Read the passage from “Rivers and Stories,” Part 2. … and even in all that noise it looked peaceful: greenish water; a strong, gentle current; reeds; palms; bankside banyans with their broad gleaming leaves; and, as if conjured from a late eighteenth century water color, the red lanteen sails of the felluccas, skimming upriver in a following breeze. What is the effect of the connotative words in this passage? Rivers and Stories, Part 2 The connotative words express the author’s scientific knowledge about rivers. The connotative words imply that the author feels technology and progress are harmful to rivers. The connotative words convey a calm and positive aspect of the river that the author appreciates. The connotative words demonstrate the author’s fear that rivers are being destroyed.
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Answer:
A book of river stories is, of course, an invitation to think about the relation between rivers and stories. It is also an occasion to think about the condition of the world’s rivers, which we need urgently to do at this moment in the history of the human relation to the earth.
And a place to begin is with the obvious, with the fact that most of the life on earth depends on fresh water. The mineral earth with its dream shapes of mountain range and valley basin, desert and forest and taiga and prairie and butte and mesa, forged by the heat of the earth's core, scoured by the advance and retreat of glaciers, terminated by coastal cliffs and beaches of sand or shingle, is intricately veined with the flow of it. The story of our relation to it begins, I suppose, with pieces of bone excavated along the Awash River in Ethopia and a piece of a jaw excavated beside an ancient lake in Kenya. Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus anamemnsis: they are about 4.4 million years old. At one point eight million years ago, a welter of hominid species foraged the edges of the same lake. And among them, most likely, were our ancestors. Human life probably developed within easy range of lakes and rivers. Human civilization—at the Tigres and Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yangtze, and the Nile—certainly did.
Human beings must first have used rivers for drinking and bathing and for food, fishing the shallows and hunting the birds and mammals drawn to the banks for water. It was probably fishing and hunting on floating logs that led to boat-making, and boat-making must have increased enormously the mobility of the species. Agriculture developed in the rich deposits of the flood plains. And these sedentary toolmakers were soon harnessing the power of the water with mill wheels and dams. Irrigation, as a technology, is about three thousand years old. It will tell you something about the stress human beings have put on river systems in the last hundred years of this history if you know that in 1900, 40 million hectares of cropland were under irrigation world-wide. Forty million hectares in three thousand years. By 1993, 248 million hectares were under irrigation.
It's also a fact of the twentieth century that as a mode of travel, for commerce and pleasure, rivers have been largely displaced by highways, railways, and air travel. A hundred and fifty years ago the epic stories of engineering had to do with canal building, connecting one river system or one sea with another: Panama and Suez. The locks of the Erie Canal and the extensive lock system of English rivers belong now to a quaint and minor tourism. The stories of the twentieth century have had to do with massive dams, with nationalism and economic development and the prestige of massive dams. Rivers now supply 20 percent of the world's electrical power, most of it generated by large, ecologically destructive, often culturally destructive, dams. The still-to-be-completed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is only the latest in a series of Faustian bargains technological culture has struck with the rivers of the earth.
Answer:
The connotative words convey a calm and positive aspect of the river that the author appreciates.
Explanation:
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