Prática de Shadowing: The banana is under threat - Aprenda a falar inglês com o YouTube
C1
This banana is known as the Gros Michel, aka Big Mike.
156 frases
Se as frases estiverem muito curtas ou longas, clique em Edit para ajustá-las.
1
This banana is known as the Gros Michel, aka Big Mike.
2
And it nearly went extinct.
3
Hard to imagine because the myth that bananas are ubiquitous is so ingrained in our minds.
4
I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say...
5
Bananas in pajamas.
6
Now let's go bananas!
7
So Mauricio Catalan's comedian is composed of a single banana.
8
It is the number one grown fruit in the world,
9
the most consumed fruit, the most important fruit crop.
10
It's the, I think, the weirdness of bananas that makes them so interesting.
11
When Big Mike disappeared from the market,
12
it was replaced with something very similar, the Cavendish banana.
13
And you probably recognize it as the banana,
14
since it's pretty much the only banana we see in the US.
15
By the 1950s, Cavendish became the most commercially successful banana.
16
Bananas are so good for you and so easy to digest.
17
But a variant of the same disease that virtually wiped out Big Mike is coming for the Cavendish.
18
And this time, there's no replacement.
19
So what needs to happen to save our beloved banana?
20
Bananas are fascinating fruits.
21
They're part of the genus Musa and are full of potassium and an energy-dense food,
22
making them a staple crop in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
23
They originally came from Asia,
24
likely somewhere in Southeast Asia.
25
The wild ones are full of of seeds.
26
So a wild banana is going to be about the length of your thumb here.
27
And these banana seeds are rock hard, tooth shattering.
28
To get to the seedless bananas we have today,
29
humans basically had to find sterile fruits.
30
It was probably a mutation that did this.
31
Some of these early farmers found a banana that was seedless and watched it propagate and said,
32
hey, you know, we can cut this sucker off,
33
this daughter plant, and take it somewhere else.
34
And the daughter plant gives birth to another plant.
35
And this can go on for thousands of years.
36
This method of reproducing through propagations is also known as asexual cloning.
37
But it also creates some problems because these fruits are essentially now clones
38
and they're all exactly the same and they carry the same weaknesses.
39
And this genetic cloning is really where the danger starts.
40
Commercially farmed bananas, which are pretty much all of the bananas we consume, are monocrops.
41
It's an industrial agriculture term that refers to single crop species grown on the same land again and again.
42
It's driven by our demand for uniform, durable, and cheap fruit.
43
The variety they picked was a banana called the Gros Michel.
44
The Gros Michel is a great banana for commercial use because it's tough.
45
It doesn't need to be packaged really that much.
46
It ripens at a perfect rate.
47
The result?
48
Uniform bananas for consumers like us,
49
but extremely fragile biological conditions for the plants and the farmers.
50
You run a risk, which is that if one of your bananas gets sick,
51
all of them are gonna get sick.
52
And that was exactly what happened with Panama disease,
53
or Tropical Race 1, in the early 1900s.
54
The plantations begin to get very sick.
55
Fungus invades the soil, making it impossible to grow the bananas.
56
But instead of diversifying, industrial banana companies acquired more lands as the plantations became diseased.
57
And all goes well until they finally run out of land.
58
This is partially how the term banana republic came to be.
59
It's an ugly history that involves US corporations like the United Fruit Company exploiting land and labor in Central America.
60
These companies took over farms and governments to grow exports like bananas cheaply and at a massive scale.
61
But no amount of land in Conquest could stop the spread of Panama disease.
62
By the 1950s, TR1 had devastated the Gros Michel globally,
63
virtually wiping it out of production.
64
Luckily, the Gros Michel had a close cousin that was resistant to that strain of Panama disease,
65
the Cabin dish.
66
At the brink of extinction,
67
at the brink of disaster,
68
the banana industry saves itself,
69
when in fact it is only delayed an inevitable fate that will come back to haunt it again.
70
Speaking of delicious bananas, this video is presented by a delicious yogurt, Stonyfield Organic.
71
For over 40 years, Stonyfield Organic has been a champion of truth in our food system.
72
There is so much misinformation out there,
73
which is why they believe in using the highest quality ingredients to ensure
74
that what they put on the shelves is the best product for you and your family.
75
The milk they use comes from all over the country,
76
including Molly Brook Farms in Vermont.
77
It's USDA organic certified, which means no growth hormones, no pesticides, no antibiotics.
78
So the next time you're in your grocery run and you're thinking about bananas,
79
make sure to also check out Stonyfield Organic Yogurt.
80
It's also important to note that Stonyfield Organic did not dictate the content of this video,
81
but their support did make this tasty reporting possible.
82
And now back to bananas.
83
By the 1990s, the Cavendish was facing a new strain of the Panama disease,
84
Tropical Race 4 or TR4.
85
The banana companies refuse to believe it and they just keep doing what they're doing.
86
The disease started in Taiwan in the late 80s.
87
From there, it spread to Africa, Australia and the Americas.
88
By late 2025, TR4 is reported in Ecuador,
89
the largest banana exporter in the world.
90
This disease is really virulent.
91
If I am wearing a sneaker with one bit of contaminated soil and I walk through a banana plantation,
92
I'm gonna spread that disease.
