新世纪英语高二学案u6.docVIP

Unit Six Amazing Achievements Reading Miracle in the Rice Field It is said that every scientist has a childhood dream for his or her future success. For Yuan Longpin, known as the “father of hybrid rice”, the dream is that he cultivates rice as huge as peanuts, and farmers can have a rest in the cool shadow of big rice plants. Yuan Longpin was born into a poor farmer’s family in 1931. Upon graduating from the Southwestern Agricultural College in 1953, he began his teaching career at an agriculture school and has since devoted himself to agricultural education and research. He came up with the idea of hybrid rice for the first time in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, he succeeded in developing the world’s first high-yield hybrid rice. Of great importance is his pioneering work, which has established China’s position of world leadership in this area. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO) has decided to get involved in the work of spreading the coverage of Yuan’s high-yield hybrid rice, which it considers the best way to increase the world’s grain output. In the following years, increasing grain output of hybrid rice further showed the success of Yuan Longpin’s research. This made him firmly believe that China can surely feed her large population with her limited cultivated land. This breakthrough in rice cultivation has significantly contributed to solving the food problem in China and the rest of the world. Yuan’s amazing achievement has won him a great many awards and honours from the United Nations and worldwide. However, even with such a great achievement, Yuan won’t take a break. In his mind there always exists a dream, more practical than that of his youth, that popularizing the new hybrid rice with higher yields around the world can eliminate starvation on Earth. “If the new hybrid rice were grown in the world’s remaining rice fields, the present grain output around the world would be more than doubled. This can solve the grain shortage,” said the scienti