Word: ju
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Five years ago, Ju Songzhen was an agricultural worker in a village in Shanxi province. He had a reputation as a can-do fellow, but, like his neighbors, he was earning not much more than $30 a month. Then, in response to a daring new government policy that encouraged country people to develop their own moneymaking projects, Ju began building and marketing metal frames for the battery chargers used by local coal miners. Soon demand for his high-quality but economical merchandise started to snowball. Customers multiplied; orders boomed. By 1984, thanks to his success in manufacturing a product that...
...system. He purchased three bicycles and four motorbikes. He ordered a Japanese-made van equipped with air-conditioner and stereo. Before long, his small home was so crowded with material possessions that he had a new two-story house built. Even then, enough cash was left over to enable Ju and his wife to take long vacations, flying around the country and staying in the best hotels...
During World War II, the Germans built an experimental Junkers JU-287 jet bomber with wings that raked sharply forward. The plane flew well in tests. But once the sound barrier was broken in 1947, the design presented a problem: forward-swept wings tore away from the fuselage at supersonic speeds, and strengthening the wings with steel or aluminum made the craft unacceptably heavy. Now, newly developed graphite-epoxy composites can produce a wing stronger than steel and up to 45% lighter. These materials form the skin of the X-29A's wings...
Around the fringe of the dusty, sprawling Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez (pop. 625,000) rise row after row of corrugated-steel and beige brick structures bearing the logos of RCA, General Electric and GTE. Inside a Honeywell building, hundreds of women wearing red smocks hunch over an assembly line as they put together tiny electronic devices. Ten million parts a month are turned out here and then trucked across the border to U.S. plants, which ship them off to be used in Apple computers, Xerox copiers and instrument panels for the space shuttle...
...decades ago, the land around Ciudad Juárez, situated just south of El Paso, Texas, was occupied by tumbleweeds, a few head of cattle and a little cotton. But in 1965 the Mexican government decided to stimulate jobs in the northern region by relaxing its laws against foreign ownership of factories and reducing import taxes on raw materials. This has enabled U.S. companies to build so-called twin plants, one north of the border and the other south. A typical company manufactures its materials in the U.S. plant, sends them to the Mexican factory for assembly and then returns...