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  3. For much of the 20th century, milk was a simple part of daily life in the U.S., as farmers raised cows, milkmen delivered bottle

For much of the 20th century, milk was a simple part of daily life in the U.S., as farmers raised cows, milkmen delivered bottle

admin2022-11-16  211
问题     For much of the 20th century, milk was a simple part of daily life in the U.S., as farmers raised cows, milkmen delivered bottles and children drank it at school. But those days are fading—a fact emphasized by the announcement on Jan. 5 by Borden Dairy, the milk processor, that it is filing for bankruptcy protection. Borden, which said it was impacted by "market challenges facing the dairy industry," follows Dean Foods, America’s largest milk producer, which filed for bankruptcy protection in November.
    America has fallen out of love with drinking milk, as lower-calorie options have proliferated and people are substituting water bottles for milk cartons. Americans each drank an estimated 146 lb. of fluid milk—a category that includes products from skim to cream—in 2018, according to the USDAs Economic Research Service. That may sound like a lot, but it’s down 26％ just since 2000. The downturn has been tough on dairy processors like Borden and Dean, which buy fresh milk from farms and use techniques like pasteurization to create a consumer-safe beverage with a longer shelf life. For the past five years, thanks to technology that increased milk production, fresh-milk prices were relatively low, which meant processors could break even despite shifting demand.
    But prices began ticking up again last year, squeezing the processors’ already tight margins. "Declining sales in a thin-margin business is not a good recipe for success," says Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin.
    Milk processors are also facing competition from big retailers, which have set up their own processing plants. In 2018, Walmart opened a milk-processing plant in Indiana to serve hundreds of stores in the Midwest, taking away approximately 95 million gal. of milk-processing business from Dean Foods.
    On the other end of the supply chain, dairy farms are facing trouble of their own. The low prices that were a boon to processors left small farmers struggling across the industry. The number of Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies in 2019 was up 24％ from the previous year. "We’re trying our best to hang on," says Mary Rieckmann, a dairy farmer in Wisconsin whose family has turned to GoFundMe to keep their century-old farm running.
    Borden says it plans to continue to operate as it restructures under court supervision. But if that plan fails, it wouldn’t be the first dairy processor to cease operations. There were 605 fluid-milk plants in America in 1990. By 2018, there were only 459.
The underlined word "boon" (Line 2, Para. 5) most probably means________.
选项 A、benefit
B、boom
C、harm
D、recession
答案A
解析 题干中boon所在句的含义为“低价牛奶对于加工商来说是________，可却使得该行业中的小户奶农举步维艰。”结合常识可知，加工商需要从奶农那里购买牛奶，低价对于加工商是好事：低成本意味着利润变高，能体现这一好处的只有A项benefit。B项“兴旺，繁荣”、C项“伤害”和D项“衰退”均不符合语境。
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