28 Write a composition expressing your opinion on the following topic. Defend your opinion using 120-180 words.
What is ‘charity’? What person can be called a charitable one? Is ‘being charitable’ a quality people are born with or do we acquire it socially?
Evaluation
What have you done in this unit?
What have you learnt from it?
What did you enjoy about it?
Have you any criticisms of it?
Have you any recommendations or suggestions for doing it differently?
International Organizations Dealing with Social Problems
“Aid is not charity but a vital investment in global peace and security”.
D. Wolfensohn,
President of the World Bank, 2001
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1 Make comments on the quotation given at the beginning of the unit.
2 Discuss the following questions in pairs or groups:
What international organizations that help people solve their social problems do you know?
What are the main problems these organizations are concerned with?
Give examples of international economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems that exist in the world.
3 You are going to read the passage about the United Nations Organization (UNO), one of the largest international organizations dealing with social, economic and humanitarian problems in the world. Before reading the passage try to recollect the events happened recently in the world that required the assistance and interference of the UNO. What is the role of the UNO in these events? Share your ideas with your partners.
4 Read the passage ‘Organization of the United Nations’ to be ready to answer the questions after the passage.
Organization of the United Nations
The purposes, principles, and the organization of the United Nations are outlined in the Charter. The ultimate goals of the United Nations, according to its Charter, are “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, … to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” Its primary purpose, therefore, is to maintain international peace and security.
Other important objectives listed in Chapter 1 of the Charter include developing friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principles of equal rights and self-determination of peoples; achieving worldwide cooperation to solve international economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems; respecting and promoting human rights; and serving as a centre where nations can coordinate their actions and activities towards these various ends.
Chapter 6 of the Charter provides for the pacific settlement of disputes, through such means as negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and/or judicial decisions. When pacific settlement fails, the goal of collective security – whereby the security of each member is assured by all, and aggression against one would be met by the resistance of all – underlies the provisions in Chapter 7 for coercive measures, including economic and military sanctions, against an aggressor. In practice, however, collective security has been extremely difficult to achieve. During the Cold War, collective security was replaced by peacekeeping and preventive diplomacy. In the post-Cold War period, appeals to the United Nations for peacemaking purposes increased dramatically, renewing discussion about the feasibility of putting into practice the original UN provisions for collective security.
In addition to traditional peacekeeping and preventive diplomacy tasks, the functions of UN forces in the post-Cold War era have been expanded considerably. From 1990 they supervised elections, encouraged peace negotiation and distributed food in many parts of the world.
(From: The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, V. 2).
5 Make comments on the quotation given at the beginning of the unit.
6 Discuss the following questions in pairs:
What are the main principles and objectives of the UNO listed in the Charter?
What are the main ways that UNO uses in order to fulfill its functions and achieve goals listed in the Charter?
What are the functions of UN forces?
7 Look at the words and phrases underlined in the passage ‘Organization of the United Nations’ and explain what they mean. Make up sentences with these words.
8 Read the passage about the importance of child caring in the international contemporary society and fill in the gaps with the prepositions suggested in the box. You may use the same preposition more than once.
by with under for in to of at up
To look into some aspects of the future, we do not need projections …1… supercomputers. Much of the next millennium can be seen how we care …2… our children today. Tomorrow’s world may be influenced …3….. science and technology; but more than anything, it is already taking shape …4…. the bodies and minds of our children.
Over 200 million children …5….. developing countries …6….the age of five are malnourished. For them, and for the world …7….. large, the message is especially urgent. Malnutrition contributes ……8… more than half of the nearly 12 million under-five deaths in developing countries each year. Malnourished children often suffer the loss of precious mental capacities. They fall ill more often. If they survive, they may grow ……9…. …10… lasting mental or physical disabilities.
This human suffering and waste happens because …11…. illness – much of it preventable; because breastfeeding is stopped too early; because children’s nutritional needs are not sufficiently understood; because long-entrenched prejudices imprison women and children …12…. poverty.
9 Use additional sources available to find the information about well-known international organizations that are involved in solving social problems in the world. Making your project you may use the plan suggested:
History
Members, National Committees, regional and field offices
Aims and objectives
Categories of people they help
Problems they deal with
Countries they provide assistance for
Plans and perspectives of the organization
9. Problems and difficulties the organization comes across
10 You are going to read the article ‘To Feed a Growing World Family, Fund Science for Farmers’. Look at the heading and try to predict what this article might be about.
11 Look through the words that will appear in the article and try to explain what these words mean. What context might these words appear?
malnutrition
famine
fertilizer
underinvestment
genetics and genomics
philanthropic
starvation
12 You are going to read an article where the writer Robert M. Goodman is sharing his ideas on how to solve the problems of poverty and malnutrition in developing countries. Some parts of the article are removed, read the article and fill in the gaps with the appropriate part (A, B, C, D or E). There is one extra part that you do not need to use.
A) And they need access to the best and most appropriate technologies, from modern genetics to organic methods, to serve the needs of farmers and local entrepreneurs who will play the critical roles.
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B) But it isn’t enough. What shall we do in the developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the pressure of population, the underinvestment in infrastructure, the degradation of the environment and the constraints of natural resources conspire to make hunger acute in the coming decades?
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C) The 19th century’s westward expansion in North America was in part driven by impoverishment of soils in the East. Intensive tillage made possible by mechanization helped create the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
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D) All of this growth will occur in the less developed countries, where more than 2 billion people, mostly children, already suffer from grinding poverty, malnutrition, hunger and sometimes famine. In these countries the population will rise from 4 to 7 billion in a single generation. No one has a clue about how these people will be fed.
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E) It also will help them be intelligent shoppers for appropriate technologies that enable them to make progress. Today’s situation is much more difficult than the problem the developed world solved in the Green Revolution. Population has doubled and will double again.
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