Summary & Response (compare & contrast)
Format MLA
Volume of 1 page (275 words)
Assignment type : Other types
Description
1. In this assessment, there are two tasks: a Summary (part one) and a Response
(part two).
2. Part One: Read the passages below and write a short summary for Text One
(approximately 70 words). The first sentence should introduce the source,
state the main idea and contain a citation. The remaining sentences should
summarize the most important sub-points of the text.
3. Part Two: In a focused, unified, and coherent paragraph answer the prompt
below. Develop your main idea using the compare and contrast rhetorical
mode. between ( text one and text two )
COL 140 Summary & Response (compare & contrast)
Instructions:
1. In this assessment, there are two tasks: a Summary (part one) and a Response
(part two).
2. Part One: Read the passages below and write a short summary for Text One
(approximately 70 words). The first sentence should introduce the source,
state the main idea and contain a citation. The remaining sentences should
summarize the most important sub-points of the text.
3. Part Two: In a focused, unified, and coherent paragraph answer the prompt
below. Develop your main idea using the compare and contrast rhetorical
mode.
Remember:
• Think about the audience to whom you are writing.
• Any supporting ideas taken from the source for your response must be
paraphrased. Do not use direct quotes. Provide an in-text citation for
sources you use in your response.
• Edit your papers carefully.
Part I
Text One:
Why Does Hunger Still Exist in Africa?
When I first started traveling to Africa, I would often meet children in the villages I
was visiting and try to guess their ages. I was shocked to find out how often I guessed
wrong. Kids I thought were 7 or 8 years old based on how tall they were – would tell
me that they were actually 12 or 13 years old.
What I was witnessing was the terrible impact of malnutrition in Africa. These
children were suffering from a condition known as stunting. They were not starving,
but they were not getting enough to eat, leaving them years behind in their
development – and it was hard to see how they could ever catch up.
Stunting not only affects a child’s height. It also has an impact on brain development.
Stunted children are more likely to fall behind at school, miss key milestones in
reading and math, and go on to live in poverty. When stunted children don’t reach
their potential, neither do their countries. Malnutrition saps a country’s strength,
lowering productivity and keeping the entire nation trapped in poverty.
Worldwide, one in four children is stunted. Three-quarters of them live in South Asia
and sub-Saharan Africa. However, while stunting has declined by more than a third in
South Asia since 1990, in sub-Saharan Africa, the number of stunted children is still
on the rise, up 12 million since 1990 to 56 million. Forty percent of all children in
sub-Saharan Africa are stunted.
I run into a lot of people from rich countries who still think of Africa as a continent of
starvation. The fact is, that’s an outdated picture (to the extent that it was ever
accurate at all). Thanks to economic growth and smart policies, the extreme hunger
and starvation that once defined the continent are now rare. As I saw when I was back
in Africa last month with best-selling author John Green, today the issue isn’t quantity
of food as much as it is quality—whether kids are getting enough protein and other
nutrients to fully develop.
As Melinda and I have grown aware of the scale of this challenge, we’ve made
improving nutrition a bigger priority for our foundation. One thing we’ve quickly
come to appreciate is the problem’s complexity. There’s no vaccine to prevent
stunting. Proper nutrition involves eating enough food, and the right kinds, every day
of your life. While the global health community is still working to understand all of
the causes and solutions to malnutrition, we do know a lot about how to ensure
children get the nutrition they need for a healthy start to life.
We know that getting children the right nutrition in the first 1000 days – from the start
of a woman’s pregnancy until her child’s 2nd birthday – is the best down payment on
their future, giving them the opportunity to grow and develop physically and
mentally. We also know that exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of a
child’s life is the single most effective intervention to help the brain develop and
protect against life-threatening diseases. That’s why we continue to research the best
ways to address cultural beliefs and other barriers that have kept almost half of all
women from using optimal breastfeeding practices.
We know kids have a hard time getting the nutrients they need when fruits, meats, and
vegetables are in short supply—so fortifying staple foods like cooking oil, flour, and
salt with essential vitamins and minerals can fill the gap. We’re also beginning to
develop new crops that are more-nutritious–including a sweet potato that’s enriched
with vitamin A—and also produce a higher yield. Not only does this help smallholder
farmers earn more income that can be used to diversify their family’s diet, it also puts
more nutritious food directly on their table.
