2 . Lima, the capital of Peru, is the world’s second largest desert city. The region is water-stressed. The annual rainfall is less than 4 cm. Access to water is an ongoing problem for the residents in and around the South American capital.

When industrial engineer Abel Cruz was a boy, his weekly work was to climb down a valley in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes to fetch the family’s water from a spring. “It was downhill from the house, far away and steep,” he says. Cruz began dreaming up better ways to collect water. Then he noticed that subtropical plants capture rain and mist with their wide leaves. Actually Lima doesn’t lack in humidity (湿度), averaging 83% year-round. Located in the foothills of the Andean mountains, it is close to the Pacific Ocean, which ensures that blankets of dense fog roll in for three-quarters of a year. Eventually, Abel Cruz struck upon the idea of a fog net.

Each upraised net is 20 square metres, where micro-droplets of water suspended in the foggy atmosphere condense (凝结) and drip down into collection tanks. Approximately 200 to 400 litres of water is collected daily from each net. Locals can fetch it in buckets for small-scale farming. Working in Lima with support from the Creating Water Foundation, Cruz has installed over 3, 600 nets on hillsides around the city to capture fog drifting in from the Pacific Ocean. Cruz raised funds for hundreds of nets in Peru with his revolutionary initiative Peruvians Without Water. He aims to set up even more fog harvesters, and to treat the water to make it drinkable.

“The planet has less and less fresh water,” Cruz points out, “because the glaciers that are natural reservoirs are disappearing. So we must find a way to accumulate and save water for times of drought.” The technology is life-changing for the poor households who normally have to rely on water tanks being delivered to them. His approach ends extreme poverty and brings rural development. Moreover, he is trying to bring healthy and clean water also to urban areas lacking water.

3 . Sheep herding is a profitable industry in China. However, if farmers want to earn more, they have to solve a range of problems such as scale expansion, processing and marketing, which is almost impossible relying on only their individual strength. But farmers in Nanxiaozhai village in the Shanxi city of Huairen, have found a solution.

Guo Jianqiang, a resident in Nanxiaozhai, said he started his business in 2013 by raising about 300 sheep. The number has since increased to 1,000. “I earned an income of 2 million yuan ( $309,000) last year and the amount is expected to reach 9 million yuan this year,” he said.

Guo attributed the growth to the establishment of a sheep cooperative, which helped to expand operational scale and sales channels with the joint force of stockholders.

According to Guo Zhidong, Party secretary of the village, Nanxiaozhai now has a total of 89 such cooperatives. The cooperatives have also developed a full industrial chain for sheep, ranging from raising, slaughtering and land processing to their sale.

Nanxiaozhai has a long history in the sheep industry, according to the village Party chief, who explained that was a natural choice out of the village’s environmental conditions. In Nanxiaozhai, residents used to farm on the infertile land and the grain yield could hardly support their existence.

It was Wang Yueming, Cao Zhiguo and other villagers who started their business as sheep dealers in the late 1970s. “They could earn up to 20 yuan for selling a sheep,” Guo Zhidong said. “That was a very large income at that time.” Later, about 80 percent of the villagers were engaged in the business but they found purchasing sheep from neighboring villages became more difficult because of limited output. So they began to raise sheep themselves.

The village business has boosted the sheep industry in Huairen city as a whole. Statistics show the city’s annual output of sheep is about 6 million heads, making it a renowned sheep-producing base in Shanxi.

4 . New research finds a link between poverty and poor decision making. The findings may explain why poor people sometimes make bad choices that continue their hardship.

Earlier studies have found the poor less likely to escape poverty. But there has been little research on why the poor make decisions that make their lives harder. Until recently, Eldar Shafir, a psychologist and his team did two experiments. One took place at a shopping center in New Jersey. The other was carried out among sugar cane (甘蔗) farmers in rural India.

The New Jersey experiment involved individuals with low paying jobs and others belonged to the middle class. All the volunteers were asked what they would do if their cars needed repairing.

The volunteers were given two imaginary situations. In the first, the car repair cost $150. In the second, $1,500.

“In the first, the poor and the rich performed equally well.”

“And when the repair cost $1,500, the poor performed significantly worse.” The poor lost about 13 IQ points on average. This is about the loss experienced when a person has not slept for one night.

The scientists then wondered if the same person reacted differently when he was rich and when he was poor. Once a year when the harvest comes in, the India sugar cane farmers earn most of their money, which often does not last through the year.

“So they find themselves basically rich after the harvest when the income comes in and poor just before the harvest.”

The researchers gave them tests similar to the ones taken by the people in New Jersey. They tested the Indian farmers before the harvest and after.

And the results were much the same as with the mall shoppers.

“They performed much more slowly and made many more mistakes when they were poor than when they were rich.”

Mr. Shafir says the results support 50 years of research that shows all humans have limited mental power to deal with things in life.

“And so the insight here is that, having not enough of something in a way makes it harder to make good decisions for everything else.”

5 . As the world’s wealthiest country, it’s hard to understand that there are 38 million Americans living in poverty. Poverty is defined as a household income below the national poverty line, which is $25, 750 for a family of four.     1     Millions of people are struggling to afford basic necessities like food, shelter, and healthcare.

There are many factors that contribute to poverty in America.     2     In many cities, the cost of rent is astronomical(天文数字), and even those with full-time jobs can’t afford to pay for both rent and other basic expenses. Additionally, low-paying jobs and a lack of access to quality education can also contribute to poverty.

    3     People who live in poverty are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases and mental health issues, and they are more likely to die prematurely. Children growing up in poverty are at a disadvantage from the start, as they often don’t have access to quality education or healthcare, and they are more likely to experience food insecurity and homelessness.

Poverty is a complex issue with no easy solutions.     4     These include things like increasing access to affordable housing, creating more job opportunities with livable wages, and improving access to education and healthcare for all Americans.

In conclusion, poverty in America is a harsh reality that affects millions of people every day.     5     Necessary steps should be taken to ensure that all Americans have the opportunity to live a healthy and prosperous life.

7 . Imagine you’re a farmer in India with a crop of potatoes to sell. Typically, you go to a marketplace called a mandi and get the best price you can from a local middleman, who will then sell them to another middleman.

Sanjay Agarwalla learned about Indian farmers’ lack of access to buyers even when he was a student decades ago. After talking the problem over with his son Aditya, then a computer science major at Princeton University, the two decided to form an online marketplace they called the Kisan Network in late 2015.

“Anything that deals with agriculture in India is pretty large. So, if it’s a problem, the problem can affect millions of people, and the impact of the solution could be enormous,” Sanjay says. After all, some 70 percent of rural households in the country depend on agriculture as a main source of income.

Kisan Network’s app lets farmers advertise their produce and see potential buyers beyond the local mandi. Once the deal is completed online, Kisan runs the produce from the farmer direct to the buyer, each side staying put.

Kisan’s fee ranges from 5 to 15 percent of the sale, and farmers get to keep more than they would under the traditional system, where middleman after middleman raises the price of the produce before it reaches a final buyer. “Even with low-profit crops like potatoes, we have been able to offer 10 percent more than physical market rates. That’s what our entire goal is,” says Aditya. “As for higher-profit crops, the improvement goes up.”

Building products for this new set of technology consumers brings its own challenges. “All of our engineers are from urban backgrounds,” says Aditya Agarwalla. “It’s not like you’re building something you would use on your own.” To be effective, Kisan’s platform must work with inexpensive smartphones on slower networks and be able to support regional languages.

Today, farmers feel it’s better selling to someone who is at their doors. They do not have to typically travel miles to a mandi, staying overnight without a place to sleep.