Exetat Langues 2021

Question 1

ENGLISH TEXT


Once a wild ground – crawling plant, today’s soybean plant has been bred by Chinese farmers for more than three thousand years to grow upright. The typical plant now stands about three feet high and measures three wide. For Asians who do not drink animal milk, the soybean quickly became indispensable. The beans were knows as the “cow of china” because they were soaked in water to yield a white liquid now called soy milk. In 206 B-C., soybeans were first fermented to make douche, the predecessor of soy sauce.

Around the seventh century, miso emerged in Japan, evolving in part from a soybean paste that Buddhist monks brought from China. Miso was made almost exclusively by monks, and remained a delicacy of the privileged upper classes until the tenth century.

The earliest references of western visitors to China and Japan rarely mentioned the soybean. Instead, travelers wrote of “gravy” (soy sauce), “great cakes like cheeses” (tofu), and “milk out of the kidney beans” (soy milk). Samuel Bowen, an American adventurer, is credited with having introduced the soybean to the United States in the mid-1700s. Over the next two hundred years, soy products went from relative obscurity to the basis of a burgeoning industry.

The oil embargoes and resulting shortages of the 1970s created a need for an alternative oil for making printer’s inks. Today, nearly one third of American newspapers use soy – based inks. Researchers have also found applications for soybean oil as clean burning substitute for diesel fuel in city buses and as a machine lubricant.

In the 1990s, researchers began experimenting genetically modified soybean plants. Some of the benefits of these “designer” plants are larger crop yields, higher – quality edible oil, greater protein content, and resistance to disease.


QUESTION BASED ON THE TEXT.
1. The followings statement is the summary of the …. paragraph. Soybean oil is also used as a fuel.