Poverty: Striking the World One Country at a Time

Have you ever wondered what it is like to live in poverty? Having to wake up every day not knowing if you’ll be sleeping on the same makeshift bed that night, or even not knowing when your next sip of water will be. Poverty affects billions of people worldwide and keeps growing every year. A lack of skills, money, and education all contribute to the poverty of our world. Poverty is a problem that needs to be addressed and fixed worldwide.

It is undeniable that poverty not only spreads across the United States, but across the entire world. Every year, women, children, and men are affected by the sad truth of poverty. These individuals are faced with the hardships of not being able to live properly due to their lack of necessary resources; necessary resources meaning, food, water, clothes, and a roof over their head, not electronics or any extras. Although definitions of poverty vary from country to country, poverty is undoubtedly a problem. In the United States the definition of poverty is the amount of money a family would need to pay for food ("Poverty." Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.). People are forced to live day to day on what would seem like nothing to a middle class citizen; most people living in poverty in the United States live on less than $2.00 a day. There is much heated debate on the real cause of poverty and many speculations about why certain groups are more likely to live in poverty than others.

One speculation about the cause of poverty is called the Cultural View of Poverty. This means that within certain communities economic success is discouraged among one another. This discouragement and lack of motivation is often passed down th...

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...eenhaven Press, 2012. Opposing Viewpoints. Rpt. from "Raise the Minimum Wage to $10 in 2010." LetJusticeRoll.org. 2009. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.). As people of the world we need to stop worrying so much about the differentiation between the different classes, but we should be trying to make them unified; as the saying goes, you are only as strong as your weakest link.”

Poverty is undoubtedly one of the largest and fastest growing problems of our world today. No matter if it is based on situational poverty or cultural poverty, poverty exists. Not only affecting billions of people a year, but taking millions, even billions of lives each year as well; most of those lives are adolescents. Taking on the challenge of fixing and addressing poverty once and for all cannot be secluded to one particular area but rather it has to be a global effort.