Dictation Sheet (Listening A)

Unit 6 Adaptations
Unit 2 [Audio]

F1: This presentation is about farming and superweeds. What is a weed? A weed is any plant that you

do NOT want in your garden. To you a flower might be pretty, but to a farmer, that same flower may be

a weed because it prevents the plants he wants, say corn, from growing.

And what is a superweed? I’m not talking about garden plants with superpowers. I’m talking about

weeds that cannot be killed with the chemicals farmers usually use – chemicals called herbicides.

Killing weeds, so that only useful plants are growing in a field, has been a challenge for farmers for

centuries. One problem is that farmers often use only one type of herbicides. And that herbicide actually

creates superweeds.

So, how does a herbicide create superweeds? First, a farmer, let’s call him Joe, plants seeds that cannot

be hurt by a specific herbicide. Next, instead of using several different herbicides, he uses large amounts

of only one: the one that he knows will not hurt his plants. This eliminates almost all of the weeds in

Joe’s field. The problem is, a few weeds are still alive. They are similar to Joe’s crops: the herbicide

cannot hurt them. With no competition from other weeds, and no other herbicides to kill them, these

become superweeds.

There’s another way that fighting weeds with only one type of herbicide can create superweeds. Farmers

used to dig up and turn over all the soil, or dirt, in their fields before they planted crops. This killed

weeds, but after that, a lot of soil washed away in the rain. Companies instructed farmers to stop plowing
 Dictation Sheet (Listening A)

up their soil. This modification stopped the valuable dirt from washing away in the rain, but it also let

the weeds grow.

As superweeds have begun taking resources away from crop plants in countries around the world,

governments and companies have instituted these guidelines for farmers:

1)Use a variety of herbicides to attack weeds. 2)Do not plant the same crop in a field every year.

Instead, plant different crops in different years. 3)Plow fields occasionally.