Illiteracy locks communities into vicious cycles of poverty that lay the conditions for violence and strife.

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Alhajji sees a number of vicious cycles that will support continued strength in oil prices for the foreseeable future.

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Like all vicious cycles, the relationship between the declining fortunes of news outlets and the shrinking of their audiences is a difficult one to untangle, a chicken-and-egg problem.

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Wretched economies produce all sorts of weirdly vicious cycles.

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During our poverty tour last year, we met countless people caught in vicious cycles of looking for nonexistent jobs because their unemployment benefits were expiring or had run out, scraping change together for gas to go on interviews that may or may not pan out, and having to swap food stamps for cash to keep the lights or gas on in the house.

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Business cycles, particularly in the sixties and early-seventies, were vicious.

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