真题（职称英语综合类考试卷）_0.docVIP

试卷第 PAGE 1 页共 NUMPAGES 2 页 真题（职称英语综合类考试卷） 姓名:_____________ 年级:____________ 学号:______________ 题型 选择题 填空题 解答题 判断题 计算题 附加题 总分 得分 评卷人 得分 How technology pushes down price The Treaty of Breda, signed in 1667 after a war between the English and Dutch in which the English were worsted, gave the Dutch the big prize: Run, a small island in the Indonesian archipelago which was the world’s principal source of nutmeg. The margin on nutmeg at the time was around 3,200%. The English, as a consolation prize, got Manhattan. As an illustration of the long-term fall in food prices compared with other goods, that is a sharp one. But deflation has characterized the food business for centuries, because of continual advances in food production and distribution technology. Consumers have benefited greatly from those advances. Malthusians, whose descendants until quite recently predicted that the world would run out of food, have thereby been confounded. More and more food is being produced by fewer and fewer people with less and less capital; it is therefore ever more plentiful and cheaper. Since demand is to some extent limited by the size of people’s stomachs, spending on food compared with other goods has been falling for many years, and continues to drop (see chart 4). Genetically modified (GM) seeds are the latest manifestation of a production revolution that started with Charles “Turnip” Townsend, who in the 18th century laid the basis for crop rotation. Organic fertilisers were replaced by chemical ones in the 19th century. The railway opened up the American mid-west. The horse replaced the cow, the combine harvester the horse. After the second world war, dwarf varieties of wheat and rice (which overcame the problem that heavily fertilised crops in hot countries grew too tall and fell over) boosted developing-country output. The “green revolution” helped trigger a more recent “livestock revolution”, documented by Chris Delgado, who works jointly for the Internation