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P a g e
Reading Test 8
SECTION 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 1 on the following pages
Natural Pesticide in India
A
A dramatic story about cotton farmers in India shows how destructive pesticides can
be for people and the environment; and why today's agriculture is so dependent on
pesticides. This story also shows that it's possible to stop using chemical pesticides
without losing a crop to ravaging insects, and it explains how to do it.
B
The story began about 30 years ago, a handful of families migrated from the Guntur
district of Andhra Pradesh, southeast India, into Punukula, a community of around 900
people farming plots of between two and 10 acres. The outsiders from Guntur brought
cotton-culture with them. Cotton wooed farmers by promising to bring in more hard cash
than the mixed crops they were already growing to eat and sell: millet, sorghum,
groundnuts, pigeon peas, mung beans, chilli and rice. But raising cotton meant using
pesticides and fertilisers - until then a mystery to the mostly illiterate farmers of the
community. When cotton production started spreading through Andhra Pradesh state.
The high value of cotton made it an exceptionally attractive crop, but growing cotton
required chemical fertilizers and pesticides. As most of the farmers were poor, illiterate,
and without previous experience using agricultural chemicals, they were forced to rely on
local, small-scale agricultural dealers for advice. The dealers sold them seeds, fertilizers,
and pesticides on credit and also guaranteed purchase of their crop. The dealers
themselves had little technical knowledge about pesticides. They merely passed on
promotional information from multinational chemical companies that supplied their
products.
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