This is the short edition of Morales.

First broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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Hello, welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service.

I'm Ruth Alexander.

China is poised to overtake the US as the world's largest economy

way ahead of schedule.

The IMF predicts that by the end of the year China's GDP

adjusted to the country's relatively low cost of living

will be 17.6 trillion dollars topping the US.

A recent news report, but is it correct?

We'll be taking a look at China's economy later in the programme.

But our first item comes after one of our listeners,

Alexandra Delegue, contacted us with a number he'd seen on Twitter.

It's a claim that almost 8% of the males born in the Soviet Union

in 1923 did not survive World War II.

We looked online and saw that this is something that's repeated

fairly regularly, most notably on the website Buzzfeed,

although we haven't been able to track down the original source.

But we asked two academics to have a look into this for us.

...