The poor stay poor and the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

And everybody knows

Poverty, more than anything else, is a state of mind

I. Match the words on the left to their definitions on the right. If necessary, guess their
meaning. How do you think the words in bold are related to the article on poverty?

1.Enduring a. an important new discovery in sth you are

studying, esp. one made after trying for a
long time
2.Underachieve b. of facts, ideas: to be closely related
3.Abolish c. do less well that expected
4.Breakthrough d. suggested or understood without being
stated directly
5.Prerequisite for/to sth e. to do sth that produces an effect or change
in sth or in sb’s situation
6.Explicit f. continuing for a long time and hard to
solve
7.Implicit g. to become or make sth smaller
8.Affect h. a social system within a group of people or
animals in which each member knows who
has a higher or lower rank than themselves
9.Correlate with sth i. sth that is necessary before sth else can
happen
10.Chronic j. continuing for a very long time
11.Back up k. expressed in a way that is very clear and
direct
12.Shrink l. to say or demonstrate that sth/sb is true
13.Heap m. a large, untidy pile of things
14.The pecking order n. to officially end a law, system, etc, esp.
one that has existed for a long time

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 I AM JUST A POOR BOY THOUGH MY STORY'S SELDOM TOLD
Apr 2nd 2009

1 How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming

clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular
parts of the brain

THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus
5 remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society.
Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to
abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have
preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood
what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.

10 The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of
the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of
children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than
those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold
bits of information in the brain for current use--the digits of a phone
15 number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for
reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also
a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of
declarative memory--the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates
of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to
20 ride a bicycle.

That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working
memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is
also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals,
which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the
65 chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the
brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the
brain, and causes the "remodelling" of existing ones. Most
significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex
70 and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely
associated with working memory.

Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put

pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less
75 well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same
circumstances on their own children.

Dr Evans's and Dr Schamberg's study does not examine the nature of the
stress that the children of the poor are exposed to, but it is now well
established that poor adults live stressful lives, and not just for the
obvious reason that poverty brings uncertainty about the future. The
80 main reason poor people are stressed is that they are at the bottom of
the social heap as well as the financial one.

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 Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, and his intellectual
successors have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social
85 hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those
at the top--and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite
young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things.

So, it may not be necessary to look any further than their place in the
pecking order to explain what Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg have discovered
90 in their research into the children of the poor. The Bible says, "the
poor you will always have with you." Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have
provided an important part of the explanation why.

1. What is working memory?

95 2. What impact does it have on your career in adult life?
3. What impact does stress have on working memory?
4. Why do poor children live more stressful lives? What is the key factor
generating stress?

VOCABULARY

1. Are you aware of some other enduring social problems?

2. What do you consider a prerequisite to solving them?
3. Is your judgement backed up by any research or observations?
4. Do you know any other reasons, apart from poverty, why people end up at the bottom
of the social heap?
5. Do we naturally establish pecking orders in groups (in the office, at home at school,
on the beach in a tourist resort, etc)? If so, how do we know our place in the order?

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6. After reading

1. How, over the centuries, have different schools of thought (followers of different
philosophies) attempted to handle poverty?
Has any been successful so far, or have they all thrown the baby out with the bath
water (= damaged valuable parts of the system when trying to get rid of problematic
elements)? List the side-effects of the solutions proposed/applied so far.

2. Children seem to inherit poverty because they are unable to break free from the
following vicious circle:
‘why are you poor?’
‘because I’m stupid’
‘why are you stupid?’
‘because I’m poor’

Using the facts given in the article suggest a way (ways) for kids to escape poverty.

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