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water skiing

(Encyclopedia)water skiing, sport of riding on skis along the water's surface while being towed by a motorboat. It probably originated on the French Riviera in the early 1920s, and was known in the United States by...

rugby, game

(Encyclopedia)rugby, game that originated (1823), according to tradition, on the playing fields of Rugby, England. It is related to both soccer and American football. The game is said to have started when a Rugby S...

Dasht-e Kavir

(Encyclopedia)Dasht-e Kavir däsht-ēkävērˈ [key], great salt desert, c.500 mi (800 km) long and c.200 mi (320 km) wide, SE of the Elburz Mts., N central Iran. It is a huge basin of interior drainage named after...

Kursky Zaliv

(Encyclopedia)Kursky Zaliv ko͝orˈlănd [key], lagoon, 56 mi (90 km) long and 28 mi (45 km) wide, in Lithuania and Russia. It is separated from the Baltic Sea by Courland Spit, a sandspit c.60 mi (100 km) long and...

Okmok

(Encyclopedia)Okmok, shield volcano on Umnak, SW Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands. Rising to 3,520 ft (1,073 m) and extending over most of NE Umnak, the 22-mi-wide (35-km) volcano contains two 6-mi-wide (10-km) part...

Cam Ranh Bay

(Encyclopedia)Cam Ranh Bay käm rän [key], inlet of the South China Sea, 10 mi (16 km) long and 20 mi (32 km) wide, S Vietnam. It is an excellent harbor linked to the sea by a strait (1 mi/1.6 km wide), and there ...

Amazon, river, Peru and Brazil

(Encyclopedia)Amazon, Port. Amazonas ämäzōˈnəs [key], world's second longest river, c.3,900 mi (6,280 km) long, formed by the junction in N Peru's Andes Mts. of two major headstreams, the Ucayali and the short...

Hellenistic civilization

(Encyclopedia)Hellenistic civilization. The conquests of Alexander the Great spread Hellenism immediately over the Middle East and far into Asia. After his death in 323 b.c., the influence of Greek civilization con...

Landis, Kenesaw Mountain

(Encyclopedia)Landis, Kenesaw Mountain kĕnˈəsôˌ [key], 1866–1944, American jurist and commissioner of baseball (1921–44), b. Millville, Butler co., Ohio, grad. Union College of Law (now Northwestern Univ. ...

MacNeice, Louis

(Encyclopedia)MacNeice, Louis məknēsˈ [key], 1907–63, Irish poet b. Belfast. Educated at Oxford, he became a classical scholar and teacher and later was a producer and traveled the world for the British Broadc...