Protecting Our Health

Words in Use (Lesson 19)

• harvest
• abundant
• uneasy
• calculate
• absorb
• estimate
• morsel
• quota
• threat
• ban
• panic
• appropriate

Read the following passage to see how the new words are used in it.
  
Protecting Our Health
Pick an apple, a tomato, a peach-no worms in the harvest. We are familiar with the abundant use of pesticides by farmers, but today's chemists are becoming uneasy. They calculate that there are 45,000 different pesticides, and all of them can be absorbed by the fruit on which they are sprayed. The chemists estimate that every morsel we eat in the future may contain a deadly quota of pesticide. The tragedy* will come slowly but the threat is real. These government chemists do not suggest that we ban pesticides. They are cautious* and do not easily panic. What is needed, they say, are appropriate, budgeted* doses that will not pollute* our food.