Ex. 9. Answer the comprehension questions on the text:

1. What role does food play in our life?

2. Why does a food crisis exist in the world?

3. What are new approaches to solving the world food problem?

4. What will future success in feeding the world depend on?

5. Why are the black topsoils considered to be the biggest treasure of the Ukrainian land?

6. What do they grow in Ukraine?

7. What's your opinion of agricultural production in Ukraine?

8. Sugar can be called white gold, can't it? Why?

9. Does the quality of our food products meet world standards?

1. Food is the source of energy for the maintenance of life.

2. The world presently produces more than enough food to feed everyone. But each year 12 million to 20 million people die prematurely from chronic undernutrition (lack of adequate food), malnutrition (lack of sufficient protein, vitamins, and minerals needed for good health), or normally nonfatal diseases (worsened by these conditions?)

3. Agriculture plays a key role by providing the means of increasing productivity. Scientific and technological advances in the industrialized world have fostered the development of more efficient farm machinery; more effective chemical fertilizers insecticides, and herbicides; improved crop varieties and animal breeds; and new farming methods, such as multiple cropping and reduced tillage farming.

4. Future success in feeding the world will depend on coordinated program of action] by business and government and on a balanced industrial and agricultural effort.

5. In Ukraine steppes and plains compose the most part of its territory (95 percent). The topsoils are mainly black. They are the biggest treasure of the Ukrainian land. Twenty five percent of the world’s black rich soils are in Ukraine.

6. In Ukraine they grow sugar beets, wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn, sun flower, hemp, flax, buckwheat, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, cabbages, also a large variety of grain cultures, fruits, vegetables.

7. Ukraine has about 30 thousand hectares of land under cultivation. Grain production is almost 1 ton per person. Sugar beet production per person is 1000 kg (in France - 415, in Germany - 332, in Hungary - 450). Ukraine produces 100 kg sugar per person (France - 65, Germany - 60, in the USA - 25).

8. Sugar can be called white gold (in the world market it costs 250 U.S. dollars per ton). This product can bring great profits to Ukraine’s state treasury

9. And now we can say that the quality of our food products meets world standards.