Urban Farming – IELTS Reading Answers from Cambridge IELTS 18

Raajdeep Saha

12 min read

Updated On Jul 24, 2024

Reading Passage
Answers for Urban Farming Reading Answers with Location and Explanations
Tips to Solve the Question Types in Urban Farming IELTS Reading Answers
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IELTS applicants who practise consistently can earn the highest possible scores on the IELTS Reading module. To do so successfully, you must be able to approach and respond to a variety of question types, such as those found in ‘Urban Farming’ in IELTS Cambridge 18 Academic Reading Test 1.

The Academic passage, Urban Farming, is a reading passage that is part of the latest Cambridge IELTS series. Try to find the answers to get an idea of the difficulty level of the passages in the actual reading test. If you want more passages to solve, try taking one of our IELTS reading practice tests.

There are 13 questions in total in the Reading Answers of Urban Farming. You must comprehend the subject, identify important terms in the IELTS reading passages, and then respond in accordance with the instructions.

The question types found in this passage are:

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Reading Passage

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

Urban Farming

In Paris, urban farmers are trying a soil-free approach to agriculture that uses less space and fewer resources. Could it help cities face the threats to our food supplies?

On top of a striking new exhibition hall in southern Paris, the world’s largest urban rooftop farm has started to bear fruit. Strawberries that are small, intensely flavoured and resplendently red sprout abundantly from large plastic tubes. Peer inside and you see the tubes are completely hollow, the roots of dozens of strawberry plants dangling down inside them. From identical vertical tubes nearby burst row upon row of lettuces; near those are aromatic herbs, such as basil, sage and peppermint. Opposite, in narrow, horizontal trays packed not with soil but with coconut fibre, grow cherry tomatoes, shiny aubergines and brightly coloured chards.

Pascal Hardy, an engineer and sustainable development consultant, began experimenting with vertical farming and aeroponic growing towers- as the soil-free plastic tubes are known – on his Paris apartment block roof five years ago. The urban rooftop space above the exhibition hall is somewhat bigger: 14,000 square metres and almost exactly the size of a couple of football pitches. Already, the team of young urban farmers who tend it have picked, in one day, 3,000 lettuces and 150 punnets of strawberries. When the remaining two thirds of the vast open area are in production, 20 staff will harvest up to 1,000 kg of perhaps 35 different varieties of fruit and vegetables, every day. ‘We’re not ever, obviously, going to feed the whole city this way,’ cautions Hardy. ‘In the urban environment you’re working with very significant practical constraints, clearly, on what you can do and where. But if enough unused space can be developed like this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eventually target maybe between 5% and 10% of consumption.’

Perhaps most significantly, however, this is a real-life showcase for the work of Hardy’s flourishing urban agriculture consultancy, Agripolis, which is currently fielding enquiries from around the world to design, build and equip a new breed of soil-free inner-city farm. ‘The method’s advantages are many,’ he says. ‘First, I don’t much like the fact that most of the fruit and vegetables we eat have been treated with something like 17 different pesticides, or that the intensive farming techniques that produced them are such huge generators of greenhouse gasses. I don’t much like the fact, either, that they’ve traveled an average of 2,000 refrigerated kilometers to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because the varieties are selected for their capacity to withstand such substantial journeys, or that 80% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and transport companies, not the producers.’

Produce grown using this soil-free method, on the other hand- which relies solely on a small quantity of water, enriched with organic nutrients, pumped around a closed circuit of pipes, towers and trays- is ‘produced up here, and sold locally, just down there. It barely travels at all,’ Hardy says. ‘You can select crop varieties for their flavour, not their resistance to the transport and storage chain, and you can pick them when they’re really at their best, and not before.’ No soil is exhausted, and the water that gently showers the plants’ roots every 12 minutes is recycled, so the method uses 90% less water than a classic intensive farm for the same yield.

Urban farming is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Inner-city agriculture is booming from Shanghai to Detroit and Tokyo to Bangkok. Strawberries are being grown in disused shipping containers, mushrooms in underground carparks. Aeroponic farming, he says, is ‘virtuous’. The equipment weighs little, can be installed on almost any flat surface and is cheap to buy: roughly 100 to 150 per square metre. It is cheap to run, too, consuming a tiny fraction of the electricity used by some techniques.

Produce grown this way typically sells at prices that, while generally higher than those of classic intensive agriculture, are lower than soil-based organic growers. There are limits to what farmers can grow this way, of course, and much of the produce is suited to the summer months. ‘Root vegetables we cannot do, at least not yet,’ he says. ‘Radishes are OK, but carrots, potatoes, that kind of thing- the roots are simply too long. Fruit trees are obviously not an option. And beans tend to take up a lot of space for not much return.’ Nevertheless, urban farming of the kind being practised in Paris is one part of a bigger and fast-changing picture that is bringing food production closer to our lives.

