2013年6月英语六级真题阅读第三套.doc

2013年6月第套 Norman Borlaug: Father of the Green Revolution Few people have quietly changed the world for the better more than this rural lad from the midwestern state of Iowa in the United States. The man in focus is Norman Borlaug, the Father of the Green Revolution, who died on September 12, 2009 at age 95. Norman Borlaug spent most of his 60 working years in the farmlands of Mexico, South Asia and later in Africa, fighting world hunger, and saving by some estimates up to a billion lives in the process. An achievement, fit for a Nobel Peace Prize. Early Years Im a product of the great depression is how Borlaug described himself. A great-grandson of Norwegian immigrants to the United States, Borlaug was born in 1914 and grew up on a small farm in the northeastern corner of Iowa in a town called Cresco. His family had a 40-hectare (公顷) farm on which they grew wheat, maize (玉米) and hay and raised pigs and cattle. Norman spent most of his time from age 7-17 on the farm, even as he attended a one-room, one-teacher school at New Oregon in Howard County. Borlaug didnt have money to go to college. But through a Great Depression eraprogramme, known as the National Youth Administration, Borlaug was able to enroll in the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis to study forestry. He excelled in studies and received his Ph.D. in plant pathology (病理学) and genetics in 1942. From 1942 to 1944, Borlaug was employed as a microbiologist at DuPont in Wilmington. However, following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Borlaug tried to join the military, but was rejected under wartime labour regulations. In Mexico In 1944, many experts warned of mass starvation in developing nations where populations were expanding faster than crop production. Borlaug began work at a Rockefeller Foundation-funded project in Mexico to increase wheat production by developing higher-yielding varieties of the crop. It involved research in genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomolo