banana
part of speech
noun (banana, bananas)
meaning for a pupil
1) A banana is a long curved fruit with a yellow skin that you peel; inside it is soft and sweet. tree →
2) A banana plant is the large plant that bananas grow on, in a bunch. tree →
sense in the lessons
a fruit on the table; a counted thing in problems («a bunch has 6 bananas»); in everyday life a lunchbox snack, banana bread, smoothies; in science bananas grow in warm places and turn from green to yellow to brown as they ripen; «go bananas» means go wild with excitement
examples
- I eat one banana from the table. tree →
- Student: two bananas and one pear tree →
- A bunch has 6 bananas. How many bananas are in 3 bunches? tree →
- Ali bought 8 bananas and ate 2. tree →
- Peel the banana before you eat it. tree →
- These bananas are still green, so they are not ripe. tree →
- Mum made banana bread with the old bananas. tree →
- The monkey grabbed a banana from the tree. tree →
- Don't leave a banana skin on the floor; someone could slip. tree →
- Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda riding on Teddy’s shoulder, and they gave him banana and some boiled egg. tree →
note
A fruit, so it counts in «how many fruits»; no clue for the operation. Spelling: one n, then two: b-a-n-a-n-a. Plural «bananas». Trap: «a bunch of bananas» is one group; count the bananas in it if the question asks for bananas.
In the corpora
- People argue whether the banana is a clever joke about money and art or proof that the art market is silly.
- Banana skins are slippery because of a gel on the inside; scientists who measured it won the joke Ig Nobel Prize in 2014.
- Bananas grow on a giant herb, not a tree, and the fruits curve upwards towards the light.
- Commas separate the items in a list: "I bought apples, bananas and grapes."
- Ordinary plurals never take an apostrophe: bananas, apples, cars.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «banana» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.