Word: poorer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rich were able to fill their garages with Porsches. Meanwhile, the poor were watching their streets become battle grounds, drug lord squaring off against drug lord. While the average person in the top two quintiles of income got wealthier during the Reagan era, the rest of the country got poorer...
...debt burden of the poor. But just as important is a concerted campaign to convince the people of developing countries that it is in their own long-term interest to preserve their environments. Wiping out forests may make developing nations momentarily richer, but it is bound to produce a poorer future...
Ultimately, no problem may be more threatening to the earth's environment than the proliferation of the human species. Today the planet holds more than 5 billion people. During the next century, world population will double, with 90% of that growth occurring in poorer, developing countries. African nations are expanding at the fastest rate. During the next 30 years, for example, the population of Kenya (annual growth rate: 4%) will jump from 23 million to 79 million; Nigeria's population (growth rate: 3%) will soar from 112 million to 274 million. Expansion is slower in Brazil, China, India and Indonesia...
...Poorer countries have fewer options. Wracked by periodic floods, Bangladesh cannot simply evacuate the "chars" -- bars of sand and silt in the Ganges Delta -- where millions of people have set up camp. But the government has drawn up plans for a network of raised helipads and local flood shelters to facilitate the distribution of emergency aid if, as seems inevitable, disaster strikes again. Meanwhile, the country can only appeal to its Himalayan neighbors to do something about the root cause of the flooding: the deforestation of watersheds in India and Nepal that has turned seasonal monsoons into "unnatural disasters...
...shocking toll on the shoddy construction of the buildings in Armenia's cities and towns. According to Brian Tucker, acting state geologist of California who has visited Armenia, many buildings in the region are made of 8-in.-thick concrete slabs held together by metal hooks and mortar. Poorer Armenians, he says, tend to live in "very fragile, very deadly houses" made of unreinforced mud and rock. Yet geologists have long known that the region affected by the quake is interlaced with small faults in the earth's crust and has been shaken by dozens of serious tremors this century...