Word: smog
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1990
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With the nation's big cities ridden by crime, smog and traffic snarls, Americans must be fleeing to the serenity of the countryside, right? Wrong. Preliminary statistics from the 1990 census indicate that over the past decade the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s was reversed. Rural areas may have lost as many as 1.4 million people, far more than demographers had predicted. By contrast, metropolitan areas along the California and Florida coasts have grown sharply...
...Scholastic staffers sifting through the outgoing mail sometimes gulped at the messages. "Dear Whoever, My life is full of danger in this small town," wrote a 13- year-old Iowa boy. A young Californian confided that "Los Angeles is a great place if you happen to like earthquakes and smog" and added, "Every one of us lives their own hell from day to day." On the brighter side, there were mash notes: "If you're a girl, send me a picture of you. The girls in our school are immature and physically repulsive." And good old American inquisitiveness popped...
United Parcel, with headquarters in Greenwich, Conn., has spent a year testing 10 natural gas-fuel trucks in Brooklyn, N.Y. Reduction of smog-causing gases has been so effective in those vehicles that the company is preparing to make sample conversions by early 1991 in its 600-vehicle fleet in Manhattan. They will come none too soon; New York City has the second worst air in the U.S., after Los Angeles...
South Central Los Angeles looks a lot like the rest of the city -- smog- filtered sunlight, palm trees, pastel-colored stucco apartments. It doesn't look like a ghetto. The gang writing on cement walls, criminal samizdat that cops read for news of a planned attack with the expert alacrity of CIA cryptologists, is fastidiously printed; it bears little resemblance to the loopy graffiti of New York City...
Aesthetes may complain that Barcelona lacks the glittering royal art galleries and grandiose vistas of London, Madrid or Paris and that its geography, a natural amphitheater framed by mountains and sea, produces a smog worthy of Los Angeles. Some may even view as excessive chauvinism the natives' insistence on speaking Catalan rather than Spanish. But those who take the time will discover in this most Mediterranean of cities a rare personality, fanatically avant-garde yet obsessively preservationist. First century Roman baths are being excavated amid the twisting streets of its dense Gothic quarter. The famous Picasso Museum is housed...