Задание №16390 ЕГЭ по Английскому языку

The Truth About Bananas

When I was in college, I had a professor who was known for being a bit odd. Although he was smart, friendly, and much loved by the students, he had some strange and inexplicable habits. For one thing, he had a very peculiar way of speaking, including about a dozen idiosyncratic phrases that he repeated over and over. The professor always kept a pen clipped to his collar, even if he was wearing a shirt with a pocket. And he encouraged us, on multiple-choice exams, to write in our own answers in the margin if we didn’t like any of his.

Every now and then, this professor came to class with the sticker from a banana on his shirt. We assumed it was just another one of his silly habits, but one day, a student actually asked him — during class — what was with the stickers. He replied, solemnly, “Oh. Yeah. Well, whenever I have a banana for breakfast that has a sticker on it, I put the sticker on my shirt to remind me of the suffering of the banana pickers in Latin America, who sometimes earn just 50¢ for a 12-hour day of work in gruelling conditions. I wear it to show my solidarity with them, as a silent protest for better treatment.” From that day on, we saw the professor in a completely new light — and we started thinking about bananas differently too. As I was later to discover, almost nothing about bananas is as it seems.

On a trip to Costa Rica, which is a major exporter of bananas, I saw endless banana plantations and also visited a botanical garden where a botanist shared some fascinating details about banana trees. Among other interesting tidbits we learned was that banana “trees'' are not even trees — they’re the world’s largest perennial herbs. The distinction is not merely academic. Also surprising was that bananas grow upside down, seemingly showing contempt for gravity. Bananas also have an unusual life cycle. Normally, the primary reason for a plant to bear any sort of fruit in the first place is to propagate itself, since the fruit contains the seed. Modern, commercial strains of banana don’t have seeds. Well, they do, but they’re tiny and sterile, unlike wild and often inedible varieties of bananas, which have large and viable seeds. Seedless fruit-bearing plants normally propagate only with human help because the plant has no natural way to regenerate when it dies.

These peculiarities aside, bananas are an excellent source of potassium, not to mention a highly effective device for keeping scoops of ice cream aligned in a dish. Bananas have been referred to as “the world’s most popular fruit,” “the world’s most popular tropical fruit,” “America’s most popular (or second- or third-most popular) fruit,” and a variety of other designations in the upper strata of fruit stardom, based on different metrics for assessing popularity.

But what about the tale of the exploited banana pickers? I’m sorry to say it’s true. Though the situation is better in some areas than others, and has on the whole improved somewhat since I was in college (for example, fair trade bananas are a thing, at least in some areas), the life of the average banana picker is still rather bleak. Of course, if the producers paid their workers a living wage, bananas would become so expensive that few people would buy them, thus reducing demand, and so on — a tricky problem to solve. For my part, I wear banana stickers just as my professor did — not to advertise Dole, Chiquita, or Del Monte or because I think it will have any tangible impact, but to remind myself of the real price of bananas.