Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist - Кузнецов Сергей Александрович - Страница 3

Predictions without dates are easy. All trees fall; it is spotting the diseased ones that is trick.

Anti-corruption campaigners would have nothing to cheer if the cure ended up being more harmful than the disease.

People around the world produce an estimated 6.4 trillion litres of urine every year.

He learned about the "umbles": as hypothermia sets in you mumble, fumble, grumble, stumble, then finally tumble. Without help you die.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

The Amish in America spurn modern medicine, along with almost everything else invented since the 17th century.

ERC, a research firm, says consumption per person was 999 cigarettes a year in 1990 and only 882 in 2012. Yet the appetite for cigarettes continues to rise. Smokers lit up 5.9 trillion times last year compared with 5.1 trillion in 1990. ERC tracks 123 countries, home to about 99 % of smokers. It finds the worst addicts in central and eastern Europe. Serbians each smoke a lung-blackening 3,323 cigarettes per year, more than any other nationality. Eight of the top ten countries, ranked by consumption per person, are in the former Eastern block.

Walgreens is another operator of worksite clinics. One of its 358 centres is in Orlando, at the Disney theme park. It aims to treat Disney's "cast members" quickly (unblocking their huge ears and fixing their fairy wings, presumably), so they can go back to work.

The lexicon of oncology is filled with military metaphors: the war on cancer, aggressive tumours, magic bullets. And although these are indeed only metaphors, they do reflect an underlying attitude – that it is the clinician's job to attack and destroy his patient's tumour directly, with whatever weapons are to hand. As in real warfare, those weapons may be conventional (surgery), chemical (cancer-killing drugs) or nuclear (radiation therapy). There is even talk of biological agents, in the form of viruses specifically tailored to seek out and eliminate their tumorous targets. Which is all well and good as strategies go. But as Sun Tzu observed, the wisest general is not one who wins one hundred victories in one hundred battles, but rather one who overcomes the armies of his enemies without having to fight them himself. And one way to do that is to get someone else to do your fighting for you.

What is depression? The ancient Greeks believed it resulted from an imbalance in the body's four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (from the Greek word melas or "dark" and kholé, meaning "bile"), with too much of the latter resulting in a melancholic state of mind. Early Christianity blamed the devil and God's anger for man's suffering, with depression the result of the struggle against worldly temptations and sins of the flesh. In the Renaissance it was viewed as a disease of scholars, such as Robert Burton, author of "The Anatomy of Melancholy", who were given to abstract and intense speculation.

Not quite old enough for Medicare (which typically kicks in at 65) and not quite poor enough for Medicaid.

In most countries it is illegal to buy or sell a kidney. If you need a transplant you join a waiting list until a matching organ becomes available. This drives economists nuts. Why not allow willing donors to sell spare kidneys and let patients (or the government, acting on their behalf) bid for them? The waiting list would disappear overnight. If John and Mary love each other but are married to other people, they will be tempted to leave their current partner and marry each other. But if John loves Mary, while Mary loves her husband more than John, both will stay put.

In China a strong taboo hangs over discussing death.

Patrolling a rough neighbourhood is a health hazard.

The Puente Hills landfill, an artificial mountain near Los Angeles is the biggest dump in America, 30 years old, 150 metres high and containing 130m tonnes of rubbish within a 700-acre footprint. If it were a building, it would be among the 20 tallest in the city. Building a rubbish pile is, it turns out, surprisingly high-tech.