It is harder to predict how Mr Obama's proposed reforms to the failing health-care system will turn out.

The way in which Mr Jobs revived the failing company he had co-founded and turned it into the world's biggest tech firm (bigger even than Bill Gates's Microsoft, the company that had outsmarted Apple so dramatically in the 1980s), sounds like something from a Hollywood movie.

He turned a failing company into a profitable business

He criticized teachers for failing to recognize that boys are actually more emotional than girls.

I'm self-employed and need the Internet for my work, but I'm failing to accomplish my work,to take care of my home, to give attention to my children," she wrote in a message sent to the group.

Another issue affecting real estate in the coming year will be America's failing infrastructure.

Indeed, even before the steep climb in grain prices in 2008, the number of failing states was expanding.

She didn't hand in her first two assignments for chemistry, which started her out in the class with a failing grade.

The nutritional and health crises that followed the policy of structural adjustment, he says, led to many children and teenagers failing to reach their full potential in terms of height.

In writing about their own experiences many applicants slip into clichés, thus failing to engage the reader.

Scholars will debate which interventions this time - the Federal Reserve's support of a failing credit system, guarantees of bank debt, Obama's ''stimulus" plan and bank "stress test" - counted most in preventing a recurrence.

Setting realistic goals can turn a failing business into success.

But researchers are improving systems to measure a teacher's performance throughout the year, and, with three years of data, it's usually possible to tell which teachers are failing.