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

He learned about the "umbles": as hypothermia sets in you mumble, fumble, grumble, stumble, then finally tumble. Without help you die.

Asked the secret of his youthfulness, Benito Martinez Abrogan, 120, said he had never cheated a man or said bad things of other people.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

Patriotism requires Medicare for all. Somehow, neither has caught on.

Puffing 15–24 cigarettes a day, on average, robs a smoker older than 35 of five hours of life each and every day. But 20 minutes of moderate exercise a day earns almost an hour back. Alcohol wears a Janus face: the first drink of the day adds about 30 minutes per day to one's life expectancy, but each subsequent one cuts it back by 15 minutes.

The Amish in America spurn modern medicine, along with almost everything else invented since the 17th century.

The UN reckons that by 2100 the planet's population will be rising past 10.9 billion, and be much older. The median age will go up from 29 to 41, and around 28 % will be over 60. A few may even remember this article.

ERC, a research firm, says consumption per person was 999 cigarettes a year in 1990 and only 882 in 2012. Yet the appetite for cigarettes continues to rise. Smokers lit up 5.9 trillion times last year compared with 5.1 trillion in 1990. ERC tracks 123 countries, home to about 99 % of smokers. It finds the worst addicts in central and eastern Europe. Serbians each smoke a lung-blackening 3,323 cigarettes per year, more than any other nationality. Eight of the top ten countries, ranked by consumption per person, are in the former Eastern block.

The more sophisticated the patient, the less scalpel-happy the doctors. The best informed patients of all are, of course, other doctors. Sure enough, physicians went under the knife much less often than the average Ticino resident. Lawyers' wives – whom doctors have good reason to fear – had the fewest hysterectomies of all.

Walgreens is another operator of worksite clinics. One of its 358 centres is in Orlando, at the Disney theme park. It aims to treat Disney's "cast members" quickly (unblocking their huge ears and fixing their fairy wings, presumably), so they can go back to work.

Doctors manage to restart only about half of the hearts that stop in a hospital, and only about a sixth of patients will go on to survive long enough to be discharged. One of the toughest decisions faced by hospital staff is how long to keep trying, and when to give up on a particular patient as a lost cause.