93
But unlike what happened with Gros Michel in the 1950s,
94
there is no banana cousin to replace the Cabin dish with.
95
So we're in the situation now where this disease is really starting to have a dramatic influence.
96
And all of the major producers around the world are now recognizing at long last things have to change.
97
Now, it's not like other bananas don't exist.
98
There are actually over a thousand species of bananas.
99
With specialty farms and supermarkets,
100
you can even find some of these other varieties.
101
There's certainly been a move to try to move consumer preferences from Cavendish to something else.
102
Consumers didn't like it.
103
Didn't taste like Cavendish that preference is such an incredible driver.
104
And to try to get consumers to change from a Cavendish banana to something else is going to be a big ask.
105
So Professor Dale turned to science.
106
My group started to genetically modify bananas.
107
So we know there is resistance to the Panama disease tropical waste fall.
108
It actually occurs in one of those wild bananas we were talking about,
109
the ones with seeds we pulled one gene out of that banana and transferred it to Cavendish.
110
But as you can imagine,
111
consumers have a lot of skepticism around genetically modified foods.
112
At this time, in March,
113
2026, Professor Dale's lab-grown Cavendish bananas are not yet available in stores.
114
We've now had approval to grow,
115
commercially grow that banana in Australia,
116
but nowhere else in the world has yet.
117
Genetically modified crops are highly regulated.
118
So Europe at the moment is very reticent on taking any genetically modified foods.
119
And the other thing, of course, is consumer perception.
120
While his modified banana will likely never make it into the European market,
121
Professor Dale has other solutions like gene editing.
122
In many countries, this is no longer considered genetic modification.
123
There are many, many other crops that are being gene edited and some of them are already on the market.
124
So, to save our beloved banana,
125
either Western consumers will have to give up on the myth of there being only one type of banana,
126
or regulators are going to have to accept genetically engineered Cavendish.
127
I think we're going to have to have an open mind
128
about how we're going to produce our crops under what are becoming increasingly extreme conditions.
129
Though truthfully, science can only do so much.
130
The answers for preserving our beloved banana and the future of many of our fruits lies in maintaining a diverse ecosystem.
131
How do we fix the problem?
132
And the answer is destroy the monoculture.
133
We need to get all those bananas that are so good to the United States,
134
to Europe, to the Western world,
135
because that's the only way to sort of protect the banana and to protect people who grow bananas.
136
What I would love to see would be when you walk into a supermarket,
137
that still the bananas are right there front and center,
138
but there are 10 different ones.
139
Cavendish over here and maybe Ladyfinger and bananas would go from the world's favorite fruit to even more favorite.
140
Alright so we got all of these bananas for this shoot
141
and we want to do a blind taste test to see
142
if we can actually identify which one is Cavendish and also see
143
if we like one of these bananas better shout out to the Thai
144
and Filipino markets for actually having such a diverse array of bananas
145
and we're gonna put the results of the blind taste test up on Vox's Patreon.
146
If you're not yet a member go on over to patreon.com slash Vox.
147
It's so important to support independent journalism.
148
You know, your membership allows us to continue making videos like this,
149
allow us to have fun,
150
be creative, but also really dig into the investigative reporting.
151
And if it doesn't make sense for you financially today to support Vox,
152
you can still sign up for free,
153
stay up to date with our reporting.
154
And now let's get this taste test started.
155
Ben, ready eventually?
156
Thank you.
Baixar aplicativo
Pontuação por IA para cada frase que você fala
TRENDING
Populares
Sobre Esta Lição
Nesta lição, você terá a oportunidade de praticar seu inglês ao discutir um tema fascinante: a banana e sua importância global. Através da análise de um vídeo que explora a história da banana Gros Michel e seu substituto, a banana Cavendish, você praticará a escuta ativa e expandirá seu vocabulário em torno de alimentos, agricultura e conservação. O foco será desenvolver sua capacidade de melhorar a pronúncia em inglês ao usar a técnica de shadow speak, imitandando a pronúncia e a entonação do narrador. Você vai aprender como a banana se tornou um símbolo cultural e o que está em jogo com sua possível extinção.
Vocabulário e Frases Chave
- Variedade - variety
- Extinção - extinction
- Replicar - to replicate
- Clonagem - cloning
- Cultura Monocrop - monocrop culture
- Fragilidade - fragility
- Consumo - consumption
- Energia densa - energy-dense
Dicas de Prática
Ao assistir ao vídeo, utilize a técnica de shadow speech para acompanhar o narrador. Preste atenção ao ritmo e à entonação das falas. Dica: quando o narrador fala rápido, tente captar as palavras-chave e focar na pronúncia correta em vez de se preocupar em entender cada palavra. Isso ajuda a desenvolver sua habilidade para aprender inglês com YouTube. Faça pausas regulares para repetir as frases em voz alta, imitando a cadência do discurso dele. Isso não só facilitará a melhoria da pronúncia em inglês, mas também tornará o aprendizado mais agradável e envolvente. Repetir em voz alta o que você ouviu é uma das melhores maneiras de absorver o idioma. Com prática consistente, você vai notar uma melhora significativa em sua fluência e confiança ao falar inglês.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.
☕ Pague-nos um café
O ShadowingEnglish permanece 100% gratuito graças ao seu apoio. Os custos de servidor e IA são altos — seu café nos mantém ativos! 🙏