IELTS Reading Intensive Lesson - The Power of Ants - Trí Đức English TRÍ ĐỨC ENGLISH IELTS Reading Intensive — Passage Analysis & Practice I. READING PASSAGE: The Power of Ants [Paragraph A] While farmers of Berne in Switzerland were taking pests to a court headed by an archbishop in 1476, Chinese farmers had a more practical approach to pest control. Rather than relying on divine intervention like their counterparts in Switzerland, the Chinese initially put their faith in frogs and ducks which were encouraged to snap up the pests in the paddies and check the occasional plague of locusts. But the notion of biological control began with an ant called yellow citrus ant Oecophylla smaragdina . In the beginning, Chinese farmers randomly built ant nests here and there, but it did not take long before the growing demand led to the development of a thriving trade in nests and a new type of agriculture—ant farming. [Paragraph B] China, as the ancestral home of oranges, lemons and other fruit trees, also faces the greatest diversity of citrus pests. The trees that produce the sweetest fruits usually attract a host of plant-eating insects. With so many hostile insects, fruit growers back then clearly had to find some way of protecting their orchards. Then the yellow citrus ant became remarkably popular as it could run fast and has a powerful nip, which would be perfect for killing a large number of insects that plagued the orange groves in southern China. [Paragraph C] It was not until the early 20th century that the West discovered the Chinese orange growers' secret weapon. At the time, Florida was suffering an epidemic of citrus canker. After trying all the methods that failed in the end, Walter Swingle, an American plant physiologist, was sent to China in search of varieties of orange plantations which were resistant to the disease. While Swingle was studying the citrus orchards around a city in Southern China, he accidentally came across the cultivated ant "grown" by villagers nearby who sold them to the orange growers. [Paragraph D] The earliest report of citrus ants at work among the orange trees appears in a book on tropical and subtropical botany in 304 AD, saying "The people of Chiao-Chih sell ants in bags of rush matting in their markets. The nests are like silk. The bags are all attached to twigs and leaves, with the ants kept inside the nests. The ants are reddish-yellow in colour, bigger than ordinary ants. In the south, if the orange trees do not have this kind of ant, the fruits will all be damaged by pests, and not a single fruit will survive." [Paragraph E] "In the beginning, farmers depended on nests collected from the wild or bought at the market, where sales of nests were constant. Also, people believe that orange trees that do not have ants may have wormy fruit. As a result, the people are eager to purchase nests for their orange trees," written by Liu Hsun in his book Strange Things Noted in the South in around AD 890. The industry qu...