3 . In the United States, farmers who are trying to earn money find the situation difficult to deal with. The United States Department of Agriculture found that more than half of the small farms in California do not make money. But the United Nations reported at least one third of the food is wasted by not selling it out in time.

One California farm family is using social media to change the situation and reduce wasted food. Nick Papadopoulos is the manager of Bloomfield Farms in Sonoma County. He was sad and worried to watch his employees returning from some weekend farmers’ markets with top quality unsold products.

Mr. Papadopoulos said he would find boxes of leaf greens and carrots left in a storehouse. The vegetables would go bad before the next market day. One night, he began thinking about the matter of wasted food when he didn’t know how to deal with 32 cases of broccoli (西兰花). Usually he would give it to chickens and use the rest to make fertilizer (肥料). He thought he shouldn’t let the farm products go to waste.

Then his daughter showed him a book she bought online. Suddenly it hit him that he could offer the food at a low price by advertising it on the farm’s Facebook page on Sunday nights. The deals were open to anyone using the social media website. In the first week, some neighbors came to his home to buy the vegetables. Another week, the buyers were a group of friends. And now many people wait to buy his cheap products.

After his success, Mr. Papadopoulos helped to set up a website called cropmobster. com, which is a place where people deal with food production at low prices, feeding the hungry. Since March, the website has stopped more than 20, 000 kilograms of food from going to waste.

From 8 a.m to 10 a.m each morning, dozens of low-income families and cleaners in the Tangqiao neighborhood would line up in front of a food bank     1    (collect) free vegetables and fruits.

The food bank,     2     (create) by Shanghai Oasis Ecological Conservation and Communication Center in 2014, is the first of its kind in the country. The food bank collects donated products—    3     (usual) food items close to their “best before” dates from supermarkets, producers or restaurants. After collecting enough food, the bank donates it     4     the needy. According to the Oasis, the     5     (establish) of such food banks is aimed not only at saving food that otherwise would be wasted,     6     at helping low-income people and protecting the environment.

Oasis has seen its food bank network extended (扩大……的范围) to at least 11 provincial-level     7     (region), including Beijing, Sichuan Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Region and Liaoning Province. Oasis said that 580 tons of food worth more than 31 million     8     (save) by the end of 2019. The food,     9     was produced by 202 food companies, was distributed (分发) to 760,000 individuals.

It was not until recently when the country started a nationwide campaign (活动) to avoid     10     (necessary) food wastage that such banks have become better known.

As many sit down to enjoy plentiful holiday meals this season, it’s also a good time to note the growing problem of food waste.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, it is     1     that one-third of food produced for human consumption worldwide annually is lost or wasted.

The economic and environmental impacts of food loss and waste are     2    . More than a quarter of the world’s agricultural land is being worked to grow food that nobody eats.

What’s the difference between food loss and food waste? Waste happens toward the back end of the food chain, at the retail and consumer level. Loss, on the other hand, mostly     3     at the front of the food chain — during production, post-harvest, and     4     — and it’s more common in the developing world, where all of the food usually can’t be delivered in     5     shape, to consumers.

In developed nations, extreme-efficient farming practices, plenty of refrigeration, and first-rate transportation and storage     6    that most of the food they grow reaches the retail level. But things go rapidly south from there.

Store managers     7     over-order goods, for fear of running out of a particular product. The British supermarket chain Tesco, for example,     8     throwing out nearly 50,000 tons of food within their UK stores during the latest financial year.

Consumers are also to     9    . We often order too much food in restaurants without taking leftovers home. We overbuy when there is a discount for invitingly packaged food. When we store food, many of us take “use by” dates literally, and we suffer no     10     for dumping eatable food into a bin.

6 . Have you got any gadgets hanging around your home that you no longer want or use? Between us, we have millions of bits of tech stockpiled in drawers that could be given a new lease of life.

Part of the problem for our unloved gadgets is that many become obsolete quickly because their software doesn’t get updated. Other items are left unused because they’re broken or they’ve become replaced by a fancy new version. Many of these items are electronics, but despite them appearing to be past their sell-by date, they don’t need to end up in landfill. And here are some tips for you to make the most of our unwanted gadgets.

Materials used to make them can be extracted and reused in other things. As an example, Elisabeth Ratcliffe from the Royal Society of Chemistry told the BBC: “There are about thirty different elements just in a smartphone, and many of them are very rare. ” These can be used in touch screens and solar panels.

Probably the best approach to our throwaway culture is to repair our broken tech. This takes patience and skill, which can be learnt at repair clubs and repair cafés—free meeting places where you’ ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. In the UK, the interest in mending our stuff and giving it a new life is reflected by the popularity of a TV series called The Repair Shop, where craftspeople rescue and resurrect items their owners thought were beyond saving.

You can breathe new life into unwanted stuff by transforming it into valuable pieces or collectable retro items. These could be sold on, meaning you can make some cash from your junk and create much needed space in your home!

8 . Adults understand what it feels like to be flooded with objects. Why do we often assume that more_is_more when it comes to kids and their belongings? The good news is that I can help my own kids learn earlier than I did how to live more with less.

What do the words “more is more” in paragraph 1 probably mean?

10 . It is reported that half of the food the world produces is never eaten but thrown away instead. Wasteful people in rich nations, however, are not the only food buyers. Poor countries, too, are throwing out perfect good food. According to Elliot Wooley, a professor who studies at Loughborough University, what should be noticed is that developed and developing countries have different causes for their waste.

Because of few food production methods, in developing countries, food is usually wasted while it is still in the field or during the storage and transportation process, but once food is sold, people usually eat everything they buy. In the United States and other developed countries, people throw away as much as half the food they buy.

Such a change among countries calls for special solutions. Professor Wooley’s answer to food waste is a smart-phone app that he created. It would inform people of how many goods they have bought, how long they will last and so on. At the international meeting held last month in Vietnam, the professor said the result from an experiment shows that people who used the app cut down the amount of food they wasted by 34 percent.

But Jeremy, a student from Germany thinks Professor Wooley’s app is not enough to prevent food waste. “It might help those who already want to change the way they use the food they buy, but it could also encourage them to waste more because they no longer have to pay attention to how much food they buy,” Jeremy said.

“The problem is that as food is getting cheaper, people are buying more food than they need, which will surely result in a huge waste,” Jeremy added, “so one way to prevent food waste is to persuade people to stop buying too much food in their first place.”