Providing better health care can make a difference too. Children who receive the
rotavirus vaccine, for example, have fewer bouts of diarrhea, which can drain kids of
vital nutrients and make them more susceptible to infection. Likewise, clean water
and sanitation play a role in improving nutrition by reducing illness and disease.
We have many great interventions on our side, but with so many factors at play it can
be difficult to measure which interventions have the most impact on improving
nutrition and why. If I could have one wish, I would want the world to have a better
understanding of malnutrition and how to solve it.
We have much more research to do in this area and we will continue to make
progress. But what’s not in doubt is the importance of giving all children the nutrition
they need for a healthy start to life. Their future depends on it. So does Africa’s.
Gates, B. (2014, August 01). Why does hunger still exist in Africa? Retrieved
January 30, 2017, from gatesnotes, https://www.gatesnotes.com/
Development-Does-Hunger-Still-Exist-Africas-Table-Day-One
Text Two:
Technology is Key to Ending Hunger
Food insecurity in the Horn of Africa has risen from severe to catastrophic. An
estimated 2.4 million people in Kenya, 4.5m in Ethiopia, 0.1m in Djibouti and 3m in
Somalia are at risk, ravaged by famine, according to surveys carried out by the
Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), under the UN Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), a watchdog on drought, and food
shortages.
Famines, like wars and epidemics, are cyclical and have knocked on the doors of
humanity with unrelenting regularity throughout history, claiming lives in their wake.
When the potato, the main food of Ireland, rotted in the ground because of blight in
mid 1840s, about one million people died of starvation, resulting in mass migration,
reducing the population of Ireland by 50% by 1911. The Chinese famine of 1959 to
1961 claimed 15 to 30 million lives; the Ethiopian famine of 1984/85 devastated
Wollo Province killing one million and affecting 8 million, while the North Korean
Famine of 1995 to 1999 killed an estimated 2.5 million. Compare these to the
Rwandan Genocide that claimed about 0.8 million lives, showing that famine can
unleash a more devastating blow than even the calculation of wretched homicidal
minds.
The definition of famine has taken a technical turn. There is famine when in a given
population 30% of the children are severely malnourished, 20% of the population has
no food, and there are 4 deaths among every 10,000 children. In Sub-Saharan Africa,
hunger and malnutrition claim more lives than TB, HIV/Aids and Malaria combined,
and one in every three people suffers from hunger. The global picture is no less
disheartening. More than 800 million people, roughly the population of the African
continent, go to bed hungry.
In 2000, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), committed world leaders to
reducing the number of the hungry by 50% by 2015, as one of its Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) but the number of the chronically hungry have risen by
about 62 million since 1992. Hunger is inherited. Each year millions of children are
born underweight because their mothers are malnourished. Yet the world produces
enough food to feed its population of 7 billion.
Famine is a violation of the right to safe and nutritious food for all and it has no place
today in a forward looking, robust and functional multi-party democracies. It can be
mitigated through technology, which can deliver water to the farthest corners of the
country. It is time to invest in dams and water pans to arrest and harness water that
flows all the way to the sea. Modern irrigations systems that make use of drip
irrigation and green houses, powered by solar and wind energy, desalination that
removes salt from sea and lake waters, cloud seeding, an artificial way of inducing
rainfall, waste water recycling, roof catchments and transvasement, which is a method
of diverting rivers from their courses, can all be harnessed to combat famine.
Kenyans have been fed on a menu of drought, famine and aridity for years. We even
have a Ministry of Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands. I had the privilege of being
its first Permanent Secretary. Aridity by definition is present where the land has no
soil and vegetation cover and water is not within reach of a few hundred meters below
the surface. There are no such lands in Kenya. Not even in the North. So we do not
have arid lands. If we are unable to see beyond our noses to make use of the vast
resources to feed the people and overcome famine, it is because we suffer from aridity
of the mind. The land is innocent.
Technology is key to ending hunger. (2011, Aug 10). AllAfrica.Com
Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/882935163?
accountid=15192
Part II:
Please respond to the following prompt with a compare and contrast paragraph that is
no longer than 300 words.
The articles above discuss different ways to help the global hunger problem.
Select a specific method from each of the articles, and describe the similarities
and/or differences between them.
