New Foods and the New World
In the last 500 years, nothing about people — not their clothes, ideas, or languages — has changed as much as what they eat. The original chocolate drink was made from the seeds of the cocoa tree (可可树) by South American Indians. The Spanish introduced it to the rest of the world during the 1500’s. And although it was very expensive, it quickly became fashionable. In London, shops where chocolate drinks were served became important meeting places. Some still exist today.
The potato is also from the New World. Around 1600, the Spanish brought it from Peru to Europe, where it soon was widely grown. Ireland became so dependent on it that thousands of Irish people starved when the crop failed during the "Potato Famine (饥荒)" of 1845 — 1846, and thousands more were forced to leave their homeland and move to America.
There are many other foods that have traveled from South America to the Old World. But some others went in the opposite direction. Brazil is now the world’s largest grower of coffee, and coffee is an important crop in Colombia and other South American countries. But it is native to Ethiopia, a country in Africa. It was first made into a drink by Arabs during the 1400’s.
According to an Arabic legend, coffee was discovered when a person named Kaldi noticed that his goats were attracted to the red berries on a coffee bush. He tried one and experienced the "wide-awake" feeling that one-third of the world’s population now starts the day with.

Thousands of Irish people starved during the "Potato Famine" because()

AIready, of the world’s 12 software houses that have earned the highest rating in the world, seven are in India. That’s largely because they have used new methodologies rejected by American software specialists. For example, for decades, quality specialists, W. Edwards Deming and J. M.
Juran had urged US software companies to change their attitudes to quality. But their quality call mainly fell on deaf ears in the US — but not in Japan. By the 1970s and 1980s, Japan was grabbing market share with better, cheaper products. They used Deming’s and Juran’s ideas to bring down the cost of good quality to as little as 5% of total production costs. In US factories, the cost of quality then was 10 times as high: 50%. In software, it still is.
Watts S. Humphrey spent 27 years at IBM heading up software production and then quality assurance. But his advice was seldom paid attention to. He retired from IBM in 1986. In 1987, he worked out a system for assessing and improving software quality. It has proved its value time and again. For example, in 1990 the cost of quality at Raytheon Electronics Systems was almost 60% of total software production costs. It tell to 15% in 1996 and has since further dropped to below 10%.
Like Deming and Juran, Humphrey seems to be winning more praises overseas than at home. The Indian government and several companies have just founded the Watts Humphrey Software Quality Institute at the Software Technology Park in Chennai, India. Let’s hope that US lead in software will not be eaten up by its quality problems.

A. It is a special term of astronomy.
B. It is an invented term.
C. He is quoting an authority.
D. He is using the term ironically.