You’re about to read “The Teens Who Feed America.” The article is about the lives of teens who work on farms. What do you know about how fruit and vegetables get to your table? Take the quiz to find out. (Don’t worry if you don’t know the answers. By the time you’re done, you’ll know plenty.)
Test Your Farming Knowledge!
1.
Farms in the U.S. produce more ______ than any other crop.
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On average, between 2015 and 2019, U.S. farms produced 14 billion bushels of corn a year. That’s more than three times the amount of soybeans, the nation’s second-biggest crop at 4 billion bushels a year.
2.
Most of the oranges grown in the U.S. are grown in ______.
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In 2020, Florida produced 2,565 tons of oranges. California, in second place, produced 2,020 tons. That might not seem like such a big difference, but when you consider that a ton is 2,000 pounds . . . you do the math!
3.
When strawberries are ripe enough, farmworkers ______.
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Farmworkers move along a row of strawberry plants and pick only the ones that are at least two-thirds red in color. They leave the others and come back to pick them later.
4.
What does a cherry picker do?
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A cherry picker is a type of crane with a platform or basket at the end that can hold a person. It’s used to lift people when they need to get higher up than a ladder can go—to pick cherries, work on power lines, or shoot video from the air.
5.
As broccoli is carried from farms to grocery stores, truck drivers do this to keep it from going bad:
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Most fresh fruit and vegetables are carried to stores by refrigerated trucks. The cool temperatures keep the food fresh. Another rule for carrying fresh fruit and vegetables safely: Don’t let your pets ride in the truck!
6.
How many kids and teens in the U.S. work on farms?
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It’s impossible to know the exact number of kids and teens who work on farms, but a number of organizations guess that it’s around 500,000. You’ll learn more about them—and the dangers they face—in “The Teens Who Feed America.”
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