IX Read the passage.
Over a million people working in America’s fields, and far more globally, are about to face competition from workers who never get tired or ask for a living wage.
As field robots have gotten cheaper, a steady stream of farm jobs are being automated. Lettuce weeding is one of the first where the cost of robots now matches human labor. Weeding lettuce is slow, expensive, and potentially dangerous due to chemical exposure. Farm workers must spray individual weeds from a pesticide-filled backpack. Automated systems like the one designed by Danish firm F. Poulsen Engineering replace this with mechanical weeding and computer vision to distinguish between crops and pests. The company says it can do the job much faster and at no extra cost.
Robots will likely make inroads fastest in areas where the labor is backbreaking, and peak harvest times create a short supply of workers. Most robots have been built for specialized tasks: grapevine pruners, lettuce thinners, strawberry picking and cow-milking robots. But corn and other commodity crops are already taking advantage of economies of scale to get ahead of the cost curve. Large corn farmers in the US are buying features like self-steering tractors to save money. Even though the technology isn’t expected to reach price parity with human labor until
2020 for most farmers, about 10% of US farmer have adopted the technology because of their scale.
Answer the question below.
51. What does “the workers never getting tired or asking for a living wage” refer to?
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52. What farm job is not too costly to use agriculture robots?
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53. What do farm workers carry when they apply some chemicals to vegetables?
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54. What can the automated system distinguish?
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55. To reduce cost, what do some American farmers buy?
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Fill in the blank with a suitable word/ phrase from the passage.
56. Weeding lettuce can do harm to farmers’ health because of ................................ .
57. The automated system designed by Danish doesn’t require ................................ .
58. The majority of robots are specifically designed for ................................ .
59. The ................................ between most agriculture robots with human labor hasn’t been achieved yet.
60. The proportion of Americans using automated machine in their farming occupies ................................ .
