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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  12
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.
What can we learn about the food desert?
选项 A、It is an area where the locals can’t grow fresh food.
B、It is an area where a lot of people are starving.
C、It is an area where fresh food is hardly available to the locals.
D、It is an area where people are mostly overweight.
答案C
解析 推理题。根据题干关键词food desert定位至第一和第二段。文章开篇提到美国有10％的人生活在食物荒漠，接着第二句指出美国农业部声称食物荒漠是指“由于家庭收入低，无法或几乎无法获得健康新鲜食物的地区”。由关键词definition定位至第二段倒数第二句，从中可知“食物荒漠中33％的人居住在距超市一英里以外的地方”。上述两点可相互印证，故[C]选项正确。
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