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  3. On a clear, cold day in early March 2019, Justin Jordan, a fifth-generation

On a clear, cold day in early March 2019, Justin Jordan, a fifth-generation

游客2024-03-07  5
问题     On a clear, cold day in early March 2019, Justin Jordan, a fifth-generation grower in Lacona, Iowa, reads attentively old maps spread across his dining-room table. One creased, yellowing chart shows a soil-conservation plan his grandfather created with the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) in the 1950s, including terraces for controlling erosion and areas designated for tree planting. The agency was working to reverse critical topsoil loss from decades of mass-scale plowing.
    His grandfather implemented part of the scheme. But new synthetic fertilizers, which could boost yields by 50 percent, made the situation less terrible, so he continued cultivating their corn and soybean fields each year. As did Jordan’s dad, and most other farmers. Over the past 150 years, cultivation has chewed up about half of Earth’s topsoil.
    Jordan, an polite, soft-spoken man in his late 30s, stopped plowing and began planting cover crops when he took over in the early 2000s. "I was eager to do things in a different way," he says. "It just seemed like every year the topsoil was getting thinner." Jordan tends 410 acres—larger than most farms selling vegetables at Saturday markets, but tiny compared with 10,000-acre corporate operations.
    Aerial photos show the contrast between his land and that of other farmers, most of whom continue deep cultivation. His soil is dark and rich, but from the air, his fields appear lighter, covered in accumulated mulch (护根物). Strips of hay grass (for his cattle) and native prairie species cover across the slopes-year-round plants that pump carbon into the soil. Neighboring barren fields steadily release it.
    Once Jordan brings in his corn in October, he sows a cover of rye (黑麦) among the drying stalks that stays green through the following spring, when he cuts it down and seeds next year’s crop in the mulch. He sprinkles his soybean fields before the September harvest with a cocktail of rye, radishes, and oats, creating a mini forest beneath the knee-high cash crop. With all these changes, his yields have remained roughly the same as his neighbors’.
    Soon, folks like Jordan might gain a financial edge. The Terraton Initiative, the nation’s first carbon market dedicated to agriculture, launched in June 2019 out of the farm-tech startup Indigo Ag. Companies that want to offset their emissions purchase credits; Terraton then pays growers $15 per ton for the carbon their land captures. Within six months, farmers tending a total of 10 million acres worldwide expressed interest in signing up.
    More cash would be nice, but climate change is the motivating factor for Jordan—out of global concern, and to keep his harvest from washing away. [br] What is the fundamental change about farming between Jordan and his elder generations?
选项 A、Jordan grows totally different crops from what his elder generations had grown.
B、Jordan has never used synthetic fertilizers that his father and grandfather had used.
C、Jordan has given up plowing but started to grow cover crops in land instead.
D、Jordan has produced more crops and gained much more profits than his elder generations.
答案 C
解析 根据题干中的信息词the fundamental change about fanning，可以把答题线索定位到第二至三段。第三段提到，他(乔丹)在21世纪初接管农场之后就停止了耕作，开始种植覆盖作物。接下来作者引述了他的话：“我渴望以一种不同的方式做事……”，而第一段提到，乔丹的祖父曾经和美国农业部一起制定了一份土壤保护计划，以确保表土不流失，接着第二段指出，他的祖父实施了部分计划，但是新的合成肥料可以使产量提高50％，这使情况变得没那么糟糕，所以他(乔丹的祖父)继续每年种植玉米和大豆，乔丹的父亲和大多数其他农场主也是如此。由此可知，乔丹放弃了祖辈的耕作方式，开始种植覆盖作物，故本题应选C。
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