by Hajnal Farkas

Created on: November 06, 2010   Last Updated: November 07, 2010

My GP recommended to visit the local swimming pool’s steam room to recover from my nasty cough so I went to the local Sainsbury’s to buy myself a bottle of water and I was tempted to bring something to read. I was wondering where the readable magazines are as I never buy women’s magazines, they are rubbish.

I was about to give up when I spotted the last copy of The Economist right above the daily newspapers. I checked the price tag and was surprised that it was on half price offer for 2 pounds only so I bought it.

While I was a student at the college and university I used to read Newsweek but after gaining my Masters in Economics and started to work in a bank I had free access to The Economist so I switched to it. In Hungary it is even more expensive to get a copy of these magazines. I liked reading them as they helped to improve my vocabulary in my field of expertise and kept me well informed.

The Economist

The Economist is an English-language weekly news magazine written by economists not only to economists. The first magazine was published in September 1843. Nowadays the magazine appears on glossy paper and contains about 100 pages. The Economist has several editorial offices all over the world: London, Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Chicago, Delhi, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Moscow, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Tokyo and Washington. This magazine is available in about 200 countries all over the world and according to the sales statistics from 2007 more than 1.2 million copies were sold just in the first half of the year. Most of the copies are sold in the USA then in the UK and the rest in Europe so the magazine concentrates on news of these areas but developing countries are in focus from time to time.

Topics

As I mentioned before more than half of the copies are sold in the USA and about 20% here in the UK. The magazine has the following topics:

The world this week

This is a 2-3 pages short topic which summarizes the week’s political and business news briefly. The countries and events are highlighted so it is easy to spot the ones you are interested in.

Leaders

This topic contains some articles the magazine focuses on. This week for example there were articles about America’s economy, Nigeria or Argentina. These articles are in the spot of the magazine this week, and the content of this topic shows great variety each week.

Letters

This short topic is

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