Don't Learn Grammar
6. COMPARATIVE + THAN
Examples:
Mt. Everest is higher than Mt. Blanc.
Thailand is sunnier than Norway.
A car is more expensive than a bicycle.
Albert is more intelligent than Arthur.
Hurricane makes 2nd landfall in Mexico
TECOLUTLA, Mexico - A sprawling Hurricane Dean slammed into Mexico for the second time in as many days Wednesday and quickly stretched across to the Pacific Ocean, then weakened as it drenched the central mountains with rain that flooded houses along the coast.
Coming ashore with top sustained winds of 100 mph, Dean's center hit the tourism and fishing town of Tecolutla shortly after civil defense workers loaded the last evacuees onto army trucks and headed to inland shelters.
There was no escaping the wide storm's hurricane-force winds, which lashed at a 60-mile stretch of the coast in Veracruz state.
"You can practically feel the winds, they're so strong," Maria del Pilar Garcia said by telephone from inside the hotel she manages in Tuxpan, a town some 40 miles north of where Dean made landfall. "I hope this passes quickly and the rivers don't overflow."
Sounds of crashing metal prompted farmer Moises Aguilar to take a dangerous risk in Monte Gordo, 20 miles down the coast from Tecolutla. At the height of the storm, he dashed outside his house, about 300 yards from the sea, and struggled against the wind as his neighbor's roof ripped apart.
"We've closed the curtains because we don't want to see what is going on out there," Aguilar said, his voice nearly drowned out by another crash. "I think that's more metal roofing from my garage."
At 5 p.m. EDT, Dean was 40 miles west of the inland city of Poza Rica, heading westward at 17 mph.
Mexico had suspended offshore oil production and shut down its only nuclear power plant as tens of thousands headed for higher ground. The state oil company said there was no known damage to any of its production facilities on shore or in the Gulf of Mexico.
Dean struck land Wednesday as a Category 2 storm after regaining some of the force it unleashed on the Yucatan. Its first strike on the peninsula Tuesday as a Category 5 tempest with 165 mph winds was the third most intense Atlantic hurricane ever to make landfall.
Officials said there were no reports of deaths in Mexico directly caused by Dean, which killed 20 people in its earlier sweep through the Caribbean. The toll rose Wednesday when Haitian officials said seven more storm deaths had been reported in remote areas.
Dean's sustained winds dropped to 85 mph, Category 1, shortly after making landfall in late morning, and it was downgraded to a tropical storm by afternoon with winds of near 70 mph.
But the biggest worry was rain. Up to 20 inches of rainfall were expected to swell rivers and soak mountains in a region prone to mudslides and flash floods.
"The water is rising. It's entering the houses now. The children are very frightened," said Maria Luisa Cervantes, who fled her low-lying home with her five children to a shelter in Poza Rica after a flying sheet of metal snapped power cables on to her roof.
The mountain ranges that parallel Mexico's coast are dotted with villages connected by precarious roads and susceptible to disaster. A rainstorm in 1999 caused floods that killed at least 350 people, destroyed tens of thousands of houses and damaged the pre-Hispanic ruins at Tajin.
"We don't want the same thing to happen again and we said, 'Let's get out of here,'" Jesus Vargas, a worker at a tire repair shop, said at a shelter in Poza Rica, a city 30 miles inland from Tecolutla. Poza Rica became the area's command center, with shelters for thousands.
As the storm dissipated, people in Poza Rica ventured out to assess the damage and found it less than feared.
"A lot of homes were left without roofs," said Mariano Gutierrez, the city's civil defense chief. "Many trees fell on public streets and on houses. There are many fallen signs. But so far, thank God, we don't have anything serious."
Producers of corn and sugar cane, however, likely suffered heavy losses in Veracruz, a key agricultural state. Coffee plantations at higher elevations also were threatened by the heavy rains, industry officials said.
Although Dean swept over Yucatan as a rare Category 5 hurricane, which is capable of causing catastrophic damage, the storm's top winds were relatively narrow and appeared to hit just one town: the cruise ship port of Majahual.
The few people who had not evacuated Majahual narrowly escaped with their lives. Dean demolished hundreds of houses, crumpled steel girders, splintered wooden structures and washed away parts of concrete dock that transformed what once was a sleepy fishing village into a top cruise ship destination.
The storm surge covered almost the entire town in waist-deep sea water, said fishermen Jorge Gonzalez, who struggled to keep his dog Camilo above water after taking refuge in a flooded store. "There came a moment when I thought this was the end," he said.
