Urban Farming Reading Answers, IELTS Passage

Urban Farming Reading Answers: The Urban Farming Reading Answers passage explores the concept of modern urban agriculture and its impact on food production in cities. It discusses innovative soil-free farming techniques, their benefits, and the challenges involved. This passage includes Sentence Completion, Table Completion, and True/False/Not Given questions, which will help you practice key IELTS reading skills like understanding main ideas, locating specific details, and identifying factual accuracy.

In this guide, we have provided 14 IELTS Reading questions based on the Urban Farming passage. Practicing these questions will enhance your comprehension skills and boost your IELTS Reading band score.

Free IELTS Reading Practice Tests, Cambridge Sample Test PDF

Urban Farming Reading Answers Passage

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on the Reading Passage below.

Urban Farming

Paragraph A: 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?

Paragraph B: 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.

Paragraph C: 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.’

Paragraph D: 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 gasses. I don’t much like the fact, either, that they’ve traveled an average of 2,000 refrigerated kilometers to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because the varieties are selected for their capacity to withstand such substantial journeys, or that 80% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and transport companies, not the producers.’

Paragraph E: 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.

Paragraph F: 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.

Paragraph G: 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.

Urban Farming Reading Answers Sample Questions

Sentence Completion (Q. 1-3)

Complete the sentences below using NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage.

1. The world’s largest urban rooftop farm is located on top of a __________ in southern Paris.

2. The plastic tubes used for growing strawberries are __________, allowing the roots to dangle inside.

3. The soil-free farming method uses 90% less __________ compared to traditional intensive farming.

Table Completion (Q. 4-7)

Complete the table below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

True/False/Not Given (Q. 8-13)

Write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information in the passage, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, and NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

8. Hardy started his experiments with aeroponic farming in a greenhouse in Paris.

9. The rooftop farm in Paris is expected to produce up to 1,000 kg of fruit and vegetables daily when fully operational.

10. Hardy’s urban farming technique can completely replace traditional farming methods in cities.

11. The soil-free farming method requires artificial lighting to grow crops successfully.

12. Crops grown using aeroponic farming travel long distances before reaching customers.

13. Aeroponic farming produces vegetables that have better flavor compared to those grown conventionally.

Urban Farming Reading Answers with Explanations 

Sentence Completion (Q. 1-3) Answers

Table Completion (Q. 4-7) Answers

True/False/Not Given (Q. 8-13) Answers

Also Read:

• Should You Use All Capital Letters in the IELTS Listening and Reading Tests
• IELTS Reading Mistakes
• How to Improve IELTS Reading Score
• How to Manage Time in IELTS Reading

Guidance of PW IELTS

Physics Wallah offers multiple online IELTS courses for all students. Follow the IELTS pages to better prepare for the exam.