A. Because they are strong-willed.
B. Because they speak two languages.
C. Because they do not know much about the disease.
D. Because they are mentally healthy.
4. The phrase “homed in” in line 4 from the bottom is closest in meaning to “______”.
A. looked at
B. chose
C. dwelt
D. lived
5. According to the passage, which of the following statements can be said as true?
A. Bilingual adults are generally less susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease.
B. Bilingual infants are more susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease.
C. Monolingual adults are less sensitive to voice and face cues for different languages.
D. Monolingual infants are more sensitive to voice and face cues for different languages.
(B)
Food prices offer a good proxy for agriculture’s health, notes Gerald Nelson, an economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. Rising prices signal increasing resource scarcity, he explains, which can be triggered by expanding populations, growing incomes and declining crop yields. Recent food-price shocks and yield shortfalls initially surprised analysts, note IFPRI’s Derek Headey and Shenggen Fan in a November 18 report. Government officials had been lulled into complacency by decades of falling food costs. But prices bottomed out around 2000 and have since begun climbing in response to commodities speculation and a string of poor harvests. Nelson and his colleagues have now used computer models to get some grasp on how crop yields and prices might respond, several decades out, to Earth’s continuing low-grade fever. The team considered three scenarios of income and population growth that might reasonably be expected to occur between 2020 and 2050. Then they applied four “plausible” climate scenarios with warmer temperatures and anywhere from slightly to substantially wetter weather. They also included an “implausible fifth scenario of perfect mitigation (a continuation of today’s climate into the future).” The resulting scenarios all indicated that in contrast to the 20th century, when food prices fell, the 21st century would see prices rise. Probably by a lot. Even with today’s climate, food prices would rise over the next 40 years in response to pressures from growing populations and incomes. Rice prices, for instance, would increase roughly 11 to 55 percent. Throwing in additional warming, prices can rise substantially more—a minimum of 31 percent for rice and perhaps a doubling for corn. The analyses clearly point to “climate change as a threat-multiplier,” concludes Nelson. Lighter wallets are hardly the most dire fallout of rising food costs. An analysis that Nelson’s group issued last year projected that food affordability by 2050 will likely trigger a decline in intake throughout the developing world. This could hike childhood malnutrition rates 20 percent above what would occur in the absence of climate change. Investments could be made to offset the negative impacts of climate on agriculture and childhood malnutrition. But they’d be high, IFPR I estimated: more than $7 billion annually. Last year’s greenhouse-gas releases have been fueling pessimism that nations will be able to brake their emission trajectories soon. Owing to the global recession, people had expected 2009 greenhouse-gas releases to drop precipitously, notes climate scientist Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter in England. “Global emissions did decrease 1.3 percent, but that was only equivalent to four days of emissions.” “The globe essentially faces a daunting task in terms of climate change,” notes Bruce Campbell, director of a climate and food program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research. Despite climate’s impacts on food production, agriculture remains largely ignored in international negotiations of climate and emissions policies. “What we’re hoping,” Campbell says, “is that agriculture gets to put on the agenda.”
6. The word “proxy” in line 1 is closest in meaning to “______”.
