Entraînement à la Grammaire Anglaise à Distance

Back Story New York Times 11.01.2018.

In the 1850s, a U.S. Army lieutenant exploring the Grand Canyon made one of history's less accurate predictions (1), saying that the area had no financial value (2) and that his party would probably be the last to visit. Far from it. In 1919, the year the Grand Canyon became a national park (3), it had more than 44,000 visitors (4), and it now receives six million (5) a year. The canyon's path to national park status began (6) in the 1880s, when Senator Benjamin Harrison of Indiana introduced several bills to designate it a "public park," but without success. Later, as president, he made it a forest reserve. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed parts of it a federal game reserve (7), and then established it as a national monument (8) on this day in 1908. Five years earlier, on his first visit to Arizona (then still a territory), Roosevelt said he could not describe the Grand Canyon and implored people to preserve it. "You cannot improve on it; not a bit," he said. Like Roosevelt, the environmentalist John Muir was left at a loss for words by the canyon's beauty, writing in 1902 that no artist could do justice to its colors: "And if paint is of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work (9)? Only this: Some may be incited by it to go and see for themselves."