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

Two costly wars and two episodes of currency devaluation in Britain later, the dollar was unchallenged as the world's chief reserve currency.

Americans used to believe that their constitution protected private property. The Fifth Amendment allows the state to seize it only for "public use", and so long as "just compensation" is paid. "Public use" has traditionally been taken to mean something like a public highway. Roads would obviously be much harder to build if a single homeowner could hold out forever or for excessive compensation.

The government's powers of "eminent domain" have also been used to clean up "blighted" slums. "Urban renewal", he noted, has sometimes been nicknamed "negro removal".

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.