Listening Practice Food Waste Scandal

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 6

Listening test V6

You’re going to watch a 14-minute TEDTalk from Tristam Stuart (London, 2012) called The Global Food Waste Scandal. You’ll watch the video in three parts. There are pauses of 1 minute between the parts and after the last part./ 20 seconds per question. Take notes while watching the video and use the pauses to answer questions: 1 to 8. 

Questions

1.   What gave Tristam Stuart the idea that a lot of food perfectly fit for human consumption is needlessly thrown away? 

A.   A tasty-looking, sun-dried tomato loaf.

B.   The quality of the discarded food he collected to feed his pigs.

C.   He needed an additional income next to his teenage allowance.

2 . How did Tristam Stuart establish the amount of food waste of the countries he researched?

   

A.   His numbers are based on representative samples of wasted food         

       dumped on landfill sites.

B.   He calculated the amount of food produced by a country and compared 

       that to the actual food consumption of that country.

C.   He compared the food supply of a particular country to the actual food 

       consumption of that country.

3.  Why shouldn’t people pride themselves too much on the current agricultural success?

A.   Because humans’ agricultural past took a heavy toll on the environment.

B.   Because even though mankind produces enough food to feed the world, 

        there’s still famine.

C.    Because people are depleting the earth’s resources and are approaching

        an ecological breakpoint.

4.   What does Tristan Stuart want to make clear with his 

        9-biscuit explanation?

A.   That over 50% of all available food is wasted for human consumption.

B.   That over 10% of food production already gets lost in the first phase of 

       the food-production chain.

C.   That more food is appointed to feeding animals than to feeding humans.

5.   Why does the enormous amount of food waste from supermarkets only represent the tip of the iceberg?

A.   Because even more food is discarded because of cosmetic consumption 

       standards.

B.   Because farmers are destroying vast food supplies in order to achieve 

       better prices.

C.   Because the amount of food wasted due to inefficient production 

       methods of farmers is so much bigger.

6.   What is it that Tristan Stuart is advocating for with regard to the meat production industry?

A.   To invent new, good recipes with organ meat (offal) so as to combat 

       unnecessary destruction of meat.

B.   To stop destroying nutritious body parts of slaughter animals that can’t 

       be sold.

C.   To use every part of slaughter animals for human consumption.

7.   Why do people have the power to reduce food waste?

A.   Because people can change their own ways and stop throwing away 

       perfectly good food.

B.   Because people can start regarding food waste as unethical and 

       convince governments to take action.

C.   Because people can focus on breeding pigs.

8. Tristan Stuart compares the response of the public to speak up against food waste and take action as ‘a silver lining’. Explain what he means.

Answers

1. B             2. C              3. C             4. A               5. A              6. B                 7. B

8.   He refers to the saying 'every cloud has a silver lining'. Meaning: the situation is quite bad. Perfectly good food is wasted on an colossal scale, while the earth's resources are getting depleted and over 1 billion people suffer from malnutrition (=dark cloud). But there is hope (= silver lining), because people are starting to organise themselves to curb the destructive development of food waste, nationally and internationally.