雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Foot Pedal Irrigation

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Foot Pedal Irrigation

A

Until now, governments and development agencies have tried to tackle the problem through large-scale projects: gigantic dams, sprawling irrigation canals and vast new fields of high-yield crops introduced during the Green Revolution, the famous campaign to increase grain harvests in developing nations. Traditional irrigation, however, has degraded the soil in many areas, and the reservoirs behind dams can quickly fill up with silt, reducing their storage capacity and depriving downstream farmers of fertile sediments. Furthermore, although the Green Revolution has greatly expanded worldwide farm production since 1950, poverty stubbornly persists in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Continued improvements in the productivity of large farms may play the main role in boosting food supply, but local efforts to provide cheap, individual irrigation systems to small farms may offer a better way to lift people out of poverty.

B

The Green Revolution was designed to increase the overall food supply, not to raise the incomes of the rural poor, so it should be no surprise that it did not eradicate poverty or hunger. India, for example, has been self-sufficient in food for 15 years, and its granaries are full, but more than 200 million Indians—one fifth of the country’s population—are malnourished because they cannot afford the food they need and because the country’s safety nets are deficient. In 2000 189 nations committed to the Millennium Development Goals, which called for cutting world poverty in half by 2015. With business as usual, however, we have little hope of achieving most of the Millennium goals, no matter how much money rich countries contribute to poor ones.

C

The supply-driven strategies of the Green Revolution, however, may not help subsistence farmers, who must play to their strengths to compete in the global marketplace. The average size of a family farm is less than four acres in India, 1.8 acres in Bangladesh and about half an acre in China. Combines and other modern farming tools are too expensive to be used on such small areas. An Indian farmer selling surplus wheat grown on his one-acre plot could not possibly compete with the highly efficient and subsidized Canadian wheat farms that typically stretch over thousands of acres. Instead subsistence farmers should exploit the fact that their labor costs are the lowest in the world, giving them a comparative advantage in growing and selling high-value, intensely farmed crops.

D

Paul Polak saw firsthand the need for a small-scale strategy in 1981 when he met Abdul Rahman, a farmer in the Noakhali district of Bangladesh. From his three quarter-acre plots of rain-fed rice fields, Abdul could grow only 700 kilograms of rice each year—300 kilograms less than what he needed to feed his family. During the three months before the October rice harvest came in, Abdul and his wife had to watch silently while their three children survived on one meal a day or less. As Polak walked with him through the scattered fields he had inherited from his father, Polak asked what he needed to move out of poverty. “Control of water for my crops,” he said, “at a price I can afford.”

E

Soon Polak learned about a simple device that could help Abdul achieve his goal: the treadle pump. Developed in the late 1970s by Norwegian engineer Gunnar Barnes，the pump is operated by a person walking in place on a pair of treadles and two handle arms made of bamboo. Pr

F

。。。。。此处省略一半雅思阅读真题原文！

雅思阅读真题题目：

Questions 1-6

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1 -6 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement is true

FALSE if the statement is false

NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage

1 It is easier to resolve food problem in large scale rather than in small scale.

2 Construction of gigantic dams costs more time in developing countries.

3 Green revolution failed to increase global crop production from the mid of 20th century.

4 Agricultural production in Bangladash declined in last decade.

5 Farmer Abdul Rahman knew how to increase production himself at the beginning.

6 Small pump spread into big project in Bangladesh in the following decade after the campaign.

Questions 7 -11

Filling the blanks in diagram of treadle pump’s each parts.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

雅思阅读真题+题目+答案：Foot Pedal Irrigation，完整版下载，10元有偿！