IELTS READING; YES, NO, NOT GIVEN (18)

STATEMENT:

In the United States, farmers use honeybees in a large scale over the past few years

PASSAGE:

But what few accounts acknowledge is that what’s at risk is not itself a natural state of affairs. For one thing, in the United States, where CCD was first reported and has had its greatest impacts, honeybees are not a native species. Pollination in modem agriculture isn’t alchemy, it’s industry. The total number of hives involved in the U.S. pollination industry has been somewhere between 2.5 million and 3 million in recent years

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

Cleaning farming practices would be harmful to farmers’

PASSAGE:

Meanwhile, American farmers began using large quantities of organophosphate insecticides, planted large-scale crop monocultures, and adopted “clean farming” practices that scrubbed native vegetation from field margins and roadsides. These practices killed many native bees outright—they’re as vulnerable to insecticides as any agricultural pest—and made the agricultural landscape inhospitable to those that remained. Concern about these practices and their effects on pollinators isn’t new—in her 1962 ecological alarm cry Silent Spring, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘Fruitless Fall’ that could result from the disappearance of insect pollinators.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

The blue orchard bee is the most efficient pollinator among native bees for every crop.

PASSAGE:

In fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop pollination. “The problem is trying to provide native bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to service the crop，” Jim Cane says. “You’re talking millions of flowers per acre in a two-to three-week time frame, or less, for a lot of crops.” On the other hand, native bees can be much more efficient pollinators of certain crops than honeybees, so you don’t need as many to do the job. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees (Osmia lignaria) can pollinate a hectare of apples or almonds, a task that would require roughly 50,000 to 150,000 honeybees.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

It is beneficial to other local creatures to protect native bees.

PASSAGE:

In the Delaware Valley, most farms and farm fields are relatively small, each fanner typically grows a variety of crops, and farms are interspersed with suburbs and other types of land use which means there are opportunities for homeowners to get involved in bee conservation, too. The landscape is a bee-friendly patchwork that provides a variety of nesting habitat and floral resources distributed among different kinds of crops, weedy field margins, fallow fields, suburban neighborhoods, and semi natural habitat like old woodlots, all at a relatively small scale. In other words, ’’pollinator-friendly” farming practices would not only aid pollination of agricultural crops, but also serve as a key element in the over all conservation strategy for wild pollinators, and often aid other wild species as well.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

Personal liberty and independence have never been regarded as directly linked to health-care.

PASSAGE:

However, at exactly the same time as this new realisation of the finite character of health-care resources was sinking in, an awareness of a contrary kind was developing in Western societies: that people have a basic right to health-care as a necessary condition of a proper human life. Like education, political and legal processes and institutions, public order, communication, transport and money supply, health-care came to be seen as one of the fundamental social facilities necessary for people to exercise their other rights as autonomous human beings. People are not in a position to exercise personal liberty and to be self-determining if they are poverty-stricken, or deprived of basic education, or do not live within a context of law and order. In the same way, basic health-care is a condition of the exercise of autonomy.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

Health-care came to be seen as a right at about the same time that the limits of healthcare resources became evident.

PASSAGE:

Just at the time when it became obvious that health-care resources could not possibly meet the demands being made upon them, people were demanding that their fundamental right to health-care be satisfied by the state.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

In OECD countries population changes have had an impact on health-care costs in recent years.

PASSAGE:

The second set of more specific changes that have led to the present concern about the n of health-care resources stems from the dramatic rise in health costs in most OECD¹ countries, accompanied by large-scale demographic and social changes which have meant, to take one example, that elderly people are now major (and relatively very expensive) consumers of health-care resources

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

Bush flies are easier to control than buffalo flies.

PASSAGE:

More than 4,000 species of these remarkable creatures have evolved and adapted to the world’s different climates and the dung of its many animals. Australia’s native dung beetles are scrub and woodland dwellers, specialising in coarse marsupial droppings and avoiding the soft cattle dung in which bush flies and buffalo flies breed.Some of the most remarkable beetles are the dung beetles, which spend almost their whole lives eating and breeding in dung’.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

Four thousand species of dung beetle were initially brought to Australia by the CSIRO.

PASSAGE:

Between 1968 and 1982, the CSIRO imported insects from about 50 different species of dung beetle, from Asia, Europe and Africa, aiming to match them to different climatic zones in Australia. Of the 26 species that are known to have become successfully integrated into the local environment, only one, an African species released in northern Australia, has reached its natural boundary.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN

STATEMENT:

Dung beetles were brought to Australia by the CSIRO over a fourteen-year period.

PASSAGE:

Between 1968 and 1982, the CSIRO imported insects from about 50 different species of dung beetle, from Asia, Europe and Africa, aiming to match them to different climatic zones in Australia.

• YES

• NO

• NOT GIVEN