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  3. Intensifying agriculture is never going to be the new rock ’n’ roll, but the idea is pretty fashionable right now. Last week a m

Intensifying agriculture is never going to be the new rock ’n’ roll, but the idea is pretty fashionable right now. Last week a m

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问题     Intensifying agriculture is never going to be the new rock ’n’ roll, but the idea is pretty fashionable right now. Last week a major study led by the UK government’s chief scientist John Beddington warned that the only way to feed the world is to produce more food from the same amount of land.
    Some say that misses the point: we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people, if only we didn’t waste so much. But there is another argument for intensifying agriculture: to save the rainforests. At last December’s climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, many delegates called for investment in farming to be included in REDD, the fund that will pay tropical countries to protect their rainforests and the carbon they lock away. The argument runs like this. As demand for food increases, farmers — already the biggest destroyers of forest are likely to chop down yet more trees. So to prevent further destruction, we urgently need to intensify agriculture. As climate economics guru Nicholas Stern put it in Cancun: "Cattle pasture in Brazil has only one animal per hectare. Raise that to two and you can save the Amazon rainforest. " The Brazilian government’s strategy is based on exactly that premise. The World Bank, which will run the fund, made the same pitch.
    The idea that intensifying agriculture relieves pressure on land is sometimes called the Borlaug hy pothesis after Norman Borlaug, the pioneer of the green revolution, who first articulated it. But before we go ahead we had better be sure that it is true.
    The counter-argument is that farmers don’t clear forests to feed the world; they do it to make money. So helping farmers become more efficient and more productive — especially those living near forests won’t reduce the threat. It will increase it. Tony Simons put it this way, "Borlaug thought that if you addressed poverty in the forest border, they’d stop taking their machetes into the forest. Actually, they get enough money to buy a chainsaw and do much more damage. "
    One recent study seems to bear out this contrarian view. Thomas Rudel of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, compared trends in national agricultural yields with the amount of land under crops since 1990. If Borlaug was right then where yields rose fastest, the rise in cropland should be least. It might even go into reverse. No such luck. Mostly, yields and cultivated area rose together. Rudel compared the finding to the Jevons paradox, named after the 19th-century economist William Jevons who found that increasing the efficiency of coal burning led to more, not less, coal being burned.
    That’s not to say intensification isn’t needed — the world has to be fed, after all. But it won’t necessarily save the forests. Any climate protection scheme that assumes it does is likely to be handing out money for nothing.
According to Jevons paradox, intensifying agriculture would bring______.
选项 A、a swift growth in crop yields
B、a fast increase in the burning of coal
C、a dramatic decline of forests
D、a shocking decrease in farmlands
答案C
解析 第五段末句引出杰文斯悖论。该悖论认为，随着煤炭燃烧率的提高，会有更多而非更少的煤炭被消耗掉。该理论对本文的启示是：随着粮食产量的增长(集约农业的结果)，会有更多的林地被开垦出来种植粮食，从而导致森林面积大幅下降，耕地面积大幅增加。[C]选项正确。
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