Are you familiar with the phrase ‘monkey business’? Well, a long time ago in the Amazon jungle, there was a little family of monkeys, having a good life. They didn’t have any predators there, so they were loving it. They had loads of food and loads of banana trees.
Everything was going great, they were happy. So they go to bed, and wake up in the morning – loads of bananas were gone. It turns out that it was another load of monkeys from another part of the island – from the rough bit.
So the monkeys thought ‘Well, there’s no point getting into a fight with them because they’re harder than we are.’ So basically they said ‘Let’s do some business with the bananas’. So they thought ‘Rather than them coming and robbing the bananas, we’ll flog them.’
So that put a stop to it then – the monkeys didn’t have money, they said ‘Give us some bananas’ and they exchanged the bananas for berries and nuts. So that’s where the phrase ‘monkey business’ comes from.