by Matthew Brown
Another global concern comes into view: a food shortage.
糧食短缺引起全球關注。
As if global
financial and environmental
crisis were not enough, another
alarming problem has been developing in the past few years: the food crisis.
_(1)_ In poorer countries, it's an
urgent problem, and some parts of the world have already been experiencing food
riots. Food prices are an
economic issue, and in
economics there is usually a lot of
disagreement about the causes of problems. Some of the main factors, though, may be
as follows.
Weather might be the most
significant issue
when it comes to current food
shortages. _(2)_
To make matters worse, these droughts and other bad weather may
be linked with global warming. Another problem is
ever-rising oil and energy costs. _(3)_
Emerging economies, countries that were poor but are becoming rich, are using more and more fuel and
competing for available resources. As economies around the world change, there is more demand for expensive food such as beef. However, a 100-calorie piece of beef requires
700 calories' worth of grain to be produced. _(4)_ Efforts to make biofuel may also
be to blame. Some people argue that it takes far more energy to grow grain to produce
biofuel than we can get from the biofuel itself. _(5)_
The food shortage has people pretty worried, but it is only recently that the problem has
come to popular attention. For now, most of us will just have to
wait and see what kind of solutions might be possible.
(A) If the
argument is correct, then perhaps the
grain would be better used for food
instead.
(B)
Over the last few years, the prices of food
staples such as wheat, corn, and rice have
doubled or
tripled.
(C) So this means that beef production uses a lot more grain to produce a lot less food.
(D) Modern farming techniques require
a huge amount of energy, and energy is becoming very expensive.
(E) The
combination of recent natural
disasters, such as the
tsunami in Asia and
droughts in Australia, Africa, and Central America, has
led to very poor crop
yields.
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