Tiếng Anh Học từ vựng với chuyên mục: Tại sao 1/8 dân số nước Mĩ vẫn nghèo

Poverty in America continues to affect people of colour most.

In America almost 40 million people-one eighth of its population-live in poverty. Why does one of the richest countries in the world have so many people living in profound need?

But it is hard to work out which issues are caused by history and which by bad policy.

The raw sewage from Pamela Rush's toilet travels through a straight plastic pipe directly into the backyard of her dilapidated mobile home. It smells badly in hot weather. Mosquitoes swarm and the children are forbidden from playing there. But when it rains, the stuff pools and it is unavoidable. Because the soil in Lowndes County, Alabama, where Ms Rush lives, sits atop a relatively impermeable base of limestone, a proper public sanitation system for the sparsely populated place would be expensive. Sanitation isleft to private systems, which poor residents like Ms Rush cannot afford. Foul-smelling flooded lawns are a common sight. They are also the reason that hookworm -a parasitic disease transmitted largely by walking barefoot on open sewage-has been detected among the residents there. It is a disease most often encountered in developing countries. Yet decades after it was thought to be eradicated, it can be found in America, again.

Lowndes County is part of the Black Belt-the swathe of land named for its fertile topsoil which produced vast amounts of cotton on the black of slave labour and, later, sharecropping, and where emancipated black workers farmed rented land. Despite all the wealth that was extracted from the fields, those who remain there today have little; the median household income is a mere $29, 785 and the official poverty rate is 30%. Three-quarters of residents are black, and they are nearly eight times as likely to be poor as whites in the county. Across America, black people remain disproportionately poor. More than 20% live in poverty, twice the rate of whites. After a moderate amount of progress was erased by the Great Recession, median black household wealth nationwide is one-tenth that of white households, just as it was 50 years ago.

New vocabulary:

• profound: Thâm thúy
  
• work out: Tìm ra
  
• directly into: Thẳng vào đâu đó
  
• dilapidated: Đổ nát
  
• mosquito: Con muỗi
  
• the stuff: Đồ đạc
  
• impermeable: Không thấm nước
  
• public sanitation system: Hệ thống vệ sinh công cộng
  
• the sparsely populated place: Khu vực dân cư thưa thớt
  
• left to: Giao cho
  
• foul-smelling: Mùi hôi
  
• hookworm: Giun móc
  
• parasitic disease: Bệnh ký sinh
  
• barefoot: Chân trần
  
• detected: Được tìm thấy
  
• encountered: Đã gặp
  
• eradicated: Bị xóa bỏ
  
• the swathe of land: Vùng đất
  
• fertile: Phì nhiêu
  
• the black of slave labour: Nô lệ lao động da đen
  
• emancipated: Giải phóng
  
• extracted: Trích suất
  
• disproportionately: Không cân xứng
  
• moderate: Vừa phải
  
• recession: Suy thoái