Almost 90 per cent of the world's students are now affected by nationwide school closures ______ the spread of coronavirus disease.

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 It is much more difficult to speak English than to speak French.

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 We almost gave up hope. At that time, the rescue party arrived.

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 In the last third of the nineteenth century, a new housing form was quietly being developed. In 1869 the Stuyvesant considered New York's first apartment house was built on East Eighteenth Street. The building was financed by the developer Rutherfurd Stuyvesant and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Each man had lived in Paris, and each understood the economics and social potential of this Parisian housing form. But the Stuyvesant was at best a limited success. In spite of Hunt's inviting façade, the living space was awkwardly arranged. Those who could afford them were quite content to remain in the more sumptuous, single-family homes, leaving the Stuyvesant to young married couples and bachelors.

 The fundamental problem with the Stuyvesant and the other early apartment buildings that quickly followed, in the 1870's and early 1880's was that they were confined to the typical New York building lot. That lot was a rectangular area 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep – a shape perfectly suited for a row house. The lot could also accommodate a rectangular tenement, though it could not yield the square, well-lighted, and logically arranged rooms that great apartment buildings require. But even with the awkward interior configurations of the early apartment buildings, the idea caught on. It met the needs of a large and growing population that wanted something better than tenements but could not afford or did not want row houses. So while the city's newly emerging social leadership commissioned their mansions, apartment houses and hotels began to sprout in multiple lots, thus breaking the initial space constraints.

 In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, large apartment houses began dotting the developed portions of New York City, and by the opening decades of the twentieth century, spacious buildings, such as the Dakota and the Ansonia finally transcended the tight confinement of row house building lots. From there it was only a small step to building luxury apartment houses on the newly created Park Avenue, right next to the fashionable Fifth Avenue shopping area.

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 Stars have been significant features in the design of many United States coins and their number has varied from one to forty-eight stars. Most of the coins issued from about 1799 to the early years of the twentieth century bore thirteen stars representing the thirteen original colonies.

 Curiously enough, the first American silver coins, issued in 1794, had fifteen stars because by that time Vermont and Kentucky have joined the Union. At that time it was apparently the intention of mint officials to add a star for each new state. Following the admission of Tennessee in 1796, for example, some varieties of half dimes, dimes, and half dollars were produced with sixteen stars.

 As more states were admitted to the Union, however, it quickly became apparent that this scheme would not prove practical and the coins from 1798 were issued with only thirteen Stars - one for each of the original colonies. Due to an error at the mint, one variety of the 1828 half-cent was issued with only twelve stars. There is also a variety of the large cent with only 12 stars, but this is the result of a die break and is not a true error.

 What is the main topic of the passage?

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 Many children who get into trouble in their early teens go on to become ______ offenders.