reading comprehension

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yamamoto

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Hello.
I have some trouble understanding this article.
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As humorist Will Rogers once said that money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy, we might expect tourism to generate benefits across the economy. After all, tourist are demanding: they need feeding and watering and entertaining. They need someone to grow the food, make the furniture, bottle the beer and so on. But too often, in poor countries, tourists eat imported food and sleep in rooms where nothing has been made locally. Tourists demand their cornflakes and steaks, their cheeses and crisps - as if they were at home; and they want imported beers rather than local brands. All of this contributes to leakage. As a result, many tourism earnings are either retained by the tourist-sending countries and sent back to them in some way. Somehow or other, it ends up with our hosts-not us-picking up much of the bill.
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My want to know, in the last sentence, who 'our hosts' are and who 'us' is.

Thanks in advance.
 

5jj

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It's badly written. All through the passage, the writer has been speaking about the tourists. In the last sentence, he suddenly (by using 'our' not 'their') identifies himself with the tourists. It would make much more sense as '... it ends up with their hosts (the local people), not the tourists themselves (or the tourist-sending countries), picking up much of the bill.
 

yamamoto

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Thank you very much for your quick and detailed explanation.
 

Barb_D

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Will Rogers never said anything like this. The closest he got was “The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”

American Will Rogers wouldn't talk about a tourist's desire for "crisps."
 

SoothingDave

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Will Rogers never said anything like this. The closest he got was “The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”

American Will Rogers wouldn't talk about a tourist's desire for "crisps."

I didn't read it that they were claiming Rogers said the entire paragraph. Just the bit before the first comma.
 

emsr2d2

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Will Rogers never said anything like this. The closest he got was “The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellow’s hands.”

American Will Rogers wouldn't talk about a tourist's desire for "crisps."

I assumed that only the first sentence was meant to be a reported quote by Will Rogers. As Will Rogers once said, "
money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy ..." The rest of the piece appears to be the writer's opinion based around that quote. Whether he ever said anything remotely similar I have no idea. I've never heard of him. I would assume the writer was either British or had a lot of experience with British tourists, given the mentions of cornflakes and crisps.
 

Barb_D

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I see. I re-read it a few times and can get that now, but the way it's written it's hard to get that.

As Will Rogers said, money is... , so we might expect... (Which would quote him out of context.) or "Because Rogers said X, we might expect... (Which also quotes him out of context.)

In any case, if the writer wanted to denigrate trickle-down economics, there surely would have been better people to quote than Rogers, since he was criticizing it, not advocating for it. Perhaps that's where I went awy in the first place.

I still don't see how the host foots the bill, since I expect there quite a mark-up on those cornflakes and crisps, even if the host country buys them from the tourist's home country in th efirst place. Oh well. Please ignore my "contribution" to this thread.

I agree that shifting from third person to first person makes it even harder to understand.
 
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