Page 58 - SpringBoard_Writing_Workshop_Grade7_Flipbook

The people of the city of New York throw away nine times their weight in garbage My Notes and junk every year. Assuming other cities come close to that, how long will it be
before we trash the whole Earth?
Of all household waste, 30 percent of the weight and 50 percent of the volume is the packaging that stuff comes in.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
After Reading: Using SOAPSTone
SOAPSTone (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone) is an acronym for a series of questions to ask yourselves about a text. The questions help you analyze the central components of texts.
3. After your initial reading, revisit the text and analyze the writer’s craft, using the SOAPSTone strategy to help you understand Rooney’s view so you can write an effective response. Complete the SOAPSTone graphic organizer below.
SOAPSTone
Speaker:
What does the reader know about the writer?
Occasion:
What are the circumstances surrounding this text?
Rooney is acknowledging that he is just as guilty as other Americans of heedlessly following the pattern of buying and throwing away.
“My idea of a good time is to load up the back of the car with junk . . . and take it to the dump.”
“I have two pint bottles of insecticide with 3 percent DDT in them in my own garage . . .”
“There’s something satisfying about discarding almost anything.” “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.”
Analysis
Sample responses:
Rooney cares about the future and wants us to change our culture’s wasteful ways and our relationship with the planet. Rooney relates to his audience by candidly admitting that he has also been guilty of this destructive behavior.
Textual Support
(continued ) Writing Workshop 5 • Response to Expository Text 3
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