2016届高考英语高分冲刺特训听力素材3（word版）09_高考复习指南

2016届高考英语高分冲刺特训听力素材3（word版）09

　　It is not just the weather with which farmers contend; there are higher costs for growing food and lower prices when selling it. And these combined to make farming an increasingly difficult life, especially for small family farms. In New York, a new organization called "Farm Hands" is trying to help struggling farms in the region by linking city dwellers with farmers. As John Kailish reports, the scheme seems to benefit both.

　　Last week, two actors, a housewife, a tour guide, a dog walker and an unemployed social worker, all from the New York metropolitan area, spent a day working on Hall Gibson's fruit and vegetable farm located in the Upstate New York town of Brewster. The contingent also included two four-year-olds. The group listened attentively as Gibson gave the lengthy orientation talk complete with aerial photographs of his 125-acre farm. "This area was called part of the New York milk shed. One of the big incentives to producing milk in this area was the founding of the Borden plant." After the orientation talk the group walked to a five-acre field that was lined with rows of tomatoes and turnips, eggplants and cabbage. Gibson gave some brief picking instructions to two women who were going to harvest cherry tomatoes. "If they are split like this, throw them away or eat them." "OK." The transplanted urbanites picked six bushels of tomatoes and sixty pints of raspberries over the course of several hours. The farmhands were perfect strangers when they left Manhattan, but out in the field in Putnam County, they had no trouble striking up conversations that included such heady topics as romance in television.