Why A Beverage is a very long wire (one wavelength or more) strung just a few feet above ground, usually terminated at the far end with a resistor equal to its characteristic impedance. That layout gives excellent front-to-back ratio and low noise pickup off the end, which is exactly what you want for weak-signal listening on 160, 80 and 40 meters. Because so much energy is absorbed by the lossy ground and the termination resistor, it is very inefficient as a radiator, so it is a receive-only antenna in practice.
Watch out The transmitting choice is the trap: the same ground losses and terminating resistor that kill noise also waste most of your transmit power, so hams put up a Beverage to listen and switch to a vertical or dipole to talk.
Beverage = "Be Very Long, Very Low, and only Listen."