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staggering: stunning, shocking
habitable: livable
ACTIVITY 3.3
continued
My Notes
Interpreting the Text using Close Reading
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.
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.
78 SpringBoard® English Language Development grade 7
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