The recovery made only slow advances in October and was still skirting most major population areas in the U.S., according to new readings of the Adversity Index from Moody’s Economy.com and msnbc.com. Nearly one in three metro areas have started to recover, but virtually none of the nation’s biggest cities. (The full list is below.) One likely reason is that the nascent economic recovery started in the nation’s midsection, from south to north, a part of the country that has relatively few big cities. The oil and gas industry has helped states from Texas up through the Great Plains. Heavily urbanized states such as New York and California were among the hardest hit in the recession and are proving slower to recover. Areas with the largest runup in home prices have been the slowest to recover, economists say, particularly Nevada and Florida.