Reading Comprehension:
In the past few decades something amazing has happened. The share and the number of extremely poor people in the word (on the current definition, people who consume less than $1.90 a day at purchasing-power parity) has plunged. This is hugely welcome. People who live on less than $1.90 a day are very poor, even by the standards of the world's poorest countries. So, it is regrettable that the steep decline in poverty is unlikely to continue. Extreme poverty will probably not fall as quickly in the next few years as it has done for the past few decades.
The World Bank, which tracks poverty, estimates that 1.9bn people were extremely poor in 1981. In that year, the poor accounted for 42% of the world's population. In 2013, by contrast, only 767m people were poor. Because the world's population has grown so much in the interim, the share of poor people in the population has fallen even faster, to just below 11%. The single biggest reason for this delightful trend in China. In 1981, almost unbelievably, 89% of Chinese (and 96% of rural Chinese) seem to have lived below the poverty line. In 2013 only 2% of Chinese were extremely poor.
That cannot continue. China will soon eradicate extreme poverty, if it has not done so already. So will countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, which have been almost as good at cutting poverty. That leaves a rump of poverty in South Asia and, especially, sub-Saharan Africa. In 2013, for the first time, more than half of the paupers in the world were African. Poverty will be much harder to root out in those places. South Asian countries like Bangladesh and India have decent economic growth but feeble welfare systems. Africa doesn't even have the former, especially considering how quickly its population is increasing. Besides, poor Africans often live on much less than $1.90 a day. It is hard to pull exceptionally poor people (sometimes called the 'ultra-poor') over the line. Even African countries that are growing fairly well, like Ethiopia and Rwanda, will have huge poor
populations for many years even if incomes rise across the board.
a) Write an appropriate title for this passage?
b) How China performed in reducing poverty?
c) How South Asian and African countries did in poverty eradication in the past few decades?
d) What were the challenges to eliminate poverty from African countries?