.
199. (GWD5-Q4) The Quechuans believed that all things participated in both the material level and the mystical level of reality, and many individual Quechuans claimed to have direct contact with the latter by means of an ichana (dream) experience.
200. (T-3-Q14) A scrub jay can remember when it cached a particular piece of food in a particular place, researchers have discovered, and tends not to bother recovering a perishable treat stored long enough to have rotted.