Modern agricultural practices have been extremely successful

Adam Lyons, Magoosh Tutor

Hey Ujjwal,
This sentence is about agriculture, which is growing food crops. A "loss" would be a loss in the crop. So if a tornado eliminates half of the crops, that would be a "loss" of crops. Diseases and insects can also eliminate crops, causing a loss. So 'losses to diseases and insects pests' are crops that have died from disease or been eaten by insects and thus can't be sold for profit.

Jun 4, 2019 • Reply

Cydney Seigerman, Magoosh Tutor

Hi Bilal :)

Happy to help! First the sentence says that "modern agriculture" (e.g. the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and modern machinery) has increased the amount of crops that is produced. The sentence goes on to say that, on the other hand, even though lots of pesticides are used (to try to prevent crop death due to insects/diseases), a lot of crops still die due to these diseases and insect pests.

Hope that helps! :)

Sep 14, 2016 • Reply

Susan Shen

Why not incongruous? it matches perfectly in my opinion with the transition "yet despite"; hereby showing that the losses to disease and pests are not congruous with the amount of pesticides used?

Nov 7, 2015 • Reply

Adam

Hi Susan,

>Modern agricultural practices have been extremely successful in increasing the productivity of major food crops, yet despite heavy use of pesticides, _____ losses to diseases and insect pests are sustained each year.

As you noted, we have a shift (despite), and so we are looking for a word that indicates that even though there is a heavy use of pesticides, there are still *major* crop losses. "Significant" and "considerable" thus work best.

There are a couple of problems with "incongruous." First, it has no similar word among the answer choices. Remember that with SE questions, the correct answer choices must create two sentences that mean the same thing. "Incongruous losses" is not the same as "significant" or "considerable" losses.

Secondly, saying that the losses were "incongruous" doesn't mean that they are incongruous *with regard to the amount of pesticides used.* It just means they are incongruous, but it wouldn't say in relation to what they are incongruous. So, this word doesn't make sense here.

Nov 11, 2015 • Reply

Shefali Lachhar

Thanks Adam. It was helpful. :)

Mar 13, 2016 • Reply