4 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.
A. awards B. solution C. dramatically D. innovation E. characteristic
F. restoration G. concerned H. challenging I. tackle J. estimated K. painstaking |
Yuan Longping was born in 1930 in Beijing. His parents wanted him to pursue a career in science or medicine. However, what 1 him most was that farmers often had poor harvests and sometimes even had a serious shortage of food to eat. To 2 this problem, he chose to study agriculture and received an education at Southwest Agricultural College in Chongqing.
After graduating in 1953, he worked as a researcher. Yuan Longping realised that larger fields were not the 3 . Instead, farmers needed to boost yields (生产量) in the fields they had. How this could be done was a 4 question at the time. Yuan was convinced 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 5 of hybrids is that they usually attain a higher yield than conventional crops. However, whether it was possible to develop a hybrid of self-pollinating (自花传粉的) plants such as rice was a matter of great debate. The common assumption then was that it could not be done. Through 6 effort, Yuan overcame enormous technical difficulties to develop the first hybrid rice that could be used for farming in 1974. This hybrid enabled farmers to expand their output 7 .
Today, it is 8 that about 60 percent of domestic rice consumption in China is comprised of crops generated from Yuan’s hybrid strains, and his strains have allowed China’s farmers to produce around 200 million tons of rice per year. Yuan’s 9 has helped feed not just China, but many other countries that depend on rice as well, such as India and Vietnam. Because of his invaluable contributions, Yuan Longping has received numerous 10 both in China and abroad.
