Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

Research has also shown what happens inside our brains when we make decisions. Winning money has the same effect on a brain as a cocaine addict getting a fix, while losing money has the same effect on risk-averse people as a nasty smell or pictures of bodily mutilation.

Humans are not the only species to enjoy a snifter. Myriad experiments on other animals, from rats and monkeys to bees and fruit flies, show that they also get drunk, will seek out alcohol given the opportunity and may even develop a dependence on the stuff.

The pseudo-Palaeolithic diet the two researchers chose com­prised beets, carrots and yams as root vegetables, and goat as meat. They prepared the vegetables four ways: raw and unpro­cessed; raw and hit six times with a copy of a Palaeolithic ham- merstone; raw and cut into small slices; and roasted for 15 minu­tes. The goat was also served four ways: raw and unprocessed;

raw and pounded 50 times by a hammerstone; raw and cut into small slices; and cooked on a grill for 25 minutes.

Convening a conference supporting antitrust concerns in the Windy City was like holding a symposium on sobriety in New Orleans.

People are predisposed to think that things are worse than they are, and they overestimate the likelihood of calamity. This is be­cause they rely not on data, but on how easy it is to recall an ex­ample. And bad things are more memorable. The media amplify this distortion. Famines, earthquakes and beheadings all make gripping headlines; "40m Planes Landed Safely Last Year" does not.

If the Italians don't bring pasta and the French don't bring pate, you can't complain about Mrs Merkel's cabbage soup.

French farmers use more chemicals than anyone else in Europe: 65,000 tonnes of pesticides alone each year.

Coffee moved in the opposite direction. From Ethiopia it was dissemi­nated throughout the Middle East by Arab traders during the 6th century and ultimately arrived in the New World during the 18th century, where nascent Americans may have seen drinking it as something of a patriotic duty after the Boston Tea Party.

Handlers are said to squeeze lemon in their eyes, rub chili on their genitals or force alcohol down their throats — whatever it takes to drive a bull wild enough to charge into a pen ringed with cheering, jeering people.

Cane accounts for four-fifths of global sugar production, but only one- fifth of Europe's. Most of the continent's sugar is made from beet, thanks to a technique developed in the Napoleonic wars, when an English block­ade hit French cane-sugar imports.

All houseguests are said to bring pleasure: some when they ar­rive, others when they leave.

One answer to the question, "What ate dinosaurs?" is, obviously, "Other dinosaurs."

Lewis Carroll, no mean mathematician himself, asked Alice to be­lieve as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

So central is rice to life in Asia that in many countries, rather than asking "how are you?" people ask, "have you eaten rice yet?"

Chirac about the British: "You can't trust people who have such terrible food."

As Winston Churchill once said, "This pudding has no theme."

James Bond, meanwhile, detects a spy on a sleeper train after no­ticing him behave suspiciously in the dining car ("Red wine with fish!" Bond mutters).

It's the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Benjamin Franklin is said (probably apocryphally) to have called beer "proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy".

He who holds the honey is bound to lick his fingers.

Mark Twain: "Whiskey's for drinking, water's for fighting over."

One of Samsung's smart fridges, with cameras within that check for rotting food and enable consumers to see what they are short of while shopping (through an app on their phone), sells for a cool $5,000.

Hwahae, a cosmetics-reviewing app launched in 2013 (by three men who wanted to know what exactly was in their facial pro­ducts) has already clocked up 2.5m downloads. It lets consumers read up on 1.9m ingredients in 62,000 items. It is always good to know what you are rubbing on your face.

Much of life is made of small, modest pleasures (tasty mints, starry nights) and tiny tragedies (an errant comment, an uncomfortable shoe).

Congress is as popular as a porcupine in a bag of popcorn.

The juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

The parsley on the fish can make the difference between a deli­cious meal and a dog's dinner.

Of all these edible platters, it is pizza that has become the world's fa­vourite fast food, plain dough onto which each country bakes its own flavours: mussels in the Netherlands, Teriyaki chicken and seaweed in Japan. Born in Naples, the modern pizza was the poor man's meal. One 19th-century American visitor, Samuel Morse (inventor of the telegraph), thought it "like a piece of bread that had been taken reeking out of the sewer". For Alexandre Dumas, it was "the gastronomic thermometer of the market": if fish pizza was cheap, there had been a good catch; if oil pizza was dear, there had been a bad olive harvest.