Question 17 is based on the passage you have just heard.

听力原文：

    Wild carrots probably evolved with the other flowering plants, about 360 million years ago. Like apples, carrots are native to Central Asia. That’s why horses, which come from Central Asia, like both apples and carrots so much. 

    （16）With wild carrots, the roots are white, small and skinny, so you’d have to pick a lot of wild carrots to get enough to eat. Doctors used carrot seeds and roots as medicine, on the theory that foods that taste bad must be good for you.

    Around 800 AD, people in Central Asia managed to develop a new kind of carrot—a purple carrot—that attracted more interest from international traders.（17）Then in the late 1500s, food scientists in the Netherlands cultivated large, straight, sweet, red carrots like the ones we eat today. But people still mostly fed carrots to horses, donkeys and pigs, and didn’t eat them themselves. In the 1600s, people in China used carrots as medicine, but they also ate carrots boiled in soup. The red color was popular for Chinese New Year celebrations.（18）But carrots got their biggest boost during the two world wars, when food shortages forced people to eat them, and government told everyone how healthy carrots were. Today, cooler countries grow most of the world’s carrots. Machines do most of the planting and picking, and carrots are easy to store and ship, so carrots are cheap almost everywhere.

17. What does the speaker say about carrots in the late 1500s?

解析：D。本题目为细节题。问题为：讲话人讲了胡萝卜在16世纪末的什么信息？根据原文“Then in the late 1500s, food scientists in the Netherlands cultivated large, straight, sweet red carrots, like the ones we eat today.”，可知在16世纪末，荷兰的食品科学家培育出了又大又甜，长得笔直的红胡萝卜，就像我们今天吃的一样。故正确答案为D) They began to look like modern-day carrots（它们开始像我们当今吃的胡萝卜）。