Bananas are the perfect snack. Not only are they sweet and delicious, but they are easy to carry around, so you can take them anywhere. Best of all, bananas provide different things that the human body needs!

Bananas grow best in warm places that get lots of rain. They grow on plants that look like trees. The banana plant, however, is considered a herb rather than a tree because it doesn’t have a strong, woody stem (茎). The plants can grow as high as 30 feet. When they reach their full height, flowers grow out from the stem. These flowers produce bananas.

Two or three times each year, the plants produce fruit. The bananas grow together, which seem like “hands”. A hand is made up of 10 to 20 bananas. Growers sometimes call bananas “fingers”. Each bunch (丛) of bananas has about 15 hands, and so a whole bunch may have as many as 200 bananas and can weigh more than 100 pounds.

After about three months, the bananas are ready to be picked. At this point, they still aren’t the sunny yellow color of bananas. Farmers pick them when they’re green. That’s how they’re shipped to stores. They turn yellow along the way and are ready to be sold.

If you love bananas, you’ve got a lot of company. Americans have been enjoying bananas since the first shipment arrived in the United States in 1876. Today Americans eat more bananas than any other fruit. More bananas are sold than apples and grapes together. Every American eats over 26 pounds of bananas each year!

Many people travel to different places in the world by air. Usually it takes a long time, perhaps half a day, for passengers to stay in the plane. So airlines offer passengers food. But it is common that they feel bad about food taste.

To solve this problem, airlines try hard to improve their food. They would like to do so because they don’t want to lose customers.

However, according to scientific research, part of the reason why plane food tastes bad is that at high altitude we can not taste things as well as we do on the ground. Also scientists have found that our noses become very dry even before a plane takes off. As the plane moves up, the change in air pressure reduces one third of the sensibility of our taste buds (味蕾). So our taste buds become senseless. The sad fact, however, is that our noses don’t know it.

All of these help explain why food on the plane tastes so bad. They also help explain why airlines choose to offer passengers salty and spicy food. Without doing so, the food would be tasteless.

Now there are many researches on this. According to one of them, some volunteers are asked to lie with their feet higher than their heads for weeks. And scientists write down their feelings about food taste.

Though scientists try their best, it is not as easy as they thought. Because they can’t deal with the special environment successfully, such as the change in air pressure, making food taste good is still hard for them.

People eat different things in different parts of the world.

In south China, people eat rice every day. Sometimes they eat it two or three times a day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They usually eat it with fish, meat and vegetables.

The Japanese eat rice, too. They also eat a lot of fish. They sometimes eat raw (生的) fish. In Africa, wheat (小麦) is the most important food, people there make wheat into flour (面粉). From this flour they make different kinds of bread and cakes.

In western countries such as Britain, Australia and the USA, the most important food is bread and potatoes.

People there usually make bread from wheat flour. They cook potatoes in different ways. In England the most popular food is fish and chips. Sometimes people cook it at home, but usually they buy it at the shop. They eat it at their workplace, in the park or even on the road. People call it “take-away” food.