Find the words meaning the same in text.

complete destruction, great power, causing damage, medicinal drugs, thoughtless killing, worrying, complexes of stores, 10,000 square meters, insignificant amount, short woody stemmed trees, eliminates, is a sign of, became extinct, grow strong and healthy, cut, leveled to the ground, innumerable, removed, shocking, destroyed, no longer in existence, capable of being cut and used, hard to believe.

Match the words that collocate.

1. make your skin 2. wreak 3. high 4. stiff 5. chilled

a. to the bone b. and mighty c. competition d. havoc e. crawl

4. In developing critical thinking skills, it is necessary to distinguish facts from opinions. In Bowermaster's article, both facts and opinions are used to support the author's main idea. Read the following statements and decide whether they are facts or opinions

1. Ever since man came busting out of the last ice age 11,000 years ago, armed with sharpened sticks, traps, and snares, he has had a nasty habit of wreaking havoc on plants and animals.

2. The first time he swept across North America, man wiped out saber-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, huge ground sloths, short-faced bears, and dire wolves.

3. Needless to say, the newcomers wasted little time in wasting them, too.

4. The winning of the West that followed included the butchering of the buffalo, along with varieties of bears, wolves, foxes, and cougars.

5. Tropical forests are slashed and burned at the rate of 100 acres a minute.

6. By the middle of the next century, according to the Nature Conservancy, one-half of all the earth's present species may be lost, largely as a result of mans greed, cruelty, and vanity.

7. On one hectare of any rain forest live countless species of plants and insects that exist nowhere else.

8. But there's a big difference between natural and unnatural death.

9. Already the Tasmanian wolf, the laughing owls of New Zealand, the Caribbean monk seals, and many more are history.

10. While much of the public handwringing over ... endangered species is done in the name of the "glamour" animals—like blue whales and bald eagles . . . —the unparalleled horror of today's carnage lies more in the sheer number of plants that are disappearing.

11. When dinosaurs were killed off 65 million years ago, flowering plants survived.

12. Unfortunately, as man's technology weeds out the survivors in the plant and animal world, those that will thrive are hardly the most bio­logically diverse, or necessarily the most beneficial.

13. What is wrong with the current rate of extinction is its chilling accel­eration.

Authors can have different viewpoints, but their opinions can sometimes be similar. Read the statements below and say whether Trefil and or Bowermaster would agree with them.

● Mankind is primarily responsible for the destruction of other living things.

● It is best to examine the arguments of extinction like a scientist, without feelings.

● The death of a species is part of life.

● Too much attention has been paid to the cute, attractive animals that are endangered rather than the less attractive species that are most endangered

● The media needs to give more attention to the extinction of species.

● It's hard to be concerned about the extinc­tion of species we've never seen or never knew existed.

● No one really knows how dangerous the situation for animals and plants is.

● Man's survival on this planet is of most importance in the extinction question.

After you have distinguished the opinions of the commentator and the author, express your own opinions on the above statements.

D. Vocabulary in Focus

1. “All Creatures Great and Dying” is an allusion to Biblical all creatures great and small.

Allusion is a figure of style indirectly referring to some famous phenomenon, person, statement etc.