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Silent Spring Study Guide & Notes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 88 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Silent Spring.
This section contains 1,634 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Silent Spring Study Guide

Silent Spring Summary & Study Guide Description

Silent Spring Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Further Reading and a Free Quiz on Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.

Silent Spring Plot Summary

Preview of Silent Spring Summary:

Chapter One

Carson's survey of the research on pesticides opens in a most unscientific fashion with a tale about an American town that has suffered a series of plagues. At chapter's end, Carson acknowledges that the town is an imaginary one, but lest the tale be dismissed as mere fantasy, she hastens to add that each of the catastrophes it catalogs "has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them."

Chapters Two and Three

Not until chapter two does Carson identify the source of the ills described in chapter one: potent synthetic poisons of relatively recent design, proliferating at the rate of about five hundred a year, applied in massive quantities virtually everywhere, with disastrous short- and long-term consequences for both wildlife and humans. To convey the grave danger that these substances represent, she introduces an analogy that will resurface over and over in Silent Spring: pesticides are...
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This section contains 1,634 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Silent Spring Study Guide
Copyrights
Silent Spring from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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