“Offshore financial centers” have sprung up around the world in recent years. They are generally, although not always, island nations with a relatively small economy (notable exceptions include Switzerland and Panama). They offer very low taxes and varying degrees of secrecy for large businesses who store a portion of their money in the financial centers of the country. This has benefits for both the large businesses and the governments of the offshore financial centers. Both profit, and both have to worry less about the consequences of their actions. Offshore centers of this kind are often controversial as a result of these practices.

Maquiladoras are regions of northern Mexico where American companies conduct a great deal of their business, particularly manufacturing. They flourished in the 1990s and 2000s in the aftermath of the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which greatly reduced trading obstacles between Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Believe it or not the target year for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals was 2015. Seeing as you are reading this in either 2015, or after, you can be fairly confident that the United Nations did not meet its goals of eradicating starvation and poverty, providing universal public education, and combating malaria (as well as several others). But, these dates are often arbitrary and are more meant to serve as motivation than concrete deadlines. Progress has certainly been made in almost all areas of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals since 2000.  

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals were passed at a 2000 summit of the United Nations. They included all of these answers except reducing religious conflict. They also included eradicating extreme hunger, improving maternal health, encouraging cooperative global commerce, and combating malaria and other infectious viruses.

The “offshore” aspect of “offshore financial centers” refers to the fact that these countries are usually small islands but they do not have to be. In fact, Switzerland is one of the most historically significant “offshore financial centers” in the world, and it continues to be extremely influential to this day. An “offshore financial center” is a country that encourages foreign companies to conduct financial transactions in their territory by providing very low tax rates and varying degrees of institutional secrecy.

Scandinavian countries top almost all measures of gender equity in the workforce and society. Bolstered by long traditions of welfare state policies and legislative approaches to encouraging equality, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland feature more women in the workforce than most other similarly industrialized nations.

The Atlantic Ocean is not a major oil-producing zone. Oil production is found in much higher quantities in the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Circle, the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea.

The movement of flowing water generates electricity in hydroelectric power plants. Although it was long-practiced on a small scale, hydroelectricity emerged in the twentieth century as an important alternative to the consumption of fossil fuels as a viable source of large quantities of energy.

“Chlorofluorocarbons,” or CFCs as they are often (mercifully) called, are extremely controversial because they contribute heavily to global warming. They are used in refrigeration, packaging, aerosol sprays, and fire extinguishers. When they reach the Earth’s atmosphere they react extremely detrimentally causing (by some estimates) as much if not more damage than the massive amounts of methane and carbon dioxide that we also release into the atmosphere.

Photochemical smog is the air pollution that occurs when sunlight reacts with other pollutants in the air. Greenhouse gases and ozone are not necessarily pollutants and do not produce hazy clouds. Chlorofluorocarbons are said to make holes in the ozone, and nitrogen deposition describes atmospheric nitrogen entering the biosphere.