The author uses a cause/effect text structure to demonstrate the complexity of farming. This structure allows the author to illustrate how the practice of plowing leads to negative consequences for the soil and ecosystem, emphasizing the intricate relationship between farming practices and their impacts on the environment and human health.
Question 3
"Industrial-Scale
Farming,
Sustainable Path"
by Miriam Horn
Working with his dad and brother on land
homesteaded by his maternal great-grandparents
just after the Civil War, Justin grew up hearing how
his grandmothers put wet tea towels in windows to
try to keep out the black blizzards of the Dust Bowl.
Given responsibility for several fields while still in
high school, he’d watched his own soils blowing
and washing away, weeds running out of control
and paltry yields. But it wasn’t until he went off to
Kansas State University that he understood a prime
cause of that damage: generations of plowing.
Though few landscapes appear more beautiful,
fertile and orderly than the straight, black, fragrant
furrows of a newly tilled field, plowing is unnatural
and, in many climates and soils, one of the most
destructive things a farmer can do. Plowing strips
soil bare, exposing it to erosion by rain and wind. It
collapses soil structure — closing off the water
channels left by deep roots and worms — and
harms life in the soil, which though it may appear
dead is in fact Earth’s most biodiverse ecosystem,
containing a third of all organisms. Those
thousands of microbial species are critical to
human survival. They sustain photosynthesis,
which all food and oxygen come from, by ferrying
nutrients to plants and protecting them from
pathogens. They decompose wastes, turning
corpses of plants and animals back into new life.
They’re also directly vital to human health, the
source of 90 percent of antibiotics and 60 percent
of anticancer drugs.
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A)
Use the excerpt to answer the question.
Why does the author use a cause/effect text
structure?
(1 point)
to propose solutions to soil erosion
to explain the importance of plowing
to offer alternatives to antibiotic use
to demonstrate the complexity of farming
1 answer