1 . “It’s too sugary, I can’t manage very many,” said a friend. She wasn’t talking about dessert but about some fresh cherries. I bit into another cherry and realized she was right. The fruit was so sweet that it was as if it had been pre-sugared.
But the cherries of my childhood were much less sweet than today’s cherries. Some of them were hardly sweet at all, which made it all the more exciting when you happened upon a super sweet one.
Is modern fruit getting sweeter? The answer is yes. Some of the most powerful evidence comes from zoos. In 2018, Melbourne Zoo in Australia had stopped giving fruit to most of its animals because cultivated fruit was now so sweet that it was causing tooth decay and weight gain.
Breeding isn’t the only reason that modern fruit is sweeter; there’s also climate change. It’s found that since the 1970s, with rising temperatures, Fuji apples have become significantly sweeter and softer.
But the sweetness of modern fruit is not without its problems, especially for people with diabetes, who have to be careful to moderate their intake of higher - sugar fruits such as pineapple. Fruit that is bred sweeter also tends to be lower in the phytochemicals (植物化学成分) that make it so healthy.
Health aside, maybe the real problem with modern fruit is that it has become yet another sweet thing in a world filled with sugar. Even grapefruit, which used to be quite bitter, is sometimes now as sweet as oranges. If you’ve never tasted a sour cherry, how can you fully appreciate a sweet one? Experts put forwards some thoughts about how to appreciate the various tastes of modern fruit.
1. Why does the author mention her friend’s words in Paragraph 1?
| A．To introduce the topic of the extreme sweetness of modern cherries. |
| B．To highlight the content of friend’s preference for sour cherries. |
| C．To emphasize the importance of pre-sugaring fruits. |
| D．To show the breeding and selection of modern fruit. |
2. What’s the author’ view on the rise of consistently sweeter fruit?
| A．The author believes it has no impact on health. |
| B．The author sees it as a triumph of plant breeding. |
| C．The author thinks it is a bit worrying in today’s world. |
| D．The author is concerned that it will lead to bitterness in fruit. |
3. What is a shortcoming of the modern fruit according to the passage?
| A．It is short of healthy phytochemicals. |
| B．It may not be as tasty as it used to be. |
| C．It could lack variety and contrast in taste. |
| D．It doesn’t meet people’s need for sweetness. |
4. What might the author continue talking about?
| A．The advice on selecting modern fruit. |
| B．The approaches to freeing bitter fruit. |
| C．The comments about cultivated grapefruit. |
| D．The research into the health of zoo animals. |
