Word: spend
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...their way to have their kids declared defective so that they can get the drug and so that they can also have "accommodations." This is a big deal. It has been going on for five or seven years now. Parents go out of their way and spend fortunes. Neuropsychologists do the testing. It's a huge business. "Accommodations" is not an informal word. It's a formal thing that schools do. Almost all of the accommodations are centered around prolonging the test time the kids have. It's no longer something that gets marked on your record. So colleges...
...billion to spend, how would you save the world? Would you invest it all in alternative energy research, to fight global warming? Would you revamp America's border and port security, to fight terrorism? Would you sign Kobe Bryant, Paul Pierce and Tim Duncan for the Philadelphia 76ers? (My personal choice.) Most of us might would make such a decision based on emotions - witnessing the pain of hunger, or experiencing the fear of nuclear terorrism. But what if there were a way to calculate the exact value of global priorities, a way to figure out just how much human suffering...
...That's how the Copenhagen Consensus works. Over the past two years, some of the world's top economists have been crunching the numbers on the most efficient way to spend that $75 billion, roughly the sum total of global foreign aid budgets. Led by Bjorn Lomborg - an idiosyncratic author best known for his skeptical views on global warming - the organization last month gathered eight major economists, including five Nobel Prize winners, to come up with an answer. The results are surprising. According to the numbers, the biggest problem facing the world isn't global warming or terrorism...
...explains why climate change, despite its potential for long-term catastrophe, ranks beneath threats like parasitic worms and malaria on the group's list. To Lomborg - who says he believes in global warming but is skeptical of its severity - fighting climate change just isn't a good way to spend our money. We know for certain that supplying vitamins to impoverished children will save lives - but we don't know for sure that spending billions to reduce carbon emissions will have the same clear effect. One is a sure thing, and the other is a bit of a gamble...
...might no longer be recognizable. We remain frustratingly incapable of nailing down how much warming we'll experience over the next century, or what the exact effects of climate change will be. But we know more every day, and the evidence, while not flawless, is frightening. By all means spend the money to halt malnutrition, or improve reproductive rights, or clean up water sanitation. But if I were asked to come up with the world's most pressing challenge, I wouldn't need to crunch the numbers. It's climate change - because we only have one Earth...