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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  45
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.
According to Para. 2, how did USDA reduce the number of people in food desert by 10m?
选项 A、By promoting the concept of organic food.
B、By raising people’s awareness of dietary health.
C、By establishing more full-service supermarkets.
D、By extending the definition of food desert in rural areas.
答案D
解析 细节题。根据题干提示定位至第二段最后一句。承接上文有关食物荒漠的定义可知，本句的the cut一off指的是“食物荒漠的界定线”，因此农业部通过将农村地区的食物荒漠界定标准由定义中的33％人口居住地一英里内无超市拓展至十英里范围，使得生活在食物荒漠中的人减少了1000万，故[D]正确。本文关注的是通过改善居民获取新鲜食物的条件和设施等可界定的标准来消除食物荒漠问题，[A]与[B]通过倡导有机食品和提高人们饮食健康的意识来减少食物荒漠人口数量，对此文中并未列出具体数据，应予以排除；通过下文可知，提供全方位服
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