A threat to bananas

In the 1950s, Central American commercial banana growers were facing the death of their most _____ product, the Gros Michel banana, known as Big Mike.

• cultivate

• lucrative

• abandoned

• inevitable

With its easily transported, thick-skinned and sweet-tasting fruit, the Gros Michel banana plant dominated the _____ of Central America.

• cultivations

• plantations

• monocultures

• combinations

United Fruit, the main grower and exporter in South America at the time, mass-produced its bananas in the most ____ way possible.

• effect

• efficiency

• efficiently

• efficient

The TR-1 strain of the fungus was ____ to crop sprays and travelled around on boots or the tyres of trucks, slowly infecting plantations across the region.

• attempt

• resistant

• escape

• dense

While the operation was a huge ____ for the Latin American industry, the Cavendish banana itself is far from safe.

• success

• succeed

• successful

• successfully

Growers can’t always afford the expensive lab-based methods to ____ plants from shoots without spreading the disease.

• fill

• affect

• clone

• infect

Also, they often aren’t strict enough about cleaning farm equipment and ____ infected fields.

• thriving

• quarantining

• conditioning

• monoculturing

Racing against the inevitable, scientists are working on solving the problem by ___ modifying the Cavendish with genes from TR-4-resistant banana species.

• gene

• genetic

• genetically

• geneticly

If the new bananas are planted in the same monocultures as the Cavendish and the Gros Michel before it, the risk is that another strain of the disease may rise up to ___ the modified plants too.

• consume

• threaten

• combine

• resist

etween 1990 and 2012, the global land area now accounts ___ around ten percent of total cropland in the entire world.

• in

• for

• of

• at