Word: slides
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ruling Liberal Democrats slide back to victory...
Soviet-American relations have been on a downward slide since 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate ?an event that some Soviets still regard as part of a sinister plot by American hard-liners to unseat a President who then favored a policy of accommodation with the U.S.S.R. Those relations fell off a cliff when Jimmy Carter became President. Looking back over the past 3½ years, Soviets launch into a long, angry, but obviously one-sided litany of grievances: the President's letter to dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov barely three weeks into Carter's presidency; Carter's ill-fated...
Ironically, the slide occurred at a time when teachers were getting far more training than ever before. In the early 1900s, few elementary school teachers went to college; most were trained at two-year normal schools. Now a bachelor's degree from college is a general requirement for teaching. Today's teaching incompetence reflects the lax standards in many of the education programs at the 1,150 colleges around the country that train teachers. It also reflects on colleges generally, since teachers take more than half their courses in traditional departments like English, history and mathematics...
...Interest rates continued to slide almost as rapidly as they went up last winter and early spring. Major banks reduced their prime rate on business loans to 13%, far below the unheard-of peak of 20% reached in April. Fundamentally, that is a note of cheer: the decline will make it easier for consumers to finance purchases of houses and cars and for businesses to build new plants. But not much easier: the rates are still higher than any reached before 1979. And the speed and depth of the drop shows how abruptly the high rates choked off the business...
...different from the last one, which started in 1973. Aggravating the earlier plunge was a buying spree by businesses during the boom just prior to the recession. When the economy started to grow stagnant, firms were suddenly forced to cut back inventories, thus causing the economic avalanche. The present slide has been triggered almost exclusively by a cutback in consumer spending. Sometime in late winter Americans simply closed their wallets and snapped shut their purses. Sales of everything from autos and home appliances to airline tickets have dropped sharply...