A Food Stream Contract – IELTS Reading Answer

Raajdeep Saha

10 min read

Updated On Oct 30, 2023

Reading Passage
A Food Stream Contract Reading Answers With Explanation

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The passage, A Food Stream Contract Reading Answer, is an IELTS General reading passage that consists of 13 questions.

The IELTS Reading passages, like A Food Stream Contract, ideally do not take you longer than 20 minutes to read. You must scan the given text, and highlight keywords in order to give an appropriate response that follows the directions.

The question types found in the A Food Stream Contract Reading Answer are:

Reading Passage

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

A Food Stream Contract

A With rapid urbanization, more people now live in cities than in the countryside, and this number is set to rise. For all the benefits cities bestow, they are expensive places. In some years, Tokyo records the highest cost of living; in others, Moscow. In 2014, for expatriates, Luanda, the capital of Angola, received the dubious accolade; and, for Angolans themselves, it had also suddenly become pricey with real estate going through the roof, so to speak, and food being prohibitive – even locally sourced mangoes were $5 a kilo.

B What can urbanites do to reduce the financial burden of paying for food? Diet? Grow their own? Beg for subsidies? Some economists have proposed that they buy contracts giving rights to a food stream in perpetuity, for example, a kilogram of beef would be delivered weekly from the date the contract started until the end of the owner’s life. In essence, this is what house purchase is – indefinite security of a single commodity. As is the case with buying a house, a loan from a financial institution might be necessary for the beef contract, even if it were merely for Australian blade steak and not Japanese Wagu. The contract could also be sold at the current market price if its owner moved out of delivery range or renounced beef.

C In order to maintain or increase the value of their investment, it is likely some owners would support national and international policies to limit food production – a sound idea in a world where 40% of food goes to waste.

D But let’s imagine, in this system, a consumer purchased a 25-year contract for beef, which, over time, doubled in value. Naturally, at sale, the owner would make a tidy profit. Conversely, if mad cow disease erupted, and no one dared eat beef, then the vendor would suffer. If the owner had bought ten beef contracts, he or she might even go bankrupt in this scenario.

E Let’s also imagine that people bought contracts on items they had no intention of consuming: that the health-conscious purchased, yet eschewed, saturated-fat meat; that shrewd amoral vegetarians speculated in beef, as they already buy share portfolios in which multinational agri-business is represented, or they deposit money into banks that do just that on their behalf.

F It is quite plausible that this speculative behavior could lead to the overheating of the food stream market. The state may intervene, attempting to cool things down, or it may tolerate such activity. Indeed, a government that proposed a capital gains tax or high death duties on food-stream contracts might be voted out in favor of another that believed in laissez-faire.* Besides this, an investment contract may be a way to realize wealth when there are few other possibilities either because the stock market is highly volatile, or much of the local economy generates little revenue, as is the case in Angola and many developing countries. Indeed, food-stream speculation could become a middle-class prerogative, indulged in by legislative members themselves.

G I hope by now, you’ve realized this essay is a spoof. Yet, the fantastic food-stream market is reminiscent of the global housing market, where homeownership and property speculation have become the privilege of a few at great expense to the many, who either cannot participate, or sign their lives away to banks. You may also have realized that when I bring this topic up at a dinner party, for instance, I am usually shouted down, despite what I believe to be its inherent logic, because my friends consider a house as more tangible than a steak, and their identities are bound up with vague but powerful notions of property rights and independence.

H I do concede that home ownership offers security (not having to move, being connected to one particular neighborhood) and creativity (being able to modify and decorate as you please), but I would prefer people rent rather than buy in an effort to lower property prices and to encourage investment in other sectors of the economy. Economists Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago have estimated that US output between 1999 and 2009 was 13% lower than it could have been because high housing costs forced so many people to move. Income locked up in housing could otherwise have been spent on local businesses, like restaurants or gyms, and job creation would likely have ensued.

I So, next time you toss a steak on the barbecue, ponder whether we should treat food in the same way we treat housing, or whether we should treat housing as we do food. *French for ‘allow to do’. An economic doctrine advocating that commerce should be free of state controls of any kind.

Questions 1-7

Complete the notes below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.
Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet.
A food-stream contract

Would guarantee access to one kind of food stream 1………………
Due to its expense, a bank 2………..might be needed to buy one
Could be bought and sold at the current 3………
When sold, could result in a decent 4……………or a considerable loss
Could be purchased on food a person did not plan on 5…………………..
Maybe one of the few legitimate ways to make money when the stock market is very 6…..or other parts of the economy perform poorly
Would probably be a privilege of the 7…………… and members of parliament

Questions 8-12

Do the statements below agree with the information given in Passage 1?

In boxes 8-12 on your answer sheet, write:
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information.
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information.
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

8 The writer makes an analogy between the current housing and food markets.

9 The writer rents his or her own home.

10 The writer’s friends share his or her ideas on the property market.

11 The writer thinks people like to own their homes because they can customize them.

12 Because Americans spent so much on housing, other parts of the economy suffered.

Questions 13

Choose the correct letter A, B, C, D, or E.
Write the correct letter in box 13 on your answer sheet.

What would be a suitable title for Passage?

A How to make homes affordable

B Buying a house is a bad investment

C Rethinking the housing market

D A new model for buying and selling food

E The madness of house and food prices