In 2018, China became the largest producer and consumer of the fruit in the world. Ninety-two-year-old Wu Mingzhu, a native of Wuhan, is the unknown hero who has helped make this possible.
“About 80 percent of the watermelons and sweet-melons served at people’s dining tables every day are the result of painful efforts made by Wu and her team over more than 60 years,” said Zhang Wenjun, a colleague of Wu’s.
Helping others had long been a dream of hers. And she thought the most beautiful thing in life is that everything you create can serve the people, so she made efforts to grow quality melons, which began paying off in 1973. She is one of the 8, 000 agricultural scientists who have come to Hainan annually from across the country over the past 60 years and have cultivated more than 20, 000 of China’s new seed varieties through off-season breeding.
Using innovative measures such as radiation mutation breeding, double haploid breeding and distant hybridization breeding, Wu and her team developed new germ-plasm (种质) resources, from which they cultivated more than 30 watermelon and muskmelon (香瓜) varieties with better adaptability and stronger disease resistance, said Yi Hongping, former director of the Xinjiang Muskmelon Research Center.
The new melon varieties have been promoted to more than 1.86 million hectares of fields from north to south. Some of these varieties have been promoted overseas, as far as California. Wu’s work has left her a number of honors. The “queen of melons” became an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1999 and an honorary citizen of Sanya in 2004.
【小题1】Why did Wu Mingzhu mainly want to grow high-end melons?| A．Because she wanted to make China the largest producer of melons. |
| B．Because China is the largest consumer of melons in the world. |
| C．Because she wanted to create something that could serve people. |
| D．Because Chinese government asked her to grow high quality melons. |
| A．Wu and her team cultivated melon varieties that could resist every disease. |
| B．Wu and her team cultivated high quality melons from the new germ-plasm resources. |
| C．Wu and her team cultivated 30 watermelon varieties from radiation mutation breeding. |
| D．Wu and her team cultivated melon varieties that could adapt to any circumstance. |
| A．She has cultivated more than 20, 000 of China’s new seed varieties. |
| B．She is committed to her work and makes remarkable achievements. |
| C．She helps make China the largest producer of fruit in the world in 2018. |
| D．She is awarded a number of honorary titles due to her contributions. |
| A．A diary entry. | B．A book review. |
| C．A school notice. | D．A news report. |
