The Developing World Reading Answers: IELTS Reading Practice Test with Answers

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The Developing World Reading Passage 

Paragraph A

The developing world is made up of Asia and Africa's underdeveloped economies. Oceania and Latin America are viewed as single entities that share traits with the developed world, including poverty, large fertility rates, and financial reliance. The developing world was previously referred to as "the third world." By drawing a parallel between the "third estate"—the common French people before and during the French Revolution—and the monks and nobility who made up the "first" and "second" estates, respectively, the French researcher Alfred Sauvy first used the phrase in 1952. According to Sauvy, "the poor country is nothing, and it strives to be something," similar to the third estate. The phrase, therefore, indicates that, like the third estate, the third world is abused and also that, as the third estate, its future is one of revolution. It also expresses a second point that Sauvy touches on a nonalignment. This is because the developing world does not belong to either the developed capitalist world or the affluent former communist union. At the 1955 meeting of Afro-Asian nations conducted in Bandung and Indonesia, the term "third world" was coined. Le Tiers-Monde was a book written in 1956 by a group of social researchers affiliated with Sauvy's Research Center of Population Studies in Paris. Francois Perroux, a French economist, created the same-named journal three years later, focusing on issues related to backwardness. By the 1950s, the phrase was often used in French media to allude to Asia's developing nations like Oceania, Latin America, and Africa. However, in an attempt to destroy the stigma associated with the phrase "third world," national politicians and social pundits now refer to it as the "developing world."

Paragraph B
 

The emerging world shares several characteristics with other nations, including skewed economies that are heavily dependent on manufacturing basic goods for the developed world, rural social structures, rapid population growth, and pervasive poverty. However, the developing world is starkly defined since it contains nations with differing levels of economic growth. And while the majority of third-world nations have impoverished rural areas and urban squatter settlements, their ruling classes typically have rich lifestyles.

Paragraph C

The integration of the undeveloped nations into the global capitalist economy through invasion or indirect dominance is related to the confluence of circumstances in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America. The biggest economic impact of Western dominance was the development of the first global market ever. Industrial capitalism upended ancient economies and, in fact, entire communities by establishing sub-economies connected to the West all across the developing globe and by importing other contemporary institutions. Lack of development resulted from this setback.

Paragraph D

The industries of underdeveloped nations sometimes consist of just a few modern economic activities, such as mining or the growing of agricultural products, because they have been tailored to the requirements of developed countries. Large foreign businesses have frequently maintained control over these operations. Large consumers in the economically powerful Western nations typically set prices for goods produced in developing nations, and commerce with the West accounts for the vast majority of their revenue. The capitalisation of the nations under foreign rule was severely constrained during the colonial period by open abuse. Also, after decolonisation (in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s), the emerging world's economies only gradually grew or just did not. This was large because of the worsening "balance of trade," or the ratio between the value of the commodities a country must buy from abroad and its revenue from export sales to other nations. When import prices increase more quickly than export revenues, the trade agreements are considered to be deteriorating. The majority of goods traded internationally are priced by consumers in industrialised nations, so the worsening situation of poor nations was not unexpected. Only the oil-producing nations were able to avoid the repercussions of the Western dominance of the global economy after 1973.

Paragraph E

Without accounting for population growth, no analysis of the underdeveloped world could hope to evaluate its prospects. The birth rate is still increasing at unheard-of rates, even though the mortality rate from diseases linked to poverty remains high enough to raise concerns on a global scale. Population development in the global world will undoubtedly limit meaningful increases in livelihoods and put people in stagnating economies at risk of rising levels of starvation and malnutrition.  

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