Kim: The rapidly growing world population is increasing demands on food producers in ways that threaten our natural resources. With more land needed for both food production and urban areas, less land will be available for forests and wildlife habitats.
Hampton: You are overlooking the promises of technology. I am confident that improvements in agriculture will allow us to feed the world population of ten billion predicted for 2050 without significantly increasing the percentage of the world’s land now devoted to agriculture.
Kim’s and Hampton’s statements most strongly support the claim that both of them would agree with which one of the following?
Inference question
Pre-thinking
From the argument we know that:
#1 Kim is against to exploit more lands for both urban and agricultural purposes
#2 Hampton thinks that technology will prevent the exploitation of natural resources for agricultural purposes
Both of them agree on the fact that exploitation of natural resources should be contained.
We should also note that Hampton does not give us his/her opinion about the exploitation of natural resources for urban purposes. Hence for what we know he might be against or supporting such explotation
POE
(A) Efforts should be taken to slow the rate of human population growth and to increase the amount of land committed to agriculture.
No-one thinks that increasing the land committed to agriculture is a good idea
(B) Continued research into more-efficient agricultural practices and innovative biotechnology aimed at producing more food on less land would be beneficial.
In line with pre-thinking
(C) Agricultural and wilderness areas need to be protected from urban encroachment by preparing urban areas for greater population density.
we don't know hampton's stand on urban encroachment
(D) In the next half century, human population growth will continue to erode wildlife habitats and diminish forests.
Cannot infer from the argument
(E) The human diet needs to be modified in the next half century because of the depletion of our natural resources due to overpopulation.
the human diet is irrelevant