March 10, 2014
Paula Munteanu
News Writer
News by Numbers
$151 is the average amount of money an American spends on food each month. On the average, 8 percent of the respondents affirmed to spending less than $50, while 10 percent buy weekly food worth more than $300, a Gallup poll revealed. The same survey was conducted in 1943, when an average of $15 per week was spent on food. For the following 44 years, this question was not analyzed, until 1987 when the polls showed a lower amount of $106 per week.
Gallup argues that the increase in spending is due to inflation and after adjusting the prior data to the current inflation rate, the results showed that Americans were spending more on food in the past than they do now. Young adults spend $173 weekly on food, more than older Americans who spend $103. Polls also show that people living in Midwest spend on average $139, less than in any other parts of the country, according to Gallup polls.
4 million people have signed up for ObamaCare as of February 25, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Service reports. The White House set an unofficial goal of 7 million enrollments by March 31, when the admission ends. About 700,000 enrollees signed up for the insurance plan in February.
“Consumers are shopping and enrolling in plans on HealthCare.gov everyday; system error rates are low and response times are consistently less than half a second. Our call center has handled more than 12 million calls so far and is open 24/7 to assist consumers in English, Spanish and more than 150 languages,” said Marilyn Tavenner, Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
34 foreign films are allowed into China every year by the government in order to encourage domestic cinematography and limit the Western influence. Therefore, such movies as Django Unchained, Iron Man 3, Transformers 4 and World War Z, have been modified so that they please the Chinese audience and the authorities. In the recently released movies, Red Dawn and Olympus Has Fallen, Asians villains tend to be from North Korea.
“It’s got to the point where everyone is thinking: how are we going to make a movie that, at the very least, is not offensive to the Chinese public?” said Peter Shiao, chair of the US-China Film Summit and founder and CEO of the Los Angeles-based Orb Media Group.
50 percent of workforce is women, for the first time in the U.S history.
In 2012, women made up 46.9 percent of the labor force, with 57.7 percent of all women 16 years and above being in the labor force, compared to 70.2 percent of all men, Catalystreports.
On the other hand, for every dollar a man earns, a female worker receives 77 cents. This has not changed since 2001.
In other words, over her career, a woman loses $430,000 to the pay gap,U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee reports. In a positive light, in an average married household, the wife’s salary increased from 26 percent of the family’s income in 1970, to 36 percent in 2010, according to a report by the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee.
2 million people are killed annually by outdoor air pollution. A study published by the Environmental Research Letters shows that an estimated 2.1 million deaths are related to the increase of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other 470,000 people die each year because of the human-caused ozone pollution, CNN reports.
According to the American Lung Association, 42 percent of Americans, more than 131.8 million people, are living in counties that have unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution. WHO data shows that the top three countries by the level of air pollution are Mongolia, Botswana and Pakistan.
