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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: In big cities, obesity threatens to become the new normal. My comments: This means people keep getting fat, to the point of being obese, or overweight. A generation, or two (at the most) ago, people in this country were pretty thin. Overweight people were not regularly seen in the street. Nowadays, you see them quite often. So often, in fact, that it's no longer a phenomenon, something unusual, an eye-opening event. I remember when we used to talk about someone who weighs 100 kilos, we used to talk about their weight with eyes wide open, mouth agape. “One hundred kilos, gee!” We always said something like that. We meant no harm. No bias or anything, just pure amazement. Nowadays, we see overweight people everyday – left, right and center in the shopping mall, for example. At least that's the case in Beijing – and perhaps all major cities in the country. That's why obesity is said to threaten to become the “new normal”. “New normal” itself is relatively new on the scene. I don't remember anyone ever using this term when I was learning the English language, um, about one or two generations ago. Anyways, the new normal describes any new changes in society, especially in the economy and politics that are probably going to stay. That is to say that on the one hand they're new – situations that people aren't very familiar with; on the other hand, they're becoming normal – people are getting acquainted to them pretty quickly because they're happening again and again. | 