Information still was sparse about dozens of inland Mayan Indian communities where people living in stick huts rode out the storm. President Felipe Calderon flew over Yucatan to survey damage Wednesday.
Greatly weakened from its trip across the peninsula, Dean moved across the southern Gulf of Mexico, home to 100 oil platforms, three major oil-exporting ports and the Cantarell oil field, Mexico's most productive. All offshore production was halted ahead of the storm, reducing daily production by 2.7 million barrels of oil and 2.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas.
The storm surge flooded 70 percent of Ciudad del Carmen, a city of 120,000 where Mexico's state oil company has major installations. The standing water in the low-lying town was three feet deep in many houses, Campeche Gov. Jorge Carlos Hurtado told the Televisa network.
But no deaths were reported, and Pemex said its offshore platforms and loading facilities would emerge without major damage.
Mexico also stopped production and evacuated employees from its only nuclear power plant, Laguna Verde, on the Veracruz coast.
Officials closed archaeological ruins, including the UNESCO world heritage site of El Tajin, 20 miles east of Tecolutla.
The last tourists left Tuesday from the beaches of the Emerald Coast, a getaway area where the storm brought battering waves and an expected storm surge of up to eight feet above normal.
"I wanted to stay, but my wife said no," said Zbigniew Szadkowski, 50, a physics professor from Lodz, Poland.
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14 U.S. soldiers killed in chopper crash
BAGHDAD - Fourteen U.S. soldiers were killed Wednesday when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed during a nighttime mission in northern Iraq, but the military said it appeared the aircraft was lost by mechanical problems and not from hostile fire.
It was the Pentagon's worst single-day death toll in Iraq since January and indicated how forces are relying heavily on air power in offensives across northern regions after rooting out many militant strongholds in Baghdad and central regions.
But extremists are striking back.
A suicide truck bombing against a police station in the northern oil hub of Beiji claimed at least 45 lives — 25 policemen and 20 civilians — amid a series of deadly attacks north of the capital.
The growing bloodshed in the north carries a mixed message. It suggests some success for the U.S.-led security sweeps seeking to reclaim control of areas in and around Baghdad. But it also highlights the apparent resilience of groups such as al-Qaida in Iraq as they retaliate and seek new footholds.
The White House, meanwhile, sought to quiet a political tempest with Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
President Bush, speaking to a veterans' convention in Kansas City, Mo., called al-Maliki "a good man with a difficult job." Bush added: "I support him."
Just hours earlier, al-Maliki lashed out at American criticism over his government's inability to bridge political divisions or stop the violence, warning he could "find friends elsewhere."
The spat appeared to ease, but al-Maliki's sharp words signaled a fraying relationship with his key backer nearly three weeks before Congress receives a pivotal progress report on Iraq.
The UH-60 helicopter went down before dawn in the Tamim province that surrounds Kirkuk, an oil-rich city 180 miles north of Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a military spokesman in northern Iraq.
He declined to be more specific about the location of the crash, but said the facts gathered indicated it was almost certainly due to a mechanical problem and not hostile fire. The final cause remained under investigation, however.
The Black Hawk was one of two helicopters and had just picked up troops after a mission when it crashed, Donnelly said. The four crew members and 10 passengers aboard were assigned to Task Force Lightning, but the military did not release further information about their identities pending notification of relatives.
In Washington, a defense official said the helicopter was from the 25th Infantry Division's combat aviation brigade, based in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.
A U.S. soldier also was killed and three others were wounded Wednesday during fighting west of Baghdad, the military said separately.
The total of 15 was the largest single-day death count since 25 U.S. soldiers were killed around the country on Jan. 20, including 12 who died in a helicopter crash. The deadliest crash occurred Jan. 26, 2005 when a CH-53 Sea Stallion transport helicopter went down in a sandstorm in western Iraq, killing 31 U.S. troops.
The U.S. military relies heavily on helicopters to avoid the threat of ambushes and roadside bombs — the deadliest weapon in the militants' arsenal — and dozens have crashed in accidents or been shot down.
Wednesday's deaths raised to at least 3,722 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The Sept. 15 deadline for the Iraq progress to Congress leaves Bush little time to show that the U.S. troop buildup is succeeding in providing the enhanced security the Iraqi leaders need to forge a unified way forward.
U.S. commanders have warned that extremists would step up the violence this month in a bid to upstage the report, which comes amid a fierce debate over whether Bush should start withdrawing American troops.
A string of attacks hit across northern Iraq.
