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Read the following extract and answer the questions given below :But even in a poverty-free world where every man and woman would earn enough to take care of themselves and their family, there would still be situations of temporary poverty due to a sudden catastrophe or misfortune, a bankruptcy or business downturn leading to failure, or some personal disease or disaster.A poverty-free world might see a whole group of families, locations, or even regions devastated by some shared disasters, such as floods, fire, cyclones, riots, earthquakes or other disasters. But such temporary problems could be taken care of by the market mechanism through insurance and other self-paying programmes, assisted of course by social-consciousness-driven enterprises.There would always remain differences in lifestyle between people at the bottom of society and those at the top income levels. Yet that difference would be the difference between the middle-class and luxury class. Just as on trains in Europe today you have only first-class and second-class carriages, whereas in nineteenth century there were third-class and even fourth-class carriages – sometimes with no windows and just hay strewn on the floor. Can we really create a poverty-free world? A world without third-class or fourth-class citizens, a world without a hungry, illiterate, barefoot under-class ?(1) What is the extract about ?(2) How will the poverty-free world take care of natural disasters?(3) According to the writer, what would, ‘the world without poverty’ be like?(4) What can we do to help the poor in our society? |
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Answer» (1) The extract is about the writer’s dream of seeing the world without poverty, a world without third-class and fourth-class citizens. According to him, that would be a world we could all be proud to live in. (2) The poverty-free world would take care of natural disasters like floods, cyclones, riots, earthquakes etc. by the market mechanism, through insurance and other self-paying programs, assisted by social-consciousness-driven enterprises. (3) According to the writer in the world without poverty, every person would have the ability to take care of his or her own basic life needs, in that world nobody would die of hunger or suffer from malnutrition. Today 40,000 children die each day around the world from hunger-related diseases. In a poverty-free world, no children would die of such cases. (4) Besides giving the poor food and alms, if we could give them free education and free health-care services, then they will be self-dependent, they can really take care of themselves and they would not remain poor after that. |
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