potato

Examples

• A1

  She peeled the potatoes and boiled them for twenty minutes before mashing them with butter.

• A1

  Potatoes are one of the most popular vegetables in the world and can be baked, boiled, fried, or roasted.

• A2

  The Irish famine of the 1840s was caused by a potato blight that destroyed the crop that most of the rural population depended on for survival.

• A2

  He ordered a jacket potato with cheese and beans for lunch — a cheap, filling meal popular in British cafes.

• B1

  The Columbian Exchange — the transfer of plants, animals, and diseases between the Americas and the Old World following Columbus's voyages — transformed European agriculture through the introduction of the potato, which yields more calories per acre than European grain crops, can be grown in poor soils at high altitude, and provided a dietary supplement that demographers credit with contributing to the European population boom of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

• B1

  Potato varieties number in the thousands, bred for different characteristics — waxy potatoes (high moisture, low starch, good for salads and boiling), floury potatoes (high starch, low moisture, good for mashing and baking), and all-purpose varieties that perform adequately in multiple preparations — with commercial production concentrating on a small number of varieties selected for yield, disease resistance, and supermarket acceptance.

• B2

  The molecular genetics of potato late blight (Phytophthora infestans) — the pathogen responsible for the Irish famine and still a major crop threat — illustrates the ongoing evolutionary arms race between pathogen and host: the pathogen's genome contains a large repertoire of effector genes that suppress host immune responses, while breeders develop resistant potato varieties by introducing resistance genes from wild Solanum relatives; new effector variants continuously break down newly introduced resistances, requiring continuous development of new resistance varieties.

• B2

  The political economy of potato production in Europe has been shaped by agricultural subsidies that supported the sector through price guarantees and export subsidies under the Common Agricultural Policy, creating overproduction crises in which European farmers produced more potatoes than European consumers would buy at market prices — the surplus was exported at subsidised prices, disrupting agricultural markets in developing countries whose farmers could not compete with artificially cheapened European imports.

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