Word: millenniums
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Compared with the rest of the world, industrial nations enjoy a lavish standard of living. The affluence generated by industrialism looks even more impressive when compared with living standards that prevailed throughout most of the millennium now drawing to a close. Goods that would once have been considered luxuries have become staples of everyday consumption. Medicine has reduced infant mortality and conquered many of the diseases that formerly struck down people in their prime. A vast increase in life expectancy dramatizes the contrast between our world and that of our ancestors in the distant past...
...important sect or cult has been born for decades. The colorful creeds from olden times are tiny or extinct, among them Baha'i, One-Faith, Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Hemlockite death cult. Of the assorted new revelations that were announced toward the end of the second millennium, only Mormonism maintains global reach, but it remains relatively small. On the other hand, the ancient forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, once considered near- cults in the U.S., have become sizable and respectable there...
Today's world is measured in light-years and Mach speed, and sheathed in silicon and alloy. In the world of 999, on the eve of the first millennium, time moved at the speed of an oxcart or, more often, of a sturdy pair of legs, and the West was built largely on wood. Europe was a collection of untamed forests, countless mile upon mile of trees and brush and brier, dark and inhospitable. Medieval chroniclers used the word desert to describe their arboreal world, a place on the cusp of civilization where werewolves and bogeymen still lunged...
Thus there was little panic, not even much interest, as the millennium approached in the final months of 999. For what terrors could the apocalypse hold for a continent that was already shrouded in darkness? Rather Europe -- illiterate, diseased and hungry -- seemed grimly resigned to desperation and impoverishment. It was one of the planet's most unpromising corners, the Third World...
...millennium...