Word: perlis
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...write-up on How the World Eats made for interesting reading, but it also inadvertently brought to light the grim reality of the divide between rich and poor. While the average food expenditure of a family in Germany runs to $500 per week, a poor refugee family in Chad survives on the barest minimum, with only a $1.23 food expenditure per week. I would welcome another cover story that reveals the global family's expenditure pattern. Sanjay Kumar, New Delhi...
...What developers didn't count on, though, was stingy consumers. Despite the country's rapid economic gains, the average citizen has little to spend on frills. Per capita annual income remains below $2,000. The average household saves more than 25% of its pay, in contrast to Americans, who in recent years have tended to spend more than they make. Just 4% of Chinese have credit cards, and purchases using plastic average less than $1,000 a year per cardholder. By Western standards, Chinese consumers simply have not yet begun to spend. As a result, "less than a handful...
...quiz for all you global-warming experts: After China and the U.S., which country emits the greatest quantity of greenhouse gases per year? Answer high-tech Japan or industrial Germany, and you flunk. A holographic Al Gore will be beamed over to give you remedial lessons. It's rural Indonesia, which emits 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually--almost entirely from deforestation. Living trees absorb CO2, and as they are cut down or burned, they release their stored carbon into the air. Trees also absorb sunlight, warming the earth, but in the tropics their ability to absorb...
...hardcopy of magazine.] The designers at NASA are preparing to fly what may be the feeblest spacecraft they've ever built--and they couldn't be prouder of it. Never mind the decades of unmanned probes that have gone roaring into the void at tens of thousands of miles per hour, fire streaming from their tails. The new ship will putt-putt into interplanetary space under the power--if that's even the word--of an engine that accelerates by barely 15 m.p.h. (24 km/h) per day, or zero to 60 in more than half a week. Yet the places...
...relatively few Vietnamese can fulfill the dream of a higher education, which is bad news for its economy. Vietnam currently attracts foreign investment at a rate of nearly $1 billion per month, with investors looking to take advantage both of its low-wage levels and its young and highly literate population. But only 10% of Vietnamese college-aged youths are enrolled in higher education, lagging behind India and China, and less than a quarter of the figure for Thailand. Those numbers don't bode well for Vietnam's ambitions to move into higher-end electronics and outsourcing...