سؤال قراءة ستيب محلول — الفكرة الرئيسية (تدريب 8163)

1. Each year, thousands of children in East Africa go blind or die because they don't get enough vitamin A. Now, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ugandan, American and Australian researchers are trying to develop a potential fix: a genetically modified banana that packs a significantly larger vitamin A punch. 2. The bananas have already been successfully tested on gerbils. Researchers created the new bananas by slightly tweaking its genome so that the fruit contains more alpha and beta caroteno-plant-synthesized substances that animals convert into vitamin A The new bananas have a slight orange shade but taste the same as non-genetically modified bananas. Human trials just began in Iowa, and if they're successful, farmers in Uganda will be growing the GMO bananas by 2020. About 70 percent of people there rely on bananas as a major staple of their diets, so delivering the extra vitamin boost through the fruit should be an effective means of helping to alleviate vitamin A deficiency. If the GM banana scheme helps reduce death and blindness rates in Uganda, it could be transferred to other countries or applied to other fruits, like plantains. 3. Bananas are not the only food whose yield or nutritional profile could be improved with genetic engineering. With climate change threatening to disrupt existing crops and growing global populations demanding more of those supplies, genetic engineering could be a solution for making the most of limited space and resources. Quite a number of foods that fit this profile have already been created including virus resistant squash, and disease-resistant potatoes.