Page 154 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade7_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 2.11
continued
2 Throwing things out is the American way. We don’t know how to fix anything, and anyone who does know how is too busy to come, so we throw it away and buy a new one. Our economy depends on us doing that. The trouble with throwing things away is, there is no “away” left.
3 Sometime around the year 500 B.C., the Greeks in Athens passed a law prohibiting people from throwing their garbage in the street. This Greek law was the first recognition by civilized people that throwing things away was a problem. Now, as the population explodes and people take up more room on Earth, there’s less room for everything else.
4 The more civilized a country is, the worse the trash problem is. Poor countries don’t have the same problem because they don’t have much to discard. Prosperity in the United States is based on using things up as fast as we can, throwing away what’s left, and buying new ones.
5 We’ve been doing that for so many years that (1) we’ve run out of places to throw things because houses have been built where the dump was and (2) some of the things we’re throwing away are poisoning the Earth and will eventually poison all of us and all living things.
6 Ten years ago most people thought nothing of dumping an old bottle of weed or insect killer in a pile of dirt in the back yard or down the drain in the street, just to get rid of it. The big companies in America had the same feeling, on a bigger scale. For years the chemical companies dumped their poisonous wastes in the rivers behind the mills, or they put it in fifty-gallon drums in the vacant lots, with all the old, rusting machinery in it, up behind the plants. The drums rusted out in ten years and dumped their poison into the ground. It rained, the poisons seeped into the underground streams and poisoned everything for miles around. Some of the manufacturers who did this weren’t even evil. They were dumb and irresponsible. Others were evil because they knew how dangerous it was but didn’t want to spend the money to do it right.
7 The problem is staggering. I often think of it when I go in the hardware store or a Sears Roebuck and see shelves full of poison. You know that, one way or another, it’s all going to end up in the Earth or in our rivers and lakes.
8 I have two pint bottles of insecticide with 3 percent DDT in them in my own garage that I don’t know what to do with. I bought them years ago when I didn’t realize how bad they were. Now I’m stuck with them.
9 The people of the city of New York throw away nine times their weight in garbage and junk every year. Assuming other cities come close to that, how long will it be before we trash the whole Earth?
10 Of all household waste, 30 percent of the weight and 50 percent of the volume is the packaging that stuff comes in.
11 Not only that, but Americans spend more for the packaging of food than all our farmers together make in income growing it. That’s some statistic.
My Notes
Word CoNNeCTIoNs
Roots and Affixes
Prosperity comes from the Latin word meaning “to cause to succeed” or “fortunate.” The root sper-, meaning “hope,” is also found in desperate. The suffix -ity forms a noun.
GraMMar UsaGe
Parallel Structure
Notice that when Rooney uses a series in the final paragraph, he puts all of the elements in the same grammatical form:
. . . for all of us to pack up, board a spaceship, and move out.
The words pack, board, and move are all verbs that are parallel in structure. Remember to check your writing and make sure that nouns, verbs, and phrases are parallel.
Unit 2 •
What Influences My Choices? 127
staggering: stunning, shocking
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