Question

Read the following passage:
In the 1950s, Central American commercial banana growers were facing the death of their most lucrative
product, the Gros Michel banana, known as Big Mike. And now it’s happening again to Big Mike’s
successor – the Cavendish.
With its easily transported, thick-skinned and sweet-tasting fruit, the Gros Michel banana plant dominated
the plantations of Central America. United Fruit, the main grower and exporter in South America at the time,
mass-produced its bananas in the most efficient way possible: it cloned shoots from the stems of plants
instead of growing plants from seeds, and cultivated them in densely packed fields.
Unfortunately, these conditions are also perfect for the spread of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp.
cubense, which attacks the plant’s roots and prevents it from transporting water to the stem and leaves. The
TR-1 strain of the fungus was resistant to crop sprays and travelled around on boots or the tyres of trucks,
slowly infecting plantations across the region. In an attempt to escape the fungus, farmers abandoned
infected fields, flooded them and then replanted crops somewhere else, often cutting down rainforest to do
so.
Their efforts failed. So, instead, they searched for a variety of banana that the fungus didn’t affect. They
found the Cavendish, as it was called, in the greenhouse of a British duke. It wasn’t as well suited to
shipping as the Gros Michel, but its bananas tasted good enough to keep consumers happy. Most
importantly, TR-1 didn’t seem to affect it. In a few years, United Fruit had saved itself from bankruptcy by
filling its plantations with thousands of the new plants, copying the same monoculture growing conditions
Gros Michel had thrived in.
While the operation was a huge success for the Latin American industry, the Cavendish banana itself is far
from safe. In 2014, South East Asia, another major banana producer, exported four million tons of
Cavendish bananas. But, in 2015, its exports had dropped by 46 per cent thanks to a combination of another
strain of the fungus, TR-4, and bad weather.
Growing practices in South East Asia haven’t helped matters. Growers can’t always afford the expensive
lab-based methods to clone plants from shoots without spreading the disease. Also, they often aren’t strict
enough about cleaning farm equipment and quarantining infected fields. As a result, the fungus has spread to
Australia, the Middle East and Mozambique – and Latin America, heavily dependent on its monoculture
Cavendish crops, could easily be next.
SUBJECT: ENGLISH Homework worksheet CLASS: XI
Topic- NOTE MAKING Worksheet No: 1

(a) On the basis of your reading of the above passage, make notes on it using headings and subheadings.
Use recognizable abbreviations (minimum 4) and a format you consider suitable. Supply a suitable
title to it.
(b) Make a summary of the above passage in about 80 words

Answer 1

Hyy Dude

So sorry

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