GRE阅读高频机经：寂静的春天

　　Fifty years ago, Rachel Carson wrote and published Silent Spring. Carson was ahead of hertime. She said pesticides like DDT were damaging the environment and human health.Although the book became an inspiration for the environmental movement, the battle for theenvironment continues.

　　In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was spraying more than a quarter-millionkilograms of pesticides each year. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, revealed that pesticides likeDDT were lethal not only for insects but for all living things.

　　Silent Spring essentially told the reading public that human beings could alter the naturalworld in ways that were quite deadly and that it could be potentially lethal to human beings aswell as to other parts of the natural world, said Linda Lear, the author of a biography onCarson.

　　More than six million copies of the book have been sold in the U.S. Its been translated intosome 30 languages.

　　In the Washington suburbs, the house where Carson wrote Silent Spring is now a NationalHistoric Landmark. Carson was a pathbreaker.In Silent Spring, she is writing in a voice that Icall apocalyptic writing, added Linda Lear. She is trying to sound an alarm to get ourattention.

　　Thirty years after Silent Spring was published, public television, in its program The AmericanExperience, called the book one of the most important of our time.

　　But there were dissenters. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner, led thedefense of pesticides.Were having troubles now feeding this hungry world, said Borlaug. Ifyou remove DDT with the hysteria that is present in the USA, the U.S. will be importing food,only there wont be any place from where to import it. By 1972, DDT was banned foragricultural use in the U.S. But thousands of new chemicals were being developed. NFor years,the U.S. Senates Committee on the Environment has been trying to ban or control hundredsof chemicals from agricultural products and consumer goods. This committee heard from CDC officials who told us their scientists found 212 industrialchemicals, including six carcinogens, coursing through Americans bodies, said DemocraticSenator Frank Lautenberg. In 2006, the World Health Organization announced plans to useDDT again - indoors - in its campaign against malaria. Syngenta is a major producer ofagricultural chemicals. Like others in the industry, it says its chemicals are safe if used properly. We try to do every single study that is necessary to support the safety characteristics of theproduct. said Tim Pastoor, the companys principal scientist. Fifty years after Silent Spring,millions of kilograms of new pesticides and other chemicals are being sprayed across USfarmlands. And the environmental movement is still fighting back.