Word: barren
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...Islands, volcanic juts on the Antarctic fringe of the Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles southeast of the Cape of Good Hope and even more desolate than Tristan. Civilization had found a job for which Tristanites were peculiarly fitted; they would show South African Navymen how to stay alive on barren land in the long, bone-chilling, mid-ocean winter...
...Chileans had it easiest. Their shortend stretch-204 miles out of a total of 559-rises gently from the sea through nitrate fields to the border at Socompa. But the Argentines had to push up through the barren, eroded land that the early Spaniards called "the country of desperation and death." Through the red-rock canyon of Quebrada del Toro, a 14,000-foot-high waste of salt desert, and along windswept slopes the construction crews fought their way, cutting 23 tunnels through the Andean rock and throwing bridges across 36 chasms. In summer they battled thirst, in winter...
...wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica (1910). This book approached mathematics not as a science of magnitude but as a science of deduction; it undertook to replace two existing sciences-logic and mathematics-by one new science, mathematical logic. Because Whitehead felt that "conventional English is the twin sister to barren thought" and that words are coated with ambiguities, he developed a language of mathematical symbols to express logical truths. This kept the Principia off bestseller lists, but not off the St. John's list of the 100 Great Books...
Technically, Waziristan is a country. It is also the scene of one of Britain's most dogged (and futile) essays in civilization. A ragged parallelogram of 5,200 square miles of barren territory, it is tucked away at the southwest corner of the North West Frontier, at a point where the Punjab and Kashmir reach out toward Afghanistan and Baluchistan. It is inhabited by various tribes who, finding their land too poor for a decent standard of living, have for years supported themselves by raids on their less impoverished neighbors...
Shocked at the discovery that the Navajo Indians face starvation and even death this winter (TIME, Nov. 3), the nation suddenly began sending them relief. The American Red Cross appropriated $100,000 for "immediate stopgap aid," rushed disaster relief workers to the barren Navajo country. A Navajo Trail Relief Caravan Association gathered up food and clothing in California, started seven truckloads on the way to the reservation. Utah citizens helped too. Congress, conscience-stricken after neglectful years, voted a $2,000,000 relief fund for the Navajo and Hopi tribes...