In ten years, the living conditions of the poor have been improving—but not necessarily because of the UN’s goals. Even at 70, Jiyem, an Indonesian grandmother, gets up in the small hours to cook and collect firewood for her impoverished household. Her three-year-old grandson is malnourished. Nobody in her family has ever finished primary school. Her ramshackle house lacks electricity; the toilet is a hole in the ground; the family drinks dirty water. Asked about her notion of well-being by researchers from Oxford University, Jiyem said, "I cannot picture what well-being means. " The sort of deprivation Jiyem describes remains widespread. The United Nations reckons that in 2008 over a quarter of children in the developing world were underweight, a sixth of people lacked access to safe drinking water, and just under half used insanitary toilets or none at all. ① But while these figures are disquieting, a smaller fraction of people were affected than was the case two decades ago. So such data also indicate the world’s progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals ( MDGs), a set of targets adopted by world leaders at the UN ten years ago. The leaders gave themselves 15 years to reach the goalposts set in 2000. Two-thirds of that time is up. This week they returned to the UN for another meeting. Few, if any, of them have close experience of poverty. So the MDG exercise has at least made them spend three days discussing matters they might prefer to ignore. It has also helped to shift the debate away from how much is being spent on development towards how much is being achieved. But few go as far as Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, who recently called the goals "a milestone in international co-operation" that had helped "hundreds of millions of people around the world. "②alking up the MDGs is, of course, part of Mr Ban’s job. And there has indeed been progress on many fronts. But it is hard to assign much credit to the exercise itself. Alison Evans of Britain’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) reckons that the MDGs have come to be seen as applying to each developing country. But it is hard to track performance at country level: 28 of the poorest countries have recorded poverty rates for only one year between 1990 and 2008, according to a tally by researchers at the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank in Washington, DC. ③ This makes any judgments about their progress mere guesswork. Which of the following statements about the leaders might be TRUE

A. They spared no expense to help the poor.
B. They identified with the poverty-stricken people.
C. They thought little of the problem of poverty.
D. They cared about the success they have achieved.