Yuan Longping, known as the “father of hybridrice”, is one of China’s most famous scientists, Yet, he considers himself a farmer because he continually works the land in his research. Indeed, his slim but strong body is just like that of miliions of Chinese farmers, to whom he has     1     his life.

Yuan Longping was born in 1930 in Beijing. His parents wanted him to pursue a career in science or medicine. However, what concerned him most was that farmers often had poor harvests and somnetimes even had a serious    2     of food to eat. To tackle this     3     , he chose to study agriculture and received aneducationat Seuthwest Agricultural College in Chomgqing.

After     4    in 1953, he worked as a researcher. Yuan Longping realised that larger fields were not the solution. Instead, farmers needed to     5     yields in the fields they had. How this could be done was a challenging question at the time.Yuan was     6    that the answer could be found in the creation of hybrid rice. A hybrid is a cross between two or more varieties of a species One characteristic of hybrids is that they usually attain a higher yield than    7    crops.

However, whether it was possible to develop a hybrid of self-pollinating plants such as rice was a matter of great debate.The common     8    then was that it could not be done. Through intense effort, Yuan    9    enormous technical difficulties to develop the first hybrid rice that codld be used for farming in 1974. This hybrid enabled farmers to expand their    10    greatly