The deadliest strike blasted a police station in a residential area in Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, according to police and hospital officials.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information, said 25 policemen and 20 civilians were killed. The officials also said 57 civilians and 23 officers were wounded.
Jassim Saleh, 41, who lives about 500 yards from the blast site, said he saw an explosives-laden truck carrying stones ram the police station. But other reports described it as a fuel tanker.
"It was a horrible scene. I can't describe it," he said. "The bodies were scattered everywhere. I was injured in my hand and a leg, but I took three wounded people to the hospital in my car."
Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said the attack bore all the hallmarks of al-Qaida in Iraq, which appears to be trying to retrench in parts of northern Iraq.
"It appears to be something that is consistent with an al-Qaida-related attack," he told AP Radio in an interview.
Later Wednesday, a suicide bomber on a motorcycle set off a blast near four police vehicles parked near grocery stores in Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, killing six people, including two policemen, and wounding 35 people, police said.
A roadside bomb also targeted a police patrol in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown 80 miles north of Baghdad, killing one officer and wounding three people, authorities said.
Iraqi police and tribal officials also reported that a suicide truck bomber struck a joint U.S.-Iraqi outpost near Taji, a town near an air base 12 miles north of Baghdad. They said the attack occurred a day after tribal leaders who have turned against al-Qaida held a recruiting meeting, but no information about casualties was immediately available.
The U.S. military said only that a coalition outpost in the village of Hor al-Bashah had been attacked.
Suicide vehicle bombers have killed more than 2,315 Iraqis this year, according to an AP count. The tally far outpaces the January-August period last year when 441 Iraqi deaths were blamed on suicide bombers aboard vehicles.
Bush says he supports Iraq's al-Maliki
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - President Bush, scrambling to show he still backs embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, offered him a fresh endorsement on Wednesday, calling him "a good guy, good man with a difficult job."
"I support him," Bush said a day after he acknowledged frustration with the Iraqi leader's inability to bridge political divisions in his country. "It's not up to the politicians in Washington, D.C., to say whether he will remain in his position. It is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy and not a dictatorship."
Bush's validation of al-Maliki, inserted at the last minute into his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, stole the spotlight from Bush's attempt to buttress support for the war by likening today's fight against extremism to past conflicts in Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
The president's speech — and another one like it next Tuesday — are intended to set the stage for a crucial report next month on the progress of the fighting and steps toward political reconciliation in Iraq. Democrats in Congress and some Republicans are pressing to start the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Arguing that the buildup of U.S. forces was showing results, Bush said, "Our troops are seeing this progress that is being made on the ground. And as they take the initiative from the enemy, they have a question: `Will their elected leaders in Washington pull the rug out from under them just as they're gaining momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in Iraq?'"
Comparing Iraq with earlier wars, Bush said, "The question now before us comes down to this: `Will today's generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat and do in the Middle East what veterans in this room did in Asia?'"
Bush had appeared on Tuesday to be distancing himself from the Iraqi leader when he said at a North American summit in Canada: "Clearly, the Iraqi government's got to do more." The White House denied Bush was backing away from al-Maliki, but it was lukewarm validation compared with Bush calling al-Maliki "the right guy for Iraq" last November in Jordan.
Al-Maliki, on a trip to Syria, sharply rejected the U.S. criticism. He said no one has the right to impose timetables on his elected government, and that Iraq can "find friends elsewhere." Without naming any American official, al-Maliki said some criticism of him and his government in recent days had been "discourteous."
On Monday, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., urged Iraq's Parliament to oust al-Maliki and replace his government with a more unifying one. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 2008 Democratic presidential front-runner, echoed Levin's call on Wednesday. Clinton said Iraqis should find a "less divisive and more unifying figure."
Iraq is so divided along sectarian and ethnic lines, however, that there's doubt as to whether any other politician could do a better job.
On Tuesday, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said progress on national issues had been "extremely disappointing and frustrating to all concerned."
Slow political progress in Iraq is at the heart of the U.S. military troop buildup Bush announced in January. The president justified sending more troops to increase security and give Iraqi political leaders the breathing space to reconcile.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who addressed the VFW on Tuesday, reacted to Bush's speech, saying there is no military solution to Iraq's problems. He called for increased diplomacy and humanitarian efforts in the region and a "phased withdrawal of our forces that puts real pressure on the Iraqi government to act."
Bush's speech was the first of two speeches on Iraq in the run-up to the Sept. 15 report. Next Tuesday, Bush plans to discuss the war in the context of its implications for the broader Middle East at the annual American Legion convention in Reno, Nev.
