In several of the world’s wealthiest countries in the world literacy rates are very close to one hundred percent for both men and women. But, this is the exception rather than the rule as far as the world is concerned. Most of the world suffers from a gender gap in literacy rates, this is generally most pronounced in countries that are extremely poor, although a few of the world’s poorest countries have less of a gender gap in literacy rates than some of the world’s wealthier countries. How can we explain this? Well, the answer is that some cultures have certain social standards and expectations for women. Or, more accurately, some cultures have more strict social standards and expectations for women. The Islamic world, particularly the Middle East and parts of North Africa, experiences some of the worst rates of female literacy in the world, particularly when compared to male literacy rates in the same region.

Of these options South America scores by far the highest in relative gender empowerment. Europe, particularly Western Europe, tends to score the highest; closely followed by North America and Australasia. From there it is a rather precipitous drop off to South America and parts of East Asia. This is followed by another substantial drop to South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East where gender empowerment is at its lowest.

"Folk culture" describes cultural traditions that are done at a local level and which are derived from longstanding cultural practices. Folk culture is separated from popular and high culture by its traditional and localized nature. The maypole tradition, where traditional dancing takes place around a pole on May 1st in villages and small towns, is a classic example of folk culture.

Western popular music, based off of the larger Western musical tradition, has become the popular music of much of the world. This is not due to the intrinsic quality of the music as much as it is to the influence of American and Western European media companies, which are the largest such companies in the world.

All of these answer choices are accurate descriptions of the differences between folk culture and pop culture. Folk culture tends to be local, rural, consistent over time, but inconsistent over geography. Pop culture, on the other hand, tends to be widespread and uniform over a large geographic distance, it tends to be based in urban centers, and it generally experiences fairly rapid change over time. Pop culture is often used to refer to popular music, movies, and TV shows. On the other hand, folk culture is used to refer to the traditions and customs that make up the cultural identity of a local group of people.

While nonmatieral cultural deals with the intangible, idealogical aspects of culture, like beliefs, folk and popular culture are the two primary divisions of material, tangible culture. Folk culture represents homogeneity, or sameness, and is usually practiced in isolated regions, free from the influence of pop culture’s diffusion. Since popular culture diffuses over wide areas of diverse people, it is very different from the homogeneity of folk culture, and so while folk culture may remain unchanged for years, popular culture diffuses and this changes rapidly. Moreover, the Internet and television have only increased the speed and expanse of popular culture’s diffusion, and have allowed new ideas to reach farther places faster. Thus the upper-hand of technology in pop culture diffusion means it is often spread from the most-developed regions of the world.

Popular culture is typically focused on ideals including but not limited to: celebrity influence, social media, urban culture, and Western society. Rural culture is not typically associated with popular culture because less influence is placed on cultural trends in smaller towns.

The city of Jerusalem has long been a contentious city for people of the three great western monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is sacred to all three religions and countless people have died to try and ensure that their religion controls the city. When considering why it is sacred to the Islamic faith we need look no further than the Dome of the Rock, the site where according to Islam the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.  

Belfast is the capital city of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom and is therefore controlled by the British government based in London. It has a Protestant majority and a Catholic minority, the Catholic minority wants Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of Ireland into one nation. These political and religious differences have manifested themselves in the previous hundred years in bloody conflict and acts of terrorism and government persecution.

Although genocide can involve religious conflict, forced religious conversion, or spontaneous uprisings of ethnic violence, none of these answer choices is the best description of genocide. A “genocide” is a premeditated and deliberate attempt, usually sponsored by a government, to kill every individual from a particular ethnic group; to effectively eliminate that ethnic group’s presence from a region or from the planet. Famous examples of genocides include the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Armenian Genocide.