Monday, October 24, 2011

Add up


If something doesn’t add up, it simply doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical. There seems to be an error or a mistake. Something is wrong.
*If you win something by a landslide, you win it convincingly/ easily and by a long way: Ex, “A landslide victory”.

1.  Sometimes, when people give you a long excuse with conflicting details that just don’t add up, they are probably making up (inventing) the story. From that point on, I take whatever they say “with a pinch of salt”, meaning that I don’t take everything they say seriously.

2. The Bush administration’s claims that there were WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq don’t add up. Even though it turns out that the intelligence (information) was faulty, many people still believe it was a good idea to go in and take the former dictator, Saddam Hussein, out of power.

3. There are many things about the theory of evolution that just don’t add up. It’s fairly logical, but there are many inconsistencies. For example, in a very recent article in the online “Harvard Gazette”, Harvard researchers have found that “rather than increase over time, the value of beneficial mutations in a cell decreases”: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/06/it-doesnt-add-up/


4.  The EU biofuels policy doesn’t add up, according to this article: http://www.actionaid.org/eu/2011/05/eu-biofuels-policy-doesn%E2%80%99t-add. “The EU has paid for new classrooms and toilets at a local school [in Dakatcha, Kenya]. This allows the children of the local farmers living in the woodlands – among the poorest in Kenya – to go to school and learn to read and write. But now the school will have to be torn down to make way for a biofuels plantation. That’s a shocking waste of European development money!

5. "You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be still scratching your head about the end of Osama bin Laden. Between the Obama administration and major media reports, there have been multiple divergent accounts of the Navy SEALs' mission in Abbottabad, Pakistan, with the story seeming to be colored by politics, sensationalism, and outright fantasy. Details of the story don't add up". – motherjones.com

7 comments :

  1. Please, tell us about something that doesn't add up.

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  2. Great project, thank you! I'm waiting for more.

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  3. Good question. It's one of those words that I thought I knew the meaning to, because I have heard it so many times... and I discovered that I have no idea. The internet doesn't help either! So I would just say, "very", but that doesn't seem to be a correct substitute. The dictionaries say, "with barely repressed anger", but in this context it is not that. It has to do with "burning" and intensity, like a coal in a fire that is burning long and slow. So my best guess, or the impression I get is that Nate is intensely charismatic. It's difficult to put into words.

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  4. Hi Pablo,
    so you understand it more or less?

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  5. Your definition of smolderingly doesn't add up, this blog ROCKS though, one of the greatest blogs I've found by a landslide

    Cheers !

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