YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Breaker / Overcast
Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.
Word of the Day: Outlier
Japan is, in many ways, an outlier.
Although it is a Western country, part of the G7, and considered a liberal democracy, it is in many ways very different from other Western countries.
To be an outlier means that a person, place, thing or even fact is very different from others of a similar kind.
Whereas most G7 countries can be geographically, culturally or religiously grouped, Japan is the only one located in Asia.
It is also the only one not based on European culture.
In addition to that, Japan is the only non-Christian G7 member.
These are the significant ways in which Japan is an outlier.
There are others.
For example, Japan is the only G7 member that still carries out capital punishment, other than the United States.
On a much more positive note, many more ways set Japan apart from other nations in a good way, such as the crime rate being extremely low, which makes Japan one of the safest countries in the world.
On top of that, tax rates are meagre compared to European nations or Canada.
It wasn’t until 1989 that a national consumption tax of 3% was introduced.
I remember growing up in Canada when the combined federal and provincial sales tax in my province was 21%.
It has since dropped to 15%, but even so, coming to a country that had a sales tax of 3% was like a dream.
Of course, now it is 8%, which is still extremely low for G7 countries and still makes Japan an outlier.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least an 8th-grade education (age 13 – 14).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 65.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.