The Effects of Poverty on Individuals

The Effects of Poverty on Individuals

  • Submitted By: lifang
  • Date Submitted: 12/26/2011 7:32 PM
  • Category: Social Issues
  • Words: 409
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 424

The Effects of Poverty on an Individual
There are lots of proverbs about poverty, such as, “poverty is no sin”, “poverty is the root of all evils”, “poverty is not a shame, but the being ashamed of it is”. We can conclude that people’s view on poverty vary from person to person. In fact, as every coin has two sides, poverty has both positive and negative effects on an individual.
To someone who is optimistic to life, poverty is a powerful engine. Look around you, most people being in poverty are eager to change their terrible situation and improve their life quality. Therefore, those people usually more hard-working than ordinary ones. Especially, some students among us look forward to having a bright future through studying hard. As a famous Chinese saying goes: the poor man’s child shares the household. Compared with their peers, they are more frugal in daily life. In a word, poverty can encourage you to struggle for success if you make good use of it.
But poverty isn’t always that good. Poverty can also lead to both material and mental problems. On one hand, poverty means one don’t have enough money to buy what they want, even necessity for life, not to mention luxury. Thus, they have to suffer from the lack of material. Worse still, poverty is a main cause of health problems. Due to undernutrition for a long time, diseases are more easily infected. Then they need a large number of money to cure. A vicious circle will begin. On the other hand, poverty makes a person feel himself inferior than others. So they are silent in public place or crowd. This kind of abnormal mentality is not only harmful to individual but also to whole society. A typical example is the tragedy story of Majia Jue, a college student in Yunnan University. Because of poverty, he is looked up down by his classmates. Eventually, he is enraged and killed his roommates as revenge on the society. Therefore, we can’t ignore the negative effects of poverty on individuals.
We can see that...

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