High School Reading Grades 9 10 Quiz
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READING INFORMATIONAL TEXT
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In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, an indictment of the pesticide DDT and, more broadly, of a chemical industry that had grown accustomed to operating without scrutiny. The book was serialized in The New Yorker before it appeared in hardcover, reaching millions of readers who might otherwise have skipped a work of environmental science.
Carson's argument was carefully layered. She opened with a fable—a fictional American town where spring arrives without birdsong—that made the abstract stakes vivid. She followed with dense chapters of chemistry, ecology, and epidemiology, meticulously footnoted. She closed with a call not for the abandonment of pest control but for restraint, humility, and the pursuit of biological alternatives.
The industry response was fierce. Chemical companies dismissed Carson as hysterical, unscientific, a spinster with a grudge against progress. But her documentation held up. Within a decade, DDT was banned for agricultural use in the United States, and a new regulatory framework—embodied in the Environmental Protection Agency—had emerged.
What Silent Spring accomplished was not the discovery of new facts. It was the assembly of scattered evidence into a case the public could not ignore.
The final paragraph most directly serves what function in the author's analysis?
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