Make sense of

A very confused-looking monkey.

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Phrase: Make sense of (something)

It often seems like an impossible task, but we are all trying to make sense of the world right now.

For Western countries, things had been going along smoothly for quite some time.

Sure, once in a while, something throws a spanner into the works, such as the Vietnam War, the 1970s oil shock, the dot-com bust, or the Lehman shock, but we have had it pretty good for a long time.

Now we’re all going to hell in a handbasket at supersonic speeds.


It’s hard to make sense of it all or, in other words, find meaning or coherence in what’s going on around us.


First of all, the Americans have gone mad.

People are being killed all over the place by gun violence from each other and the police.

The solution is to acquire more and bigger guns.

I can’t make sense of that.

Can you?

Yes, I usually pick on the Americans because, well, they are an easy target.

They’re big enough.

I am Canadian, and perhaps it’s repressed envy, but I don’t think so.

Let’s head on down to the land down under and give them a kick or two.

Twenty-odd years ago, when I was there, I could feel the sun burning my back just walking down George Street in Sydney.

The government, however, still refuses to take any definitive action against climate change.

While the rest of the world is going solar and digital, they continue to dig giant holes in the ground.

Can you make any sense of that?

That should leave the Aussies with a burning question.

Can you sell coal to a world on fire?


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 80.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.


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