from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year, according to a new United Nations-backed study that calls for a shift away from destructively intensive agriculture, The alarming ____26____, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will ass to the risks of conflicts unless ____27____actions are implemented, warns the institution behind the report. “As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is ___28___for land within countries and globally,” said executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at the launch of the Global Land Outlook. “ To ___29____the losses, the outlook suggests it is in all our interests to step back and rethink how we are managing the pressures and the competition.” The Global Land Outlook is ____30____as the most comprehensive study of its type, mapping the interlinked impacts of urbanization, climate change, erosion and forest loss. But the biggest factor is the ___31___of industrial farming . Heavy tilling, multiple harvests and ___32____use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the ____33____of long-term sustainability. If the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, notes a paper in the outlook by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European commission. Over time, however, this ___34___fertility and can lead to abandonment of land and