The SOL Educa-on – Đào tạo IELTS chất lượng cao

Website: www.thesol.edu.vn
Hotline: 0383 690 866

TEST 1

READING

READING PASSAGE 1
You should spend about 20 minutes on Ques4ons 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage
1 below.

Urban farming
In Paris, urban farmers are trying a soil-free approach to agriculture that uses less space
and fewer resources. Could it help cities face the threats to our food supplies?
On top of a striking new exhibition hall in southern Paris, the world’s largest urban rooftop
farm has started to bear fruit. Strawberries that are small, intensely flavoured and
resplendently red sprout abundantly from large plastic tubes. Peer inside and you see the
tubes are completely hollow, the roots of dozens of strawberry plants dangling down inside
them. From identical vertical tubes nearby burst row upon row of lettuces; near those are
aromatic herbs, such as basil, sage and peppermint. Opposite, in narrow, horizontal trays
packed not with soil but with coconut fibre, grow cherry tomatoes, shiny aubergines and
brightly coloured chards.
Pascal Hardy, an engineer and sustainable development consultant, began experimenting
with vertical farming and aeroponic growing towers — as the soil-free plastic tubes are
known — on his Paris apartment block roof five years ago. The urban rooftop space above
the exhibition hall is somewhat bigger: 14,000 square metres and almost exactly the size
of a couple of football pitches. Already, the team of young urban farmers who tend it have
picked, in one day, 3,000 lettuces and 150 punnets of strawberries. When the remaining
two thirds of the vast open area are in production, 20 staff will harvest up to 1,000 kg of
perhaps 35 different varieties of fruit and vegetables, every day. ‘We’re not ever, obviously,
going to feed the whole city this way,’ cautions Hardy. ‘In the urban environment you’re
working with very significant practical constraints, clearly, on what you can do and where.
But if enough unused space can be developed like this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t
eventually target maybe between 5% and 10% of consumption.’
Perhaps most significantly, however, this is a real-life showcase for the work of Hardy’s
flourishing urban agriculture consultancy, Agripolis, which is currently fielding enquiries
from around the world to design, build and equip a new breed of soil-free inner-city farm.
‘The method’s advantages are many,’ he says. ‘First, I don’t much like the fact that most
of the fruit and vegetables we eat have been treated with something like 17 different
pesticides, or that the intensive farming techniques that produced them are such huge
generators of greenhouse gases. I don’t much like the fact, either, that they’ve travelled an
average of 2,000 refrigerated kilometres to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because
the varieties are selected for their capacity to withstand such substantial
TEST 1

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The SOL Educa-on – Đào tạo IELTS chất lượng cao
Website: www.thesol.edu.vn
Hotline: 0383 690 866

journeys, or that 80% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and transport companies, not
the producers.’
Produce grown using this soil-free method, on the other hand — which relies solely on a
small quantity of water, enriched with organic nutrients, pumped around a closed circuit
of pipes, towers and trays — is ‘produced up here, and sold locally, just down there. It
barely travels at all,’ Hardy says. “You can select crop varieties for their flavour, not their
resistance to the transport and storage chain, and you can pick them when they’re really
at their best, and not before.’ No soil is exhausted, and the water that gently showers the
plants’ roots every 12 minutes is recycled, so the method uses 90% less water than a classic
intensive farm for the same yield.
Urban farming is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Inner-city agriculture is booming
from Shanghai to Detroit and Tokyo to Bangkok. Strawberries are being grown in disused
shipping containers, mushrooms in underground carparks. Aeroponic farming, he says, is
‘virtuous’. The equipment weighs little, can be installed on almost any flat surface and is
cheap to buy: roughly €100 to €150 per square metre. It is cheap to run, too, consuming a
tiny fraction of the electricity used by some techniques.
Produce grown this way typically sells at prices that, while generally higher than those of
classic intensive agriculture, are lower than soil-based organic growers. There are limits to
what farmers can grow this way, of course, and much of the produce is suited to the
summer months. ‘Root vegetables we cannot do, at least not yet,’ he says. ‘Radishes are
OK, but carrots, potatoes, that kind of thing — the roots are simply too long. Fruit trees
are obviously not an option. And beans tend to take up a lot of space for not much return.’
Nevertheless, urban farming of the kind being practised in Paris is one part of a bigger and
fast-changing picture that is bringing food production closer to our lives.

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The SOL Educa-on – Đào tạo IELTS chất lượng cao
Website: www.thesol.edu.vn
Hotline: 0383 690 866

TEST 1

Questions 1-3
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for
each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

Urban farming in Paris

1. Vertical tubes are used to grow strawberries, ………………………… and herbs.
2. There will eventually be a daily harvest of as much as ……………………….. in
weight of fruit and vegetables.
3. It may be possible that the farm’s produce will account for as much as 10% of the
city’s …………………………… overall.
Questions 4—7
Complete the table below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet.

Intensive farming versus aeroponic urban farming

Growth Selection Sale

Intensive • wide range • quality not good • 6………………..

farming of 4……………… used • varieties of fruit and receive very little
• techniques pollute air vegetables chosen of overall income
that can survive
long 5………………
Aeroponic • no soil used • produce chosen
urban • nutrients added to because of
farming water, which is its 7………………….
recycled

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The SOL Educa-on – Đào tạo IELTS chất lượng cao
Website: www.thesol.edu.vn
Hotline: 0383 690 866

TEST 1

Questions 8-13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?
In boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
8. Urban farming can take place above or below ground.
9. Some of the equipment used in aeroponic farming can be made by hand.
10. Urban farming relies more on electricity than some other types of farming.
11. Fruit and vegetables grown on an aeroponic urban farm are cheaper than
traditionally grown organic produce.
12. Most produce can be grown on an aeroponic urban farm at any time of the year.
13. Beans take longer to grow on an urban farm than other vegetables.

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