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  3. I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact

I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact

admin2010-10-14  302
问题     I believe very strongly that our overproduction of cheap grain in general, and corn in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that three-fifths of Americans are now overweight.  The obesity crisis is complicated in some ways, but it’s very simple in another way.  Basically, Americans are on average eating 200 more calories a day than they were in the 1970s. If you do that and don’t get correspondingly more exercise, you’re going to get a lot fatter. Many demographers are predicting that this is the first generation of Americans whose life span may be shorter than their parents’. The reason for that is obesity, essentially, and diabetes specifically.
    Where do those calories come from? Except for seafood, all our calories come from the farm. Compared with the mid-to-late 1970s, American farms are producing 500 more calories of food a day per American. We’re managing to pack away 200 of them, which is pretty heroic on our part. A lot of the rest is being dumped overseas, or wasted, or burned in our ears.
    Overproduction sooner or later leads to overconsumption, because we’re very good at figuring out how to turn surpluses into inexpensive, portable new products. Our cheap, value-added, portable corn commodity is corn sweetener, specifically high-fructose(高糖)com syrup. But we also dispose of overproduction in corn-fed beef, pork, and chicken. And now we’re even teaching salmon to eat corn, because there’s so much of it to get rid of.
    There is a powerful industrial logic at work here, the logic of processing. We discovered that corn is this big, fat packet of starch(淀粉)that can be broken down into almost any basic organic molecules and reassembled as sweeteners and many other food additives. Of the 37 ingredients in chicken nuggets, something like 30 are made, directly or indirectly, from corn.
The word "obesity"(Line 2, Para. 1 )most probably means ______.
选项 A、lack of nutrition
B、becoming too fat
C、abundance in calories
D、shortening of life span
答案B
解析 词义辨析。前一句刚刚提到超重这个问题，后面紧跟着出现“obesity”这个生词，其实跟“over weight”是一个意思。
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