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

China's leaders hew to Deng Xiaoping's dictum that "China should adopt a low profile and never take the lead." China can hide its national demands behind a multilateral fa?ade.

PepsiCo announced that it had developed the world's first bottle to be made entirely of a plastic consisting of plant-based materials, which can be fully recycled. Its "green bottle" is composed of switch grass, pine bark and corn husk. Pepsi hopes to produce bottles in the future using orange and potato peels and other by-products from food.

Saudi oil costs just $2 a barrel to produce, a small fraction of what it costs to extract the stuff in Alaska, say, or the North Sea. Demand from both Asia and America remains strong. Saudi Aramco, the giant state oil monopoly, is ramping up its production capacity. Having remained static at around 10m barrels per day for a generation, this is currently pushing 11m and may reach 12.5m by 2009 and perhaps 15m by 2015. Assuming a middle-of-the-range price of around $40 a barrel, the oil bubbling out of the ground could continue to be worth around $500m a day for many years to come.

Oil exports, having bottomed out in 1998 at $35 billion, have since soared, hitting a record $160 billion in 2005. Last year's current-account surplus was close to $100 billion and the central bank's net foreign reserves rose to $135 billion, a jump of $90 billion in just three years.

A firm and an industry that had become accustomed to obscurity will have to get used to the limelight.

Mr Hayward set out to replace flash and fluff with nuts and bolts.

London, once a blue-blooded cocoon.

Сhina is quite open to yarn, but not jerseys, diamonds, but not jewelry.

Public transport in Los Angeles has a great future, and always will.

Mr Toyoda had been reading "How the Mighty Fall", a book by Jim Collins, an American management guru. In it, Mr Collins (best known for an earlier, more upbeat work, "Good to Great") describes the five stages through which a proud and thriving company passes on its way to becoming a basket-case.

First comes hubris born of success; second, the undisciplined pursuit of more; third, denial of risk and peril; fourth, grasping for salvation; and last, capitulation to irrelevance or death.

There are lots of other jobs that aren't real. Designing a new plastic soapbox, making pokerwork jokes for public-houses, writing advertising slogans, being an MP, talking to UNESCO conferences.