This book is written about mainland China. Where it says national, domestic or the state, it means China, not your country.

Notice

This is an unofficial English translation of 高性价比人生指南 (HowToLiveBetter) by eternity4719, licensed under CC BY 4.0. If the translation and the Chinese original differ, the Chinese original prevails. Law, medical insurance and social security content describes mainland China, as of upstream commit e2605d3 (2026-10-21). It is not medical or legal advice.

Base translation: book/ starts from dlgrv/HowToLiveBetter (book/en, commit 44f57b0), which marks its own work as Unlicense. The underlying text remains CC BY 4.0, so attribution to the original author is required for any reuse. The README and all nine essays are new translations from the Chinese.

How this was checked

By script: every citation, evidence grade and cost tag is restored byte for byte from the Chinese. A script also checks numbers, URLs and cross-references for all 767 items.
By reader: a model reader compared every item, intro, essay and the README with the Chinese, and corrected what differed: 384 material and 833 minor differences, logged in review/. No reader was a human, and none opened the cited sources. This checks the translation against the Chinese, not the Chinese against the world.
Measured afterwards: a separate reader, on a fresh random sample of 60 items, found 0 material differences and 12 items with minor ones (since fixed). With 60 items, the true rate of material errors could still be as high as about 5% (95% upper bound), which would be about 38 items. Before the full read, a sample of the same kind found 14%.

So errors remain possible. Check the Chinese and a qualified person before you act on any medical, legal or money item.

Known ambiguity

以下 is rendered as inclusive ("12 or younger") by the rule in TRANSLATION.md, except where the item or its source shows "under N". For 34.2, 17.7 and 13.44 the real rule may mean "under", so the English errs on the cautious side.

Left out of this edition

The original README's donation code, advertising space and business contact are not carried over. They belong to the original author's own edition.