雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Honey bees in trouble

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Honey bees in trouble

A Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment, colony collapse disorder(CCD)，that is wiping out the honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile, economies will collapse, and food will be scarce.

B But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Pollination in modem agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years. Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed many native bees outright—they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest—and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained. Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new—in her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.

C If that ‘Fruitless Fall, has not—yet—occurred, it may be largely thanks to the honeybee, which farmers turned to as the ability of wild pollinators to service crops declined. The honeybee has been semi-domesticated since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but it wasn’t just familiarity that determined this choice: the bees’ biology is in many ways suited to the kind of agricultural system that was emerging. For example, honeybee hives can be closed up and moved out of the way when pesticides are applied to a field. The bees are generalist pollinators, so they can be used to pollinate many different crops. And although they are not the most efficient pollinator of every crop, honeybees have strength in numbers, with 20,000 to 100,000 bees living in a single hive. “Without a doubt, if there was one bee you wanted for agriculture, it would be the honeybee, “says Jim Cane, of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The honeybee, in other words, has become a crucial cog in the modem system of industrial agriculture. That system delivers more food, and more kinds of it, to more places, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is also vulnerable, because making a farm field into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory floor, and pollination into a series of continent-long assembly lines, also leaches out some of the resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems.

D Breno Freitas, an agronomist, pointed out that in nature such a high degree of specialization usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the least disbalance. In effect, by developing an agricultural system that is heavily reliant on a single pollinator species, we humans have become riskily overspecialized. And when the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it has been by colony collapse disorder, the vulnerability of that agricultural system begins to become clear.

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Questions 1-4

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage?

In boxes 1-4 on your answer sheet, write

YES - if the statement agrees with the information

NO - if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN - if there is no information on this

1  In the United States, farmers use honeybees in a large scale over the past few years

2  Cleaning farming practices would be harmful to farmers’

3  The blue orchard bee is the most efficient pollinator among native bees for every crop

4  It is beneficial to other local creatures to protect native bees

Questions 5-9

Choose the correct letter, A,B,C or D.

Write your answers in boxes 5-9 on your answer sheet.

5. The example of the ‘Fruitless Fair underlines the writer’s point about

A needs for using pesticides.

B impacts of losing insect pollinators.

C vulnerabilities of native bees.

D benefits in building more pollination industries.

6. Why can honeybees adapt to the modem agricultural system?

A the honeybees can pollinated more crops efficiently

B The bees are semi-domesticated since ancient times.

C Honeybee hives can be protected away from pesticides.

D The ability of wild pollinators using to serve crops declines.

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