外刊精读课件：向袁隆平致敬

上周六，共和国一天内痛失两位国士，“杂交水稻之父”袁隆平院士让中国人“填饱肚子”，“肝脏外科之父”吴孟超院士一生都在治病救人。

昨夜山河齐恸震，今朝双星辞九州。

关于袁隆平院士一生的坎坷和坚持，我们周六在文章袁隆平逝世！那个“让天下人都吃饱饭”的人走了 中简略写过，今天准备了一篇精读课件，帮助大家重温袁老取得的成就。

我们本来也想准备一篇吴孟超院士的文章，但涉及医学专业领域，所能找到的英文文章非常艰涩，还不适合同学们阅读。

这世上没有神仙，也无需立庙，因为每一缕升起的炊烟，都是飘自人间的怀念。

在开始今天的外刊精读课件学习之前，小编带着大家再次重温袁老生前的一个电影片段。他曾在电影《袁隆平》中出演自己，接受外国记者采访，用英语阐述自己的两大梦想：杂交水稻覆盖全球梦和禾下乘凉梦，说起梦境袁老幸福微笑。

小编根据视频特意整理出英语字幕，中英对照，供大家一睹袁老的风采。

现在，正式进入外刊精读课件学习，原文有删减改动。

Tributes Flow for Yuan Longping, Who Helped Save China from Hunger

Yuan Longping, China’s “father of hybrid rice” and hailed for his contributions to the country’s food security, died on Saturday. He was 91 years old.

The Chinese agronomist was known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s and regarded as a national hero for boosting grain harvests and helping to feed the world’s most populous country.

News of Yuan’s death prompted a flood of tributes online and was a top-ranking topic on Chinese microblogging site Weibo.

Born in Beijing in September 1930, Yuan began his career as an agrarian researcher in the 1950s. He often said in interviews that he was driven to increase rice output in China because of the hunger he had witnessed. “My lifetime pursuit is to ensure all people stay away from hunger,” he once said.

In the decades that followed, Yuan was associated with some of the most important breakthroughs in his field.

As early as 1964, Yuan theorised that a male-sterile grain could be crossed with other plants to boost yields, but it was not until 1973 that he cultivated the first hybrid rice thanks to the discovery of a wild rice species that made the breakthrough possible. Mass cultivation of the crop began in 1976 and proved key to China being able to feed one-fifth of the world’s population with just 9 per cent of its arable land.

In 1995, he produced a two-line hybrid rice and was tasked by the government to improve yields still further. He later developed a single line hybrid rice. In 1996, the agriculture ministry tasked Yuan to start a programme to breed “super rice”, plants of much higher yields.

Hybrid rice varieties have yields that tend to be about 20 per cent higher than those of conventional rice, and have been planted in 16 million hectares, or more than half of China’s rice acreage. China could feed 70 million more people thanks to Yuan’s research.

Yuan was awarded the World Food Prize in 2004, for “pioneering research that helped transform China from food deficiency to food security within three decades”.

China first exported hybrid rice to the United States in 1979 and has forged agreements on the technology — sometimes dubbed “rice diplomacy” — with several developing countries, including the Philippines, Pakistan and Madagascar. According to the China National Hybrid Rice Research and Development Centre, about 8 million hectares overseas has been planted with the varieties.

In his later years, he was also involved in research in China and Dubai into growing crops in diluted seawater. 

In 2019, Yuan was awarded the Medal of the Republic, the country’s highest honour, for his contribution to China’s food security and scientific development of agriculture, as well as increasing the world’s food output.