How Intensive Farming is Destroying the Environment - Reading Comprehension Text

Gaining popularity in the 20th century, boosted by neoliberal policies particularly in countries like the United States, intensive agriculture has been gradually overtaking more traditional farming methods. Intensive agriculture produces much higher yields per unit of land, requiring land modifications such as clearing forests and relying on huge amounts of inputs, which can include things like fertilizers, chemical pesticides and some might say a great deal of cruelty, particularly when it comes to animal operations.

This Reading Comprehension / Informational Text explores the money driven practices of Intensive Farming and how they contribute to environmental problems such as deforestation, water pollution and chemical pollution as well as how they normalize extreme animal cruelty. The text also explores possible solutions and alternative to Intensive Farming.

This activity is suitable for advanced to proficient ESL learners or native English speakers. After carefully reading the text, students are required to complete some comprehension exercises including:

• comprehension questions
• a multiple choice exercise
• a crossword
• a fill in the gaps text on “Animal Factory Farms”
  *a definitions match exercise

This can be used as a mini-lesson, assigned for homework or used to for vocabulary building purposes.

Total number of pages: 6
Answer key included

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