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，干). 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, American 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!

    Computer technology has become a major part of people's lives. This technology has its own special words. One example is the word " mouse". A computer mouse is not a small animal that lives in buildings and open fields. It is a small device (装置) that you move around on a flat surface in front of a computer.The mouse moves the cursor (光标) on the computer screen.

    Computer expert Douglas Engelbart developed the idea for the mouse in the early nineteen-sixties. The first computer mouse was a carved block of wood with two metal wheels. It was called a mouse because it had a tail at one end. The tail was the wire that connected it to the computer.

    Using a computer takes some training. People who are experts are sometimes called hackers. A hacker is usually a person who writes software programs in a special computer language. But the word" hacker" is also used to describe a person who tries to steal information from computer systems.

    Another well known computer word is Google. It is the name of a popular search engine for the Internet.People use the search engine to find information about almost any subject on the Internet. The people whostarted the company named it Google because in mathematics, googol, spelled g-o-o-g-o-l,is an extremely

    large number. It is the number one followed by one hundred zeros.

    When you "Google" a subject, you can get a large amount of information about it. Some people like to Google their friends or themselves to see how many times their name appears on the Internet. If you Google someone, you might find that persons name on a blog. A blog is the shortened name for a Web log. A blog is a personal Web page. It may contain stories, comments, pictures and links to other websites. Some people add information to their blogs every day. People who have blogs are called bloggers.

    If you ask soma people, "How did you learn English so well?" You may get a surprising answer, "In my sleep!"

    These are people who have taken part in one of the recent experiments to test "Learn-While-Sleep" methods, which are now being tried in several countries, and with several subjects, of which English is only one.

    Specialists say that this "sleep study" method speeds language learning greatly. They say the average person can learn two or three times as much during sleep as in the same period (时期) during the day, and does not affect his rest in any way, A word of warning, however, that sleep teaching will only strengthen in your mind what you have studied already while you are awake.

    In an experiment. lessons were broadcast (广播) over the radio. Each lesson lasted twelve hours from 8: 00 p. m. to 8: 00 a. m. The first three hours of English grammar and vocabulary were given with the students awake. At 11: 00 p. m. a lullaby was broadcast to send the student to sleep and for the next three hours the radio whispered the lesson again into his sleeping ears. At 2: 00 a. m. a sharp noise was sent over the radio to wake the sleeping student up for a few minutes to review the lesson. The cradlesong (a kind of soft song making you fail asleep easily) sent him back to rest again while the radio went on At 5: 00 a. m. his sleep ended and he had to go through the lesson again for three hours before breakfast.