"Many are frustrated by the pace of progress in Baghdad, and I can understand this," Bush told an estimated 5,800 VFW veterans and others in a convention hall.
He cited some political progress, saying the Iraqi government has passed about 60 pieces of legislation, and that while it has not passed a law to share oil revenues among the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis, revenues are being dispersed to the provinces. On the military front, Bush boasted that since the beginning of the year, U.S. troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al-Qaida terrorists and other extremists every month.
Bush, who has rejected Iraq-Vietnam comparisons in the past, linked the U.S. pullout back then to the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Foreign policy analysts took issue with Bush.
"The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early," said Steven Simon, a Mideast expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to (Khmer Rouge leader) Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The longer you stay, the worse it gets."
Bush said the history of U.S. conflicts in Asia have shown that critics of the day are often wrong and that withdrawing from war should never be done for short-term gain.
"The ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq," Bush said. "The defense strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbor helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., dismissed Bush's position.
"Today our soldiers remain caught in the middle of a civil war and the president's strategy is still failing to deliver the political solution necessary for Iraq's stability," Reid said. "A change of course in Iraq is long overdue, and Congress will continue to fight for that change in the coming weeks."
China claims U.S. soybeans tainted
BEIJING - China, on the defensive over the safety of its products, lashed out Wednesday at the U.S. by claiming its soybean exports contained pesticides, poisonous weeds and dirt and blaming American manufacturer Mattel Inc. in part for lead tainting that prompted the recall of millions of toys.
China is facing a global backlash following discoveries of high levels of chemicals and toxins in a range of Chinese exports from toothpaste and seafood to pet food ingredients and toys. Beijing has tried to defend its safety record and reassure consumers by highlighting similar problems in other countries.
"Numerous quality problems" have been found with American soybeans, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a notice posted Wednesday on its Web site.
"We've already made exchanges with the United States, demanded an investigation into the cause, and asked that effective measures be taken to improve the situation to avoid similar incidents from happening again," the Chinese watchdog agency said.
One batch of beans in February was found to contain red beans and pesticides that constituted a "great potential hazard to the food safety of Chinese consumers," it said.
Soybeans, which are mainly crushed for oil and used as animal feed, are the biggest single U.S. farm export to China, according to the American Soybean Association. China has bought billions of dollars worth since the current market year began in September.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it had not received any official complaints from China about contaminated soybeans.
"If any of our trading partners has a concern, the normal process with USDA requires that an official notification be made, and none has been raised here," said Matt Herrick, a spokesman for the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service.
He added that the problems over the batch of red beans had been resolved in February.
The accusations against the U.S. come as a growing number of countries are rejecting or recalling Chinese exports.
In the latest development, a distributor announced a recall in Australia and New Zealand of Chinese-made blankets found to contain high levels of formaldehyde, a potentially cancer-causing chemical preservative that gives a permanent press effect to clothes.
Earlier this month, El Segundo, Calif.-based Mattel recalled 19 million Chinese-made items including dolls, cars and action figures. Some were contaminated with lead paint. Others had small magnets that children might swallow.
Two weeks before that announcement, 967,000 Chinese-made plastic preschool toys from Mattel's Fisher-Price unit were recalled because of possible lead-paint hazards.
In an interview published Wednesday, Li Zhuoming, executive vice chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Toy Industry Association, said both Chinese manufacturers and American toy giant Mattel are both responsible for the recalls.
Blame "cannot be pushed to either side," said Li, whose government-backed association is in the southern province of Guangdong, the center of China's vast toy export manufacturing industry.
The region's exporters stand to lose billions of dollars from canceled orders if consumer confidence continues to decline. Sesame Street, Barbie and Polly Pocket products made in the province were among those recalled.
"The producers are responsible because they do not have tight controls over purchasing and production," Li was quoted as saying in the state-run Guangzhou Daily newspaper. "But the buyer Mattel cannot evade responsibility."
Mattel said Wednesday it was trying to improve its product safeguards.
"Safety of children is of the utmost importance to Mattel. We have been working around the clock to improve our system and have already instituted changes in our required procedures," the company said in a statement. "This includes the launch of an improved three point check system, part of which is testing of every production run of finished toys to ensure compliance."
But Li said Mattel neglected to "do its job well in quality inspections." He did not give any details or say how the producers did not follow standards.
Li said profit margins in China's toy industry are low and "it's hard to make money" because of the cost of labor and materials. He warned foreign companies run the risk of getting shoddy products if they demand too low a price from Chinese manufacturers.
