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Mon 4 Dec, 2006 02:55 am
America's national symbol, the bald eagle, almost went extinct twenty years ago, but it has made a comeback. In fact, the U.S. Fish and Wild Life Service is considering the possibility of taking it off the Endangered Species List. Once, more than fifty hundred pairs of bald eagles nested across the country, but by 1960 that number had fallen below four hundred. The chief killer was the widely used DDT. Fish, soaked up DDT, died, and were washed up on shores, where bald eagles feasted on them.DDT prevented eagle egg shells from thickening. The shells became so thin that they shattered before the babies hatched. Fortunately, in 1972, a law was passed to ban DDT, which saved the bald eagle from total wipeout.
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I have two questions based on the passages above. Could you help me, please? Thanks!
1) what does "Fish, soaked up DDT" mean?
2) Should "and were washed up" be changed to "and washed up"; i.e. should 'were' be deleted?
1. "Soaked up" means the fish became saturated with the poison.
2. Deleting the word "were" from the phrase in question would make no difference to the meaning. It is better to keep it as it is, however. To omit "were" would imply that the fish somehow washed themselves up on shore. The use of "were washed up" clearly shows that the beaching of the fish was involuntary.
Thank you very much, Merry Andrew
Surely anyone writing a report of this kind would instinctively write that the fish absorbed DDT? I suspect that the author may have deliberately replaced this Latinate word with something more "homey" to make this text easier for a non-specialist readership. Ironic that this should have made it less so (though putting an ungrammatical comma after fish doesn't help, either).
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