Page 155 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade7_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 2.11
continued
Which Claims to believe
habitable: livable
My Notes
12 Trash collectors are a lot more independent than they used to be because we’ve got more trash than they’ve got places to put it. They have their own schedules and their own holidays. Some cities try to get in good with their trash collectors or garbage men by calling them “sanitation engineers.” Anything just so long as they pick it up and take it away.
13 We often call the dump “the landfill” now, too. I never understood why land has to be filled, but that’s what it’s called. If you’re a little valley just outside town, you have to be careful or first thing you know you’ll be getting “filled.”
14 If 5 billion people had been living on Earth for the past thousand years as they have been in the past year, the planet would be nothing but one giant landfill, and we’d have turned America the beautiful into one huge landfill.
15 The best solution may be for all of us to pack up, board a spaceship, and move out. If Mars is habitable, everyone on Earth can abandon this planet we’ve trashed, move to Mars, and start trashing that. It’ll buy us some time.
Second Read
• Reread the argumentative text to answer these text-dependent questions.
• Write any additional questions you have about the text in your Reader/Writer Notebook.
1. Craft and Structure: What details from the text help you understand the author’s point of view about throwing things away?
2. Key Ideas and Details: What does the author mean by “Throwing things out is the American way” in paragraph 2? What details in the text make you think that?
3. Craft and Structure: In paragraph 4, Rooney says “The more civilized a country is, the worse the trash problem.” What does he mean by civilized in this sentence?
128 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 7
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