"If you give a high price for purchasing, the factories will use high quality raw materials to produce. But if the price is low, they can only use inferior raw materials," said Li.
U.S. safety officials have said no injuries had been reported from any of the products and the broad scope of the recalls was intended to prevent potential problems.
Colleges seek 'authenticity' in hopefuls
If there's a sign of the times in college admissions, it may be this: Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college counselor, tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application — on purpose.
"Sometimes it's a typo," he says. "I don't want my students to sound like robots. It's pretty easy to fall into that trap of trying to do everything perfectly and there's no spark left."
What Goodman is going for is "authenticity" — an increasingly hot selling point in college admissions as a new year rolls around.
In an age when applicants all seem to have volunteered, played sports and traveled abroad, colleges are wary of slick packaging. They're drawn to high grades and test scores, of course, but also to humility and to students who really got something out of their experiences, not just those trying to impress colleges with their resume.
The trend seemingly should make life easier for students — by reducing the pressure to puff up their credentials. But that's not always the case.
For some students, the challenge of presenting themselves as full, flawed people cuts against everything else they've been told about applying to college — to show off as much as possible.
At the other extreme, when a college signals what it's looking for, students inevitably try to provide it. So you get some students trying to fake authenticity, to package themselves as unpackaged.
"There's a little bit of an arms race going on," says Goodman, who is based in Washington. "If I'm being more authentic than you are, you have to be more authentic next month to keep up with the Joneses."
Colleges say what they want is honest, reflective students. As Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania puts it, "everybody's imperfect."
"Since that's true for all (students), those that portray that aspect of themselves are that much more authentic."
How do colleges find authenticity? They look for evidence of interests and passions across the application — in essays, interviews, recommendations and extracurricular activities.
"What we see are the connections," said Christopher Gruber, dean of admission and financial aid at Davidson College in North Carolina. If a student claims working in student government has been a meaningful experience, it's a more credible claim if recommenders have picked on that as well.
"That, in my mind, gives authenticity to an application, when you're reading things more than once," Gruber said.
But in the age of the hyper-achieving student, authenticity doesn't always come easy. Some schools, such as MIT, now specifically ask students to write about disappointment or failure. Many can only come up with a predictable and transparent answer: perfectionism.
Will Dix, a counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, who also spent eight years in the Amherst College admissions office, struggles to persuade students that essays about doubt and uncertainty can be at least as interesting to admissions officers as those with a conclusion that's sweeping but implausibly confident for a 17-year-old.
"No one expects you to solve the mystery of life," Dix says. "I sometimes get in trouble with parents for advising that. They'll say, '(colleges) will think he doesn't know anything.'"
Dix counters by paraphrasing Socrates via Donald Rumsfeld: "The first thing is to know what you don't know."
Susan Weingartner, another former admissions officer and now college counseling director at Chicago's Francis W. Parker School, surveys her juniors about shortcomings and weaknesses. The next year, those now-seniors often are unsure what to write about. She digs up their junior-year responses, where they often find their topic — like one student last year who ultimately wrote a moving essay about his experience being overweight.
Weingartner has noticed more students writing about being gay. Some pull it off, coming across as honest, humble and reflective about the challenges they've faced. But others raise alarm bells by appearing to be traumatized or just looking for sympathy.
The challenge for students is a tough one to get your mind around: If you're authentic, you feel pressure to rise above the fakers. But try too hard to do that, then you just appear to be, well, inauthentic.
Dix summarizes the logical muddle the student is in: "As soon as you ask someone to be authentic it's impossible to be authentic."
Goodman, the independent counselor who advises making a small mistake to look authentic, unapologetically tries to hit the right note of authenticity: be true enough to make the full application consistent and credible, but also give colleges what they want to hear. He compares it to a politician who has learned to give a stump speech that makes every audience feel like it's new.
And he defends the tactic with a point that several admissions deans frankly acknowledge: Colleges are guilty of playing games with authenticity, too.
"They soften their image with pictures of kids under trees, smiling in front of the library, engaging with a professor in a small group discussion," Goodman says. What's the difference between a college trying to look good to students and the reverse?
David Lesesne, dean of admission at Sewanee, a small Tennessee liberal arts college, admits Goodman has a point.
"Students perhaps have become less authentic to themselves, trying to be what colleges want," Lesesne said. But colleges have done the same. Schools "are looking to draw more applicants and students are looking to gain acceptance," he said. "As those numbers grow I think that has caused both sides of the equation to lose a little focus on what should be most important: the match."
