人教新课标必修4 Unit2 Working the land[背景文章]Yuan Longping 2.docVIP

Yuan Longping -- Father of Hybrid Rice I saw rice plants as tall as Chinese sorghum,” said Yuan Longping of a dream he once had, “each ear of rice as big as a broom and each grain of rice as huge as a peanut. I could hide in the shadow of the rice crops with a friend. Yuan was just awarded 5-million-yuan State Supreme Science and Technology Prize for his high yield hybrid rice species. This award is viewed as Chinese Nobel Prize. Road to Super Hybrid Rice Born into a poor farmers family in 1931 and a graduate from the Southwest Agriculture Institute in 1953, Yuan began his teaching career at an agriculture school in Anjiang, Hunan Province. He came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s, when a series of natural disasters and inappropriate policies had plunged China into an unprecedented famine that caused many deaths. Since then, he has devoted himself to the research and development of a better rice breed. In 1964, he happened to find a natural hybrid rice plant that had obvious advantages over others. Greatly encouraged, he began to study the elements of this particular type. In 1973, in cooperation with others, he was able to cultivate a type of hybrid rice species which had great advantages. It yielded 20 percent more per unit than that of common ones. The next year their research made a breakthrough in seeding. They successfully developed a set of technologies for producing indica (long-grained non-glutinous) rice, putting China in the lead worldwide in rice production. For this achievement, he was dubbed the Father of Hybrid Rice. In 1979, their technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of new China. At present, as much as 50 percent of Chinas total rice fields grow Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice species, yield 60 percent of the rice production in China. Due to Yuans hard work, Chinas total rice output rose from 5.69 billion tons in 1950 to 19.47 bi