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  3. A new website from the U. S. Department of Agriculture(USDA)shows that 10% of the country is now a "food desert". The Food Deser

A new website from the U. S. Department of Agriculture(USDA)shows that 10% of the country is now a "food desert". The Food Deser

admin2014-05-20  15
问题     A new website from the U. S. Department of Agriculture(USDA)shows that 10% of the country is now a "food desert". The Food Desert Locator is an online map highlighting thousands of areas where, the USDA says, low-income families have no or little access to healthy fresh food. First identified in Scotland in the 1990s, food deserts have come to symbolize urban decay. They suggest images of endless fast-food restaurants and convenience stores serving fatty, sugary junk food to overweight customers who have never tasted a Brussels sprout(抱子甘蓝).
    The USDA links food deserts to a growing weight problem that has seen childhood obesity in America triple since 1980 and the annual cost of treating obesity swell to nearly $150 billion. Accordingly, Michelle Obama announced a $ 400m Healthy Food Financing Initiative last year with the aim of eliminating food deserts nationwide by 2017. Official figures for the number of people living in food deserts already show a decline, from 23. 5m in 2009 to 13. 5m at the launch of the website in May, 2010. In America, the definition of a food desert is any census area where at least 20% of inhabitants are below the poverty line and 33% live more than a mile from a supermarket. By simply extending the cut-off in rural areas to ten miles, the USDA managed to rescue 10m people from desert life.
    Some academics would go further, calling the appearance of many food deserts nothing but a mirage and not the real problem. Research by the Centre for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington found that only 15% of people shopped for food within their own census area. Critics also note that focusing on supermarkets means that the USDA ignores tens of thousands of larger and smaller retailers, farmers markets and roadside greengrocers, many of which are excellent sources of fresh food.
    A visit to Renton, a depressed suburb of Seattle, demonstrates the problem. The town sits in the middle of a USDA food desert stretching miles in every direction. Yet it is home to a roadside stand serving organic fruit and vegetables, a health-food shop packed with nutritious grains and a superstore that attracts flocks of shoppers from well outside the desert.
    No surprise, then, that neither USDA nor the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has been able to establish a causal link between food deserts and dietary health. In fact, both agree that merely improving access to healthy food does not change consumer behavior. Open a full-service supermarket in a food desert and shoppers tend to buy the same artery-clogging junk food as before—they just pay less for it. The unpalatable truth seems to be that some Americans simply do not care to eat a balanced diet, while others, increasingly, cannot afford to. Over the last four years, the price of the healthiest foods has increased at around twice the rate of energy-dense junk food. That is the nutshell(概括)of the whole problem.
The critics of food desert hold the view that______.
选项 A、USDA overemphasizes the importance of supermarkets
B、shoppers should go outside their residence areas for food
C、USDA should expand the census areas to locate food deserts
D、shoppers should visit supermarkets more frequently
答案A
解析 推理题。根据题干关键词critics定位至第三段第三句。批评家们的观点是美国农业部在定义食物荒漠时以居民距离超市的远近为标准不合理，这意味着“数以万计的大小零售商、农贸市场以及在路边兜售水果蔬菜的商贩”被忽略了，故[A]正确。第三段第二句提到只有15％的居民在其所属的人口普查区购物，因此“购物者到居住区域以外的地方购物”并非是专家给出的建议，而是现实情况，故排除[B]；第二段末尾处美国农业部减少1000万食物荒漠人口的做法与[C]相符，并非批评家给出的意见，应予以排除；文中批评家并未指出购物者应该增加去超
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