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  3. Some of the world’s most significant problems never hit headlines. One example comes from agriculture. Food riots and hunger mak

Some of the world’s most significant problems never hit headlines. One example comes from agriculture. Food riots and hunger mak

admin2019-03-20  41
问题     Some of the world’s most significant problems never hit headlines. One example comes from agriculture. Food riots and hunger make news. But the trend lying behind these matters is rarely talked about. This is the decline in the growth in yields of some of the world’s major crops. A new study by the University of Minnesota and McGill University in Montreal looks at where, and how far, this decline is occurring.
    The authors take a vast number of data points for the four most important crops: rice, wheat, corn and soyabeans(大豆). They find that on between 24% and 39% of all harvested areas, the improvement in yields that took place before the 1980s slowed down in the 1990s and 2000s.
    There are two worrying features of the slowdown. One is that it has been particularly sharp in the world’s most populous(人口多的)countries, India and China. Their ability to feed themselves has been an important source of relative stability both within the countries and on world food markets. That self-sufficiency cannot be taken for granted if yields continue to slow down or reverse.
    Second, yield growth has been lower in wheat and rice than in corn and soyabeans. This is problematic because wheat and rice are more important as foods, accounting for around half of all calories consumed. Com and soyabeans are more important as feed grains. The authors note that " we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars rather than on crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world. "
    The report qualifies the more optimistic findings of another new paper which suggests that the world will not have to dig up a lot more land for farming in order to feed 9 billion people in 2050, as the Food and Agriculture Organisation has argued.
    Instead, it says, thanks to slowing population growth, land currently ploughed up for crops might be able to revert(回返)to forest or wilderness. This could happen. The trouble is that the forecast assumes continued improvements in yields, which may not actually happen.
What does the new study by the two universities say about recent crop improvement efforts?
选项 A、They fail to produce the same remarkable results as before the 1980s.
B、They contribute a lot to the improvement of human food production.
C、They play a major role in guaranteeing the food security of the world.
D、They focus more on the increase of animal feed than human food grains.
答案D
解析 推理判断题。由第四段第四句可知，研究者们认为人们偏向专注于提高喂养动物和为汽车提供能源的农作物的产量，而不是能养活人类的农作物的产量，故答案为D)“他们更加关注动物饲料而不是人类粮食产量的增加”。
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