Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.Farming has come a long way since the days of horse-drawn plows, and now it’s heading swiftly into the twenty-first century. Research at Indiana’s Purdue University uses the Navistar Global Positioning System (GPS) to help increase crop yields and reduce chemical use. GPS uses satellite signals to determine location within inches. Under Purdue’s scheme, a ...

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

Farming has come a long way since the days of horse-drawn plows, and now it’s heading swiftly into the twenty-first century. Research at Indiana’s Purdue University uses the Navistar Global Positioning System (GPS) to help increase crop yields and reduce chemical use. GPS uses satellite signals to determine location within inches. Under Purdue’s scheme, a farmer out in the field would use a GPS receiver mounted on his vehicle to pinpoint his position. A computer linked to the receiver and programmed with the field’s soil conditions – which can vary widely from one area to another – would tell the farmer precisely where the plant and how much pesticide and fertilizer to use at that specific site. “Currently the number one cost to the famer is chemicals” say Gary Kurtz, a Professor of Agriculture Engineering at Purdue. Site-specific farming can increase yields while reducing chemical use.

But the cost of this new technology may be too high for the small farmer. The cost of taking and testing soil samples every few feet in a farmer’s field is a limiting factor. Soil tests can run $7 to $8 each. Mark Morgan, assistant Professor of Agriculture Engineering at Purdue and his graduate assistants are working on a sensor to be attached to the front of a farm implement, enabling the farmer to perform his own soil tests on the go.

What is the most expensive part of farming for farmers?