The price of coffee beans hits a 12 – year high today. I thought there might be some kind

The price of coffee beans hits a 12 – year high today. I thought there might
be some kind of coffee – market story, like we saw with cocoa earlier this summer.
But the main driver of coffee prices right now is simpler: Colombia has had
a few years of weak coffee harvests because of too much rain, which has reduced
the global supply. And coffee drinkers keep buying coffee, even as prices rise, in
other words, demand is unchanged.
The higher price of beans – up about 40 percent since March – means higher prices for the coffee you buy by the pound. But it probably won’t affect the coffee you buy by the cup.
Smuckers, which sells Folgers and Millstone coffees, recently said it was raising its prices because of the higher cost of beans. Starbucks, however, said it would absorb the higher cost of beans without raising prices.
“You see it much more in the grocery store because the raw materials are a big factor of cost,” Jose Sette of the International Coffee Organization told me. “In a coffee shop, your big expenses are rent and labor.”
While real – world supply and demand is the big driver of the price of beans, there may be some speculative action in coffee business in the future.
But futures (期货) of the high – grade Arabica beans are traded in the US, where regulations prevent speculators (投机商) from controlling the market, hoping such things won’t happen just as in London summer market. That suggests that prices should fall when supply improves – which may happen next year.
Some experts say that farmers in third world countries won’t actually benefit from higher prices in this case. When the price difference is due to supply and demand, the profit of the seller usually doesn’t go up.
【小题1】Which of the following is the best title for the passage?A．Why coffee is getting more expensive?B．How farmer benefits from the high price?C．Whether the US will control the coffee market?D．What has caused the reduction of coffee?【小题2】From the second paragraph we can infer that     .A．Colombia is the coffee trading center of the worldB．Colombia coffee output contains a final share of the worldC．People need more and more coffeeD．Coffee sales will be getting less and less【小题3】In this summer’s coffee bean market,     .A．the US made more rules about coffee pricesB．speculators once held the coffee bean market in LondonC．coffee bean trading was seriously disorganizedD．coffee bean prices were very low in the US【小题4】Which of the following is TRUE according to the text?A．The price difference determines the profit of the seller.B．Smuckers is a famous coffee manufacturer.C．Real – world supply and demand decides the prices.D．Coffee prices will bee much higher next year.A