Word: progresses
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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This demographic time bomb is ticking away slowly inside the Soviet economy. Further industrialization is increasingly vital to Soviet economic progress; most factories, however, are in the western part of the country, while in largely undeveloped Central Asia overpopulation is accompanied by underemployment. So far, Soviet economic planners have not come up with a way of moving either the industrial base or the growing work force so as to bring them together...
...recent months Soviet leaders have had a hard time pretending they were moving. After more than half a century of often spectacular progress in building heavy industry, the Soviet economy has slipped into a serious slump. While growth zipped along at 5.3% annually from 1966 to 1970 and was a strong 7.2% as late as 1973, it fell to an almost invisible .7% last year. Steel production, always regarded as a major sign of a healthy Soviet economy, declined by 1.6% last year - the first drop since World...
...Soviets have not kept up with progress in the petroleum industry, a situation exacerbated by Western trade restrictions, like those imposed by the U.S. after the Afghanistan invasion. Vladimir Dolgikh, the Communist Party secretary for heavy industry, admitted last January that the only way to realize ambitious plans for developing energy sources in Siberia would be "to introduce new equipment, improve technology and raise labor productivity...
Most of the best and heavily supported research is done under military auspices, which means that the work is kept tightly under wraps. For this reason, Western analysts long could only guess about Soviet progress in, say, lasers and electron beams. Both of these technologies are essential to achieving a key Soviet defense goal: an antisatellite satellite. After word that the Soviets had developed such a killer satellite reached Washington, the Carter Administration quietly ordered the Pentagon to step up its own studies of these devices...
...because they got respectable grades and a diploma but cannot fill in job application forms correctly. Experts confirm that students today get at least 25% more As and Bs than they did 15 years ago, but know less. A Government-funded nationwide survey group, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reports that in science, writing, social studies and mathematics the achievement of U.S. 17-year-olds has dropped regularly over the past decade...