1/3 of US children live in poverty

Poverty is the condition of not having enough money to live up to decent or acceptable standards. It's hard to define exactly how much money a person needs in order not to be in poverty, but UNICEF has created a standard by which to judge whether people in a country are living in poverty or not.

According to the UNICEF standard, 1/3 of US children live in poverty. The US is 36th out of 41 'developed' countries that were tested.

I think this is because the US government is good at providing free services, free food, free housing, free medical care etc., but it is not good at helping people to help themselves. The Democrats get people to vote for them by giving out free things and the Republicans just want to take free things away from people. There is no middle ground of useful answers in the USA - it's all politics.

This article is from last year, but it is worth reading:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/29/child-poverty-in-the-u-s-is-among-the-worst-in-the-developed-world/

Vocabulary from the article:

the developed world - I am not sure how they determine 'developed' versus 'undeveloped' countries, but developed countries would be countries with a strong business sector, I am guessing.

The US ranks near the bottom - to rank a series of things is to place them from first to last

the pack - the group, in this case

Let that sink in - basically the writer is saying this is so shocking you should think about it and absorb this or understand this deeply

pegs - establishes

more alarmingly - an alarm goes off when something is wrong, so more alarmingly means the writer is pointing out something even worse than he pointed out before

benchmarking - establishing; so the writer points out its really difficult to establish an amount of money under which a person can be considered to live in poverty.

former, latter - the latter is the last thing mentioned, the former is the thing mentioned before the latter thing

vulnerable - those who can be hurt easily