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Questions 1-3

Complete the sentences below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1-3 on your answer sheet.

Urban farming in Paris

1 Vertical tubes are used to grow strawberries, __________ and herbs.

2 There will eventually be a daily harvest of as much as __________ in weight of fruit and vegetables.

3 It may be possible that the farm’s produce will account for as much as 10% of the city’s __________ overall.

Questions 4-7

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 4-7 on your answer sheet.

Intensive Farming versus Aeroponic Urban Farming

	Growth	Selection	Sale
Intensive farming	wide range of 4_______ used techniques pollute air	quality not good varieties of fruit and vegetables chosen that can survive long 5_______	6_______ receive very little of overall income
Aeroponic urban farming	no soil used nutrients added to water, which is recycled	produce chosen because of its 7_______	–

Questions 8-13

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?

In boxes 8-13 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 Urban farming can take place above or below ground.

9 Some of the equipment used in aeroponic farming can be made by hand.

10 Urban farming relies more on electricity than some other types of farming.

11 Fruit and vegetables grown on an aeroponic urban farm are cheaper than traditionally grown organic produce.

12 Most produce can be grown on an aeroponic urban farm at any time of the year.

13 Beans take longer to grow on an urban farm than other vegetables.

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Answers for Urban Farming Reading Answers with Location and Explanations

Don’t miss the answer key for the Urban Farming IELTS Reading passage, complete with detailed explanations, and prepare to score a high IELTS Reading band score.

1 Answer: lettuces

Question type: Sentence Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 2, Line 3-Line 4

Answer explanation: The selected lines from the second paragraph reveal, “Peer inside and you see the tubes are completely hollow, the roots of dozens of strawberry plants dangling down inside them. From identical vertical tubes nearby burst row upon row of lettuces; near those are aromatic herbs, such as basil, sage, and peppermint.”. This tells us that strawberries, lettuces, and herbs like basil, sage, and peppermint are grown from vertical tubes. Hence, the answer is ‘lettuces’.

2 Answer: 1,000 kg

Question type: Sentence Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 3, Line 4

Answer explanation: In the quoted line of Paragraph 3, it is declared, “When the remaining two thirds of the vast open area are in production, 20 staff will harvest up to 1,000 kg of perhaps 35 different varieties of fruit and vegetables, every day.”. This points to the fact that farmers will be able to harvest 1,000 kgs of fruits and vegetables on a daily basis. Hence, the answer is ‘1,000 kg’.

3 Answer: (food) consumption

Question type: Sentence Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 3, Line 7

Answer explanation: In the highlighted line of Paragraph 3, it is reported that “But if enough unused space can be developed like this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eventually target maybe between 5% and 10% of consumption.”. This proves the fact that around 10% of the food consumption of the cities can be produced from these farms. Hence, the answer is ‘(food) consumption’.

4 Answer: pesticides

Question type: Table Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 4, Line 3

Answer explanation: In the quoted line of Paragraph 4, it is said that “First, I don’t much like the fact that most of the fruit and vegetables we eat have been treated with something like 17 different pesticides, or that the intensive farming techniques that produced them are such huge generators of greenhouse gasses.”. It is clear from the above-mentioned remark of the author that intensive farming techniques use a lot of pesticides. Hence, the answer is ‘pesticides’.

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5 Answer: journeys

Question type: Table Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 4, Line 4

Answer explanation: In the specified line of Paragraph 4, it is communicated that “…that they’ve traveled an average of 2,000 refrigerated kilometers to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because the varieties are selected for their capacity to withstand such substantial journeys…”. In this way, it is shown that the selection of the variety of crops are made on the basis of the fact that they can endure long journeys. Hence, the answer is ‘journeys’.

6 Answer: producers

Question type: Table Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 4, Line 4

Answer explanation: The mentioned lines of Paragraph 4 say that “…or that 80% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and transport companies, not the producers.”. This concluding portion of the last line of Paragraph 4 points out that most of the income (80%) goes to the wholesalers and transport companies and producers receive very less of the income from intensive farming . Hence, the answer is ‘producers’.

7 Answer: flavour / flavor

Question type: Table Completion

Answer location: Paragraph 5, Line 3

Answer explanation: The given line of Paragraph 5 describes, “You can select crop varieties for their flavour…”. It is clear that the crop variety for the aeroponic urban farming is selected on the basis of its flavour and not other factors like transport resistance. Hence, the answer is ‘flavour / flavor’.

8 Answer: True