Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A. Vanishing topsoil influences farm productivities
B. Water is being polluted by chemical fertilisers
C. Advantages and disadvantages of fuel produced from crop residues
D. Environmental damages were even worsened by government policies
E. A modest cut in subsidies is adopted in some countries
F. Removal of certain subsidies achieves some positive results
All these activities may have damaging environmental impacts. For example, land clearing for agriculture is the largest single cause of deforestation; chemical fertilizers and pesticides may contaminate water supplies; more intensive farming and the abandonment of fallow periods tend to exacerbate soil erosion; and the spread of monoculture and use of high-yielding varieties of crops have been accompanied by the disappearance of old varieties of food plants which might have provided some insurance against pests or diseases in future.
Soil erosion threatens the productivity of land in both rich and poor countries. The United States, where the most careful measurements have been done, discovered in 1982 that about one-fifth of its farmland was losing topsoil at a rate likely to diminish the soil’s productivity. The country subsequently embarked upon a program to convert 11 percent of its cropped land to meadow or forest. Topsoil in India and China is vanishing much faster than in America.
Government policies have frequently compounded the environmental damage that farming can cause. In the rich countries, subsidies for growing crops and price supports for farm output drive up the price of land. The annual value of these subsidies is immense: about $ 250 billion, or more than all World Bank lending in the 1980s. To increase the output of crops per acre, a farmer’s easiest option is to use more of the most readily available inputs: fertilisers and pesticides. Fertiliser use doubled in Denmark in the period 1960 - 1985 and increased in the Netherlands by 150 percent. The quantity of pesticides applied has risen too: by 69 percent in 1975 - 1984 in Denmark, for example, with a rise of 115 percent in the frequency of application in the three years from 1981.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s some efforts were made to reduce farm subsidies. The most dramatic example was that of New Zealand, which scrapped most farm support in1984. A study of the environmental effects, conducted in 1993, found that the end of fertiliser subsidies had been followed by a fall in fertiliser use (a fall compounded by the decline in world commodity prices, which cut farm incomes). The removal of subsidies also stopped land-clearing and over-stocking, which in the past had been the principal causes of erosion. Farms began to diversify. The one kind of subsidy whose removal appeared to have been bad for the environment was the subsidy to manage soil erosion.
In less enlightened countries, and in the European Union, the trend has been to reduce rather than eliminate subsidies, and to introduce new payments to encourage farmers to treat their land in environmentally friendlier ways, or to leave it fallow. It may sound strange but such payments need to be higher than the existing incentives for farmers to grow food crops. Farmers, however, dislike being paid to do nothing. In several countries they have become interested in the possibility of using fuel produced from crop residues either as a replacement for petrol (as ethanol) or as fuel for power stations (as biomass). Such fuels produce far less carbon dioxide than coal or oil, and absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.
They are therefore less likely to contribute to the greenhouse effect. But they are rarely competitive with fossil fuels unless subsidized- and growing them does no less environmental harm than other crops.
I've got two tickets for the match. Shall we go and watch it together? ()
The football match was () on account of rain.
Which two IS-IS hello values must match to form a Level 1 IS-IS adjacency? ()
The consignment certainly does not match the samples()you sent us last month.
What happens when a route does not match any user configured policies?()
Match the log file with its role in troubleshooting.
Look at the topic headings below, marked A, B, C, D E, and F, and match them with the paragraphs in the text below. There is one extra heading which you don’t need to use.
Questions 1-5 are based on the following passage.
A.Gaining attention
B.Making sense of information
C.Trade secrets
D.Academic approval
E.A change of focus
F.An ancient skill
1 ______
The Greek philosophers knew about it and it could still dramatically improve children’s school results today, except that no one teaches it. It is a very old technique for making your memory better. Try memorizing this series of random numbers: 3, 6, 5, 5, 2, 1, 2, 4. About as meaningful as dates in history, aren’t they? It is likely that you won’t remember them in five minutes, let alone in five hours. However, had you been at a lecture given at a school in the south of England last month, you would now be able to fix them in your head for five days, five weeks, in fact for ever.
2______
“I am going to give you five techniques that will enable you to remember anything you need to know at school,” promised lecturer Ian Robinson to a hundred schoolchildren. “When I’ve finished in two hours’ time, your work will be far more effective and productive. Anyone not interested, leave now.” The entire room sat still, glued to their seats.
3______
Robinson specializes in doing magic tricks that look totally impossible, and then he shows that they involve nothing more mysterious than good old-fashioned trickery. “I have always been interested in tricks involving memory,” he explains.
4 ______
What Robinson’s schoolchildren get are methods that will be familiar to anyone who has dipped into any one of a dozen books on memory. The difference is that Robinson’s approach is aimed at schoolchildren. The basic idea is to take material that is random and meaningless and give them a structure. That series of numbers at the beginning of the article fits in here. Once you think of it as the number of days in the year—365—and the number of weeks—52—and so on, it suddenly becomes permanently memorable.
5 ______
The reaction of schools has been uniformly enthusiastic. “The pupils benefited a lot from Ian’s talk,” says Dr Johnston, head of the school where Robinson was speaking. “Ideally we should run a regular class in memory techniques so pupils can pick it up gradually.”
The football match was called()because of the snow
What are two valid match criteria for a routing policy? ()