In a TV programme, the host asked a person about the literacy rate of his city. The person replied 96%. The host then looked at the camera and said, "Wow, can you believe that?"  My question is about the use of that; if he had used this instead of that, would it be wrong?
Learning and using English I'm always confused about what word to use for referring to things that have been described by me a few sentences earlier: "that" or "this".   Confusion comes from the fact that only the equivalent of "this" is always used in my native language for such referring. But I've noticed that in English for such referring "that" is used as often as "this" (or maybe even more often).  Some examples for illustrating (just tried to google something appropriate to convey my idea better):     We assess local... the demographics of the local population. What are the natural traffic drivers in the area. Things like cinemas and pubs and retail and office and all that type of things and we now put together a bit of a matrix and actually give a weighted score to each of the things we know help our business. That helps us decide in a more scientific fashion.   or:     The problem of Cervantes' origin became after that into a tough matter. Some experts believed that the Cervantes from Alcázar, in the times of the Lepanto Battle, was in the age of a child, more concerned about gathering nests and that type of things than about fighting as a soldier.   and for "this":     I believe lot of people who involved fishery industries in Mexico Gulf are suffering now but as for economic issues, U.S government and other countries will support them and give an utmost response to it. Important thing is that we learn from this mistake and make sure this type of things will never happen in the future and protect nature environment thus we have to take this technology to get energy from water very seriously. I really hope this technology will be available and used for everybody as soon as possible.   Is there a rule describing proper usage of these words in cases like this? (or should I have written "..in cases like that"?)
What is the difference between the examples below?  Generally, in a newspaper, news is based on past tense (things which have already happened).   Then why are headlines written in ways that says: He Kills (shouldn't it be: He Killed)?  For example:  Parliament passes bill vs. Parliament passed bill  Also  He kills his friend vs. He killed his friend  Please help. How was this answer posted after this question was closed? Write access without read access Google Sheets has several import functions   IMPORTDATA IMPORTFEED IMPORTHTML IMPORTXML   Sometimes the above functions returns errors like #N/A Imported content is empty and would like to be sure that there isn't a problem with the resource content to be imported.  How do I know if these functions are able to get the content that I looking to import?  I know that there also exist IMPORTRANGE but that function only is able to import content from Google Sheets spreadsheets Generalized Second Borel-Cantelli lemma Can an integrity check be run against a USB boot disk? What's the difference between "uname -r" and "uname -v"? Dual boot. How do I reinstall the Ubuntu partition? I need to run something as sudo without a password, so I used visudo and added this to my sudoers file:  MYUSERNAME ALL = NOPASSWD: /path/to/my/program   Then I tried it out:  $ sudo /path/to/my/program [sudo] password for MYUSERNAME:    Why does it ask for a password? How can I run/use commands as root with a non-root user, without asking for a password? Get most common value for each value of another column in SQL I have a table like this:   Column  | Type | Modifiers  ---------+------+-----------  country | text |   food_id | int  |   eaten   | date |    And for each country, I want to get the food that is eaten most often.  The best I can think of (I'm using postgres) is:  CREATE TEMP TABLE counts AS     SELECT country, food_id, count(*) as count FROM munch GROUP BY country, food_id;  CREATE TEMP TABLE max_counts AS     SELECT country, max(count) as max_count FROM counts GROUP BY country;  SELECT country, max(food_id) FROM counts     WHERE (country, count) IN (SELECT * from max_counts) GROUP BY country;   In that last statement, the GROUP BY and max() are needed to break ties, where two different foods have the same count.  This seems like a lot of work for something conceptually simple.  Is there a more straight forward way to do it? In the experiments for photoelectric emission, the light is incident on one face of the emitting plate, for example the anode, when determining the stopping potential. The electrons are emitted by this face of the plate. Why are the electrons emitted in the direction of the incident light, and not opposite to it?  I have read a little about photons (the key words being, a little), and from what i gather, they have an intrinsic momentum $p=h/\lambda$, which is transferred entirely to the particle that absorbs it (along with the energy $h\nu$). This should imply that the electrons try to move further into the cathode, and not escape it! What is the fault in the reasoning?  Thanks! I am trying to install Wordpress on Lubuntu. I followed the instructions . Including PHP Apache and MySQL setups. Apache and MySQL appear to be running fine.  However, when I go to http://localhost/blog/, I get the following error:     Neither /etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php nor /etc/wordpress/config-localhost.php could be found.   Ensure one of them exists, is readable by the webserver and contains the right password/username. How's it fair for a moderator to delete my account and dissociate my questions and answers? Edit I found the email that proves a moderator deleted my account. And nobody appears to believe me before? Even if you suspend me, why dissociate my questions and answers? How can I manage or track them, or accept answers?  Original  Moderator messaged me at Personal Finance S.E. How am I supposed to see if when they deleted my account? When I click on &quot;moderator message&quot;, I get 404 not found page.  Why is this being down-voted?   Many people don't believe me that a moderator deleted my old account.  Yesterday when I logged on, I saw &quot;Join this community&quot;, but I never deleted my Money account. I then clicked &quot;Join this community&quot; to see what happened.  Screen shot beneath undeniably proves this wasn't my old account when I asked at least 5 questions. It's unquestionably false that &quot;you have not asked any questions.&quot;  Please reinstate my old account? I want to keep track of my posts.   I can't post on Money Meta. Please don't betray private details.    and: How to format date and time in Android? 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