I think the first one is "paper assets" and the second one "derivates". I'm not 100% sure though.
<span>B) They had lost battles to the Union.
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In the 1960s, the soviets developed a plan to redirect the rivers that supplied the Aral Sea with water in order to make the land around it suitable for agriculture. This actually proved to be devastating because the water level started dropping which increased the amount of salinity and the Aral Sea is nowadays almost destroyed completely.
During the Russian Civil War, Communists became known as the "Bolsheviks", which literally means "one of the majority", since the communists thought they were representing the will of the people.