NewsTracker Answers for week of Nov. 25, 2019

Q: An estimated 45 million people are threatened with hunger as a severe drought is strangling wide stretches of southern Africa. Where is southern Africa?

Circle the area on this map

Q: Many farmers are struggling to keep their families and animals alive as their crops fail in a drought that also is killing wildlife, including hundreds of elephants in Botswana and its northeastern neighbor . . .

A. Namibia

B. South Africa

C. Zambia

D. Zimbabwe

D. Botswana is bordered to the northeast by Zimbabwe, southeast and south by South Africa and the north and west by Namibia. Its northern border with Zambia is only a few hundred meters long. Up to 70 percent of Botswana is covered by the Kalahari Desert.

Q: Southern Africa has received normal rainfall in just one of the past five growing seasons. What South African city imposed significant rationing last year to avoid completely running out of water?

A. Cape Town

B. Khartoum

C. Monrovia

D. Nairobi

A. Cape Town’s water reservoirs dropped to as low as 15 percent of capacity because of an extended drought. Restrictions cut water usage by more than half, and later winter rains increased supplies to the home of South Africa’s parliament. Khartoum, Monrovia and Nairobi are the capitals of Sudan, Liberia and Kenya.

Q: Two cataclysmic cyclones hit Mozambique, Zimbabwe and other southern African countries early this year, wiping out crops of maize and other staple crops. The storms came out of which ocean on Africa’s east coast?

A. Atlantic

B. Indian

C. Pacific

D. Southern

B. Without normal rainfall, subsistence farmers are hard-pressed to recover from the destruction caused by the tropical storms that surged inland from the Indian Ocean.

Q: The lack of clean water is one of the biggest environmental issues facing southern Africa, which also has some of the world’s poorest people and worst inequality. What nation entirely surrounded by South Africa has most income inequality?

A. Angola

B. Eswanti

C. Lesotho

D. Malawi

C. According to the CIA World Factbook, tiny Lesotho has the worst income inequality in the world and South Africa ranks as the second most unequal. Botswana, Namibia and Zambia also rank among the 10 worst nations.