Speak and Write like The Economist: Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

The "triangular trade" as it was known, whereby slave-ships left European ports for west Africa with rum, guns, textiles and other goods to exchange for slaves, and then transported them across the Atlantic to sell to plantation-owners, and then returned with sugar and coffee, also fuelled the first great wave of economic globalisation. Slavers in France would send their shirts to be washed in the streams of the Caribbean isle of St Domingue, now Haiti; the water there was said to whiten the linen better than any European stream.

The price of used furniture is nothing but a viewpoint, and if you wouldn't understand the viewpoint is impossible to understand the price. With used furniture you can't be emotional 49.

There is almost no house property in London that is not overburdened with a number of middlemen.

Although Britons are cross about high pay, few seek capitalism's overthrow: they dislike corporate fat cats for being fat, not for being cats.

Some firms are employing a "China + 1" strategy, opening just one factory in another country to test the waters and provide a back-up. if China's currency and shipping costs were to rise by 5 % annually and wages were to go up by 30 % a year, by 2015 it would be just as cheap to make things in North America as to make them in China and ship them there.

Mr Rao offered two deals on loose coffee beans: 33 % extra free or 33 % off the price. The discount is by far the better proposition, but the supposedly clever students viewed them as equivalent. Even well-educated shoppers are easily foxed.

If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy.

When Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader, died in 1997 his only post was chairman of the China Bridge Association.

Shopping with coupons and jars of loose change. Watering down milk to make it go further. Using washing up liquid instead of shampoo. Inventing excuses for skipping lunch. Having to walk everywhere. Sharing beds and baths. Mending clothes that are themselves second-hand. Reviving old newspapers as makeshift lampshades. Always being tired – poverty in austerity.

The first is that entrepreneurs routinely see opportunities where everyone else sees problems. A surprising number of great companies were born out of fury and frustration.

When Wal-Mart tried to impose alien rules on its German staff – such as compulsory smiling and a ban on affairs with co-workers – it touched off a guerilla war that ended only when the supermarket chain announced it was pulling out of Germany in 2006.

When things went wrong for Middle Eastern tribes a couple of millennia ago, the accepted remedy was to send a sacrificial goat out into the wilderness to placate the gods. The practice continues today, but the voters have replaced the gods, and highly paid businesspeople the goats.

Why do Americans spend such huge amounts of time, money, water, fertiliser and fuel on growing a useless smooth expanse of grass? Much better to cultivate something useful, like tomatoes.