tailieunhanh - IELTS Academic Reading Sample 114 - Endangered chocolate

Việc ôn tập sẽ trở nên đơn giản hơn khi các bạn đã có trong tay IELTS Academic Reading Sample 114 - Endangered chocolate. Tham khảo tài liệu không chỉ giúp các bạn củng cố kiến thức mà còn giúp các bạn rèn luyện giải đề, nâng cao tư duy. | You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on the Reading Passage below. Endangered chocolate A The cacao tree once native to the equatorial American forest has some exotic traits for a plant. Slender and shrubby the cacao has adapted to life close to the leaf littered forest floor. Its large leaves droop down. away from the sun. Cacao doesn t flower as most plants do at the tips of its outer and uppermost branches. Instead. its sweet white buds hang from the trunk and along a few Fat branches which form where leaves drop off. These tiny Flowers transform into pulp-filled pods almost the size of rugby balls. The low-hanging pods contain the bitter-tasting magical seeds. B Somehow more than 2 000 years ago. ancient humans in Mesoamerica discovered the secret of these beans. If you scoop them from the pod with their pulp. let them ferment and dry in the sun then roast them over a gentle fire something extraordinary happens they become chocolaty. And if you then grind and press the beans which are half-cocoa butter or more you will obtain a rich crumbly. chestnut brown paste - chocolate at its most pure and simple. C The Maya and Aztecs revered this chocolate which they Frothed up with water and spices to make bracing concoctions. It was edible treasure offered up to their gods used as money and hoarded like gold. Long after Spanish explorers introduced the beverage to Europe in the sixteenth century. chocolate retained an aura of aristocratic luxury. In 1753. the Swedish botanist Carolus Unnaeus gave the cacao tree genus the name Theobroma. which means food of the gods D In the last 200 years the bean has been thoroughly democratized - transformed from an elite drink into ubiquitous candy bars cocoa powders and confections. Today chocolate is becoming more popular worldwide with new markets opening up in Eastern Europe and Asia. This is both good news and bad because. Although farmers are producing record numbers of cacao bean this is not .