"America the Not-So-Beautiful"

Tick, tick, tick, tick. The clock is running down on Earth. In addition to sharing his views on the television program 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney has written more than 800 essays, including one that argues we are turning our country into "America the Not-So-Beautiful."

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 7 Unit 2's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: So Much to Buy, Facts About Marketing to Children, Responsible Marketing, Marketing to kids, America the Not-So-Beautiful, the insanity of selling junk food, Ain't I a Woman?, Remarks to the U.N., Failure to Ban, It's Perverse, But It's Also Pretend, Screen Time?
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. discard
    getting rid something regarded as useless or undesirable
    There's something satisfying about discarding almost anything.
  2. prohibit
    command against
    Sometime around the year 500 B.C., the Greeks in Athens passed a law prohibiting people from throwing their garbage in the street.
  3. civilized
    having a high state of culture and social development
    The more civilized a country is, the worse the trash problem is.
  4. prosperity
    the condition of having good fortune
    Prosperity in the United States is based on using things up as fast as we can, throwing away what's left, and buying new ones.
  5. eventually
    after an unspecified period of time or a long delay
    We've been doing that for so many years that (1) we've run out of places to throw things because houses have been built where the dump was and (2) some of the things we're throwing away are poisoning the Earth and will eventually poison all of us and all living things.
  6. irresponsible
    showing lack of care for consequences
    They were dumb and irresponsible.
  7. volume
    the amount of 3-dimensional space occupied by an object
    Of all household waste, 30 percent of the weight and 50 percent of the volume is the packaging that stuff comes in.
  8. income
    the amount of money one makes over a period of time
    Not only that, but Americans spend more for the packaging of food than all our farmers together make in income growing it.
  9. sanitation
    the state of being clean and conducive to health
    Some cities try to get in good with their trash collectors or garbage men by calling them "sanitation engineers."
  10. abandon
    leave behind empty; move out of
    If Mars is habitable, everyone on Earth can abandon this planet we've trashed, move to Mars, and start trashing that.
Created on Fri Aug 29 11:30:19 EDT 2014 (updated Fri Aug 29 16:30:18 EDT 2014)

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