voa 2015 / 4 / 14

Even with falling oil prices and strong U.S. growth, the head of the International Monetary Fund said the global economy only expanded around 3.4 percent last year. While that is near the average growth over the last couple of decades, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said growth was uneven and too slow.

"Given the lingering impact of the great recession on people, it is actually generating hardship for many people around the world, including those countries where more than 50 percent of the youth population goes unemployed. So growth is not good enough," she said.

Lagarde urged nations to take advantage of lower oil prices to cut energy subsidies and use the saved money on education to boost long-term economic growth.

The IMF chief said progress on trade agreements could also help growth and employment, while better access to credit could help small businesses hire more people.

And she called for more investment in infrastructure to provide jobs in the short term and bolster growth in the long term by facilitating commerce.

Improved infrastructure is also the focus of the new Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Some analysts see it as a rival to the IMF and World Bank, which critics say are unfairly dominated by Western nations.

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is urging the new bank to adhere to high standards for dealing with environmental and labor issues.

He also said nearly one billion people around the world struggle to survive on less than $1.25 a day. Kim pledged to work closely with the new bank because the enemy was poverty - not other institutions.

"Poverty is 2.5 billion people not having access to financial services like bank accounts. Poverty is 1.4 billion people without access to electricity. Poverty is having to put your children to bed at night without food. And poverty is not going to school because, in order to survive, everyone in the family needs to make a few cents every day," he said.

World Bank critics said the global lender would fight poverty more effectively if it speeded up efforts to reform its large bureaucracy and improved safeguards for people and environments affected by bank projects.

Nezir Sinani of the advocacy group Bank Information Center said he was worried by proposals to ask borrowing nations to implement labor and environmental safeguards.

"That is going to result in huge problems in many countries that we know today are not good at defending human rights or civil liberties," said Sinani.

Top World Bank and IMF officials will be discussing these and other complex issues this week with financial and bank officials from member nations around the world as they gather here in Washington.

 今天我们要学的词是 ownership. Ownership 所有权。统计数字显示，Home ownership peaked at 69.2 percent in 2004 in the United States, but had slipped to 64 percent by the end of 2014. 美国买房的家庭比例2004年最高，达到69.2%, 到2014年年底时滑落到64%。皮尤研究中心的调查显示，54 percent of blacks now see gun ownership as a good thing, up from 29 percent two years ago. 如今，美国54%的黑人认同购买和拥有枪支，这一比例两年前还只有29%。好的，今天我们学习的词是 ownership, ownership, ownership...