It would often drown and suffocate.

Simultaneously, the occupying Power continues to take measures to further isolate and suffocate the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip.

To prevent this, the eurozone needs a risk free interest rate. The struggling economies need lower borrowing costs, or they will suffocate economically (and political support for eurozone membership will evaporate).

Likewise, commercial fishing frequently depends on gill nets walls of fine netting in which fish become snared, often by the gills. They may suffocate in the net, because, with their gills constricted, they cannot breathe.

Indeed, there is a worrying aspect to the new plans they must tread a narrow path between reckless freedom for financial institutions, which contributed to the recent global financial crisis, and over caution, which can suffocate innovation and create inefficiencies.

The world is, of course, far too complex for any lone person to fully grasp. If a gnawing sense of ignorance kept us diving deeper in our quest to understand everything we encountered, we might suffocate in the details in one area and miss other areas completely.

A consumption tax hike should be timed in such a way that it does not suffocate the economic recovery that Abe s bold economic program, dubbed Abenomics, is facilitating. Western economists typically favor gradual tax increases Jeffrey Frankel, for example, recommends a pre announced plan to increase the tax rate by, say, one percentage point annually for five years.