Rachel Carson’s classic best seller about ecological threats, Silent Spring, started a wave of American environmentalism. It played a direct role in the 1972 decision to ban the use of the pesticide(杀虫剂)DDT. Sixty years ago, the public was introduced to Carson’s arguments. The coming anniversary makes this a good time to consider whether the book achieved one of her major goals: protecting wildlife and, in particular, birds.

Carsen took a complex technical subject — the damaging effects of persistent pesticide and expressed it in one simple, poetic image: a spring in which no birds sang. She asked us to imagine what it would be like to awaken in the morning in a world without these songs. She wrote with grace, and she made us feel the loss. But how well have we acted on Carson’s warnings?

With some exceptions, we haven’t been very successful, and neither have birds. Twenty-nine percent of North American birds have died out since 1970, Grass lands were the hardest hit, with a documented loss of more than 700 million breeding individuals. The number of dead birds totaled nearly three billion, a figure that sparked(引起) a campaign with tips on what people can do to save them. Given these data, it is easy to conclude that despite the brilliance of her writing, Carson did not succeed in protecting birds.

Still, the 2019 bird study, despite its worrying results, also suggests that protecting biodiversity is not lost cause. One important exception is wet lands, where bird abundance increased by 13 percent. The other animative exception is bald eagles, which acre on the edge of extinction at the time Carson wrote, but they recovered in large part as a result of the ban on DDT. A news story published by the Au dub on Society notes that “the numbers show that taking steps like wildlife management, habitat restoration and political action can be effective to save species.”

【小题1】How did Rachel Carson fulfill her writing purpose in her book?

A．By warning gracefully.	B．By arguing simply.
C．By thinking critically.	D．By drawing vividly,

【小题2】What does the underlined word “animative” in Paragraph 4 probably mean?

A．Alarming.	B．Encouraging
C．Reliable	D．Imaginable.

【小题3】What is the writer’s attitude toward the effect of Rachel’s book?

A．Negative.	B．Objective.
C．Positive.	D．Unconcerned.

【小题4】What is the main idea of the text?

A．An American writer didn’t fulfill her promise.

B．Our efforts to protect the environment were in vain.

C．Books have limitations in raising environmental awareness.

D．Birds are still in trouble 60 years after Silent Spring warned us.