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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  207
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 consequence of rising fresh-milk prices is that________.
选项 A、the options of milk products multiply
B、the milk producers obtain a good milk recipe
C、consumers have to pay more for dairy products
D、the low-profit milk makers are in a tougher situation
答案D
解析 根据题干中的rising fresh. milk prices定位到文章第三段。该段首句ticking up意为“提高”，下文中提到的squeezing the processors’ already tight margins(挤压了牛奶加工商本已微薄的利润)即为价格上升的后果，换言之，低利润的生产商处境更艰难。D项“低利润的牛奶生产商处境更艰难”与原文表述一致，故为正确选项。A项“牛奶产品的选择增多”、C项“消费者不得不为乳制品花更多的钱”，在原文中均未提及。第二段中的“在利润微薄的行业，销量下降不是成功的良方(Declining sales in…recipe for success)”，与选项B“牛奶生产商得到一个好的牛奶配方”中的recipe含义不同，故排除。
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