Which version correctly quotes Barker and Pollan's sentence about the dirt and carbon system?

• A. Quotes incorrectly.
• B. Quotes incorrectly (with wrong capitalization).
• C. "Human activity has turned the living and fertile carbon system in our dirt into a toxic atmospheric gas."
• D. "human activity has turned the living and fertile carbon system in our dirt into a toxic atmospheric gas."

Answer: (C)

The main idea here is reproducing quoted material