Pollution !

[lisa99]

Bonjour, voilà je dois faire un résumé de ce texte à l'oral et à l'ecrit, pour m'aider je dois répondre aux questions suivantes :

What is it about ? ( Ca parle de quoi? )

Where does it take place ? ( Où la scène se situe-t-elle ? )

When is the scene set ? ( Quand ?)

Who are the characters ? ( Quelles sont les personnages ? )

Why does it happen ? (Pourquoi ça s'est pasé ?)

How does it happen ? (Comment ça s'est passé ? )

The Black Mountain Copper1 Mining Company, located near a small town in Arizona, is

polluting the river. The narrator is a biology teacher. She has been invited to a special meeting

of the women’s club.

“My students and I looked at the river water under microscopes, and the usual

things that live in a river aren’t there. Then we tested the pH of the river and found

out it’s very acidic. The EPA2 has tested it too, and they agree. But your trees knew

all this way before we did. Watering them from the river is just like acid rain falling

on them, if you’ve heard of that. The acid-rain problem here in the West comes

mostly from mine smelters3. It’s the same acid, one way or the other. Sulfuric acid.”

I feared I was losing my grasp4 of the subject, but they were still listening.

“I don’t think I can tell you anything helpful. But if you have questions I’ll try to

answer them.” I sat down.

A thin woman in a red dress stood up and demanded, “You mean the fish and

stuff is all killed?”

“Not the fish,” I said. “They’re still alive, but the smaller things that live in the

water…” I considered how to phrase this, and started again. “Usually there’s a whole

world of microscopic things living in a river, and in the dirt, and the air. If you were

in an airplane and flew over a city and looked down and saw nothing was moving,

you’d know something was up. That’s how you can tell if a river is healthy or not.

You can’t see them, but they’re supposed to be there.” […]

The woman in the red dress was still standing. “What we want to know is, is the

river poisoned for good?” Every person in the room was looking at me.

“Well, no,” I said. “The river could recover. It doesn’t start here, it starts upon the

Apache6 reservation, in the mountains where the snow melts. As long as that’s pure, the water coming down here will be okay.”

“So if you could stop Black Mountain from running the acid through the tailings7, then after a while the junk would get washed out?” inquired Mrs.Galvez. “Like flushing the john?” “Exactly like that,” I said.

Fifty women started talking at once. You’d think I’d commuted a death sentence. After a minute Dona Althea gave a short speech in Spanish, the gist of which was that I’d told them what they needed to know, and now they had to figure out how to get the company to stop polluting the river and go to hell.

Merci beaucoup de votre aide .

[Jean B]

Bonjour,

Puisque tu as su comprendre les questions, il ne te reste qu'à lire le texte pour y répondre.

C'est aussi simple que ça. Mais personne ici, moi y compris, ne le fera à ta place.

Ne te contente pas d'une seule lecture, surtout pas. Lis le texte autant de fois qu'il t'en faudra pour trouver les réponses aux diverses questions.

C'est largement à ta portée.

Bon travail.