香蕉狂潮
Going Bananas

例句：Trees propagate themselves by seeds.
樹木依靠種子來繁殖。

例句：The leaves and fruits on the tree are edible.
長在這棵樹上的樹葉及果實是可以食用的。

例句：The mutant virus does not have a cure at the moment.
這個變種的病毒目前沒有解藥。

例句：After the war, the fields at this country have become sterile.
經歷過戰爭後，這個國家的農地變得貧瘠不堪。

例句：That actress resembles my sister-in-law.
那位女演員和我大嫂長得很像。

例句：He seems to be devoid of compassion.
他似乎缺少同情心。

例句：The Mangos on the tree are ripe.
樹上的芒果已經完全熟了。

例句：Shopping through the App has become epidemic in recent years.
近年來，用 App 購物已變得十分流行。

例句：While we were hiking in the hill, we saw a lot of fungus on the rotten log.
我們在登山時看見腐爛的樹幹上長出許多菌類。

例句：The new born baby is really vulnerable; therefore, we have to take care of them carefully.
剛出生的嬰兒非常脆弱，因此我們必須非常小心的照顧他。

Going Bananas

The world's favourite fruit could disappear forever in 10 years’ time.

The banana is among the world's oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe that the first edible banana was discovered around ten thousand years ago. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last ice age. Normally the wild banana, a giant jungle herb called Musaacuminata, contains a mass of hard seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But now and then, hunter-gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seedless, edible fruits. Geneticists now know that the vast majority of these soft-fruited plants resulted from genetic accidents that gave their cells three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and pollen from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile. And that is why some scientists believe the world’s most popular fruit could be doomed. It lacks the genetic diversity to fight off pests and diseases that are invading the banana plantations of Central America and the smallholdings of Africa and Asia alike.

In some ways, the banana today resembles the potato before blight brought famine to Ireland a century and a half ago. But it holds a lesson for other crops, too, says Emile Frison, top banana at the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain in Montpellier, France. “The state of the banana,” Frison warns, can teach a broader lesson: the increasing standardisation of food crops round the world is threatening their ability to adapt and survive.

The first Stone Age plant breeders cultivated these sterile freaks by replanting cuttings from their stems. And the descendants of those original cuttings are the bananas we still eat today. Each is a virtual clone, almost devoid of genetic diversity. And that uniformity makes it ripe for disease like no other crop on Earth. Traditional varieties of sexually reproducing crops have always had a much broader genetic base, and the genes will recombine in new arrangements in each generation…