The first in the world, the Home Insurance Building, was built in 1885 on South LaSalle Street.
To be sure, there are many areas in which China does rank first in the world.
In fact, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers rebel group was among the first in the world to deploy suicide bombers.
An Asiatic "moon bear" is the first in the world to have a damaged gallbladder removed using keyhole surgery.
Yet we are still first in the world in the percentage of our young people who go on to college.
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In the 1970s, Romanian companies were among the first in the world to run their planning and budgeting with computer systems.
" Most were highly ambitious, including the goal that U.S. students would be "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.
That year, someone mailed Hotz a PlayStation 3 video-game system, challenging him to be the first in the world to crack it.
The plane is the first in the world to use the lithium-ion batteries, which are lighter, hold more power and recharge more quickly.
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Meanwhile, Argyll-based scientists are aiming to be first in the world to to locate the genes that determine how susceptible individual Atlantic salmon are to certain diseases.
Scotland is not the only country to have considered the move, but would be the first in the world to implement it in an area where alcohol is sold relatively freely.
Despite its vast geography, sparsely populated mid-section and entirely taxpayer-free communications spending, the U.S. ranks first in the world in cable modem coverage and remains competitive on every other broadband measure.
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The plant in Triunfo in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul is the first in the world to produce ethylene from ethanol and then create green polyethylene, Alcantara says.
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But it will be the first in the world to cross over into 2012, according to its government, now that it has joined Samoa in shifting to the other side of the international dateline.
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The Italian trials, which began in 2007, were the first in the world to bring to court cases involving extraordinary rendition, the CIA's practice of transferring terror suspects to countries where torture is permitted.
As noted above, U.S. 4th graders do fairly well in mathematics and science, but by the time they graduate from high school, U.S. students are nowhere near being "first in the world" in either subject.
But after hearing how microfinance worked, Lilian developed a scoring system, one of the first in the world targeted for the sector, that would determine those individuals that would best benefit from uncollateralized loans.
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Consumers will have the chance to be among the first in the world to purchase the Wii U console when the clock strikes midnight on Nov. 18 at Nintendo World in New York's Rockefeller Plaza.
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In 2003 Holland became the first country in the world to offer cannabis as a medicine.
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In 1957, Kerala became the first state in the world to elect Communists to power.
In 2009, it became the first country in the world to declare its territorial waters as a shark sanctuary.
In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps.
Opened in 1871, Souter was the first lighthouse in the world designed and built to be powered by electricity, with its foghorn kept in working condition by a dedicated team of local volunteers.
The President and the Director-General recognized the leading role that Uruguay has played in ICT in education due to its CEIBAL Campaign -- Uruguay was the first country in the world with a successful policy of universal delivery of a laptop to every primary and lower secondary student.
Finland was the first country in the world to grant unrestricted voting rights to women in 1906, and elected its first female president in 2000.
In 2000 we wanted to show leadership for this decade, so we became the first company in the world to be Climate Neutral certified so as to leave no footprint on this planet.
My first big splash on the internet came in 2004 when I was one of the first 30 podcasters in the world, hand-coding my RSS feed and speaking timidly into a microphone, broadcasting intimate thoughts to a global audience.
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"Britain was the first country in the world to feed people with industrialised food, " says Day.
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Last December Australia became the first country in the world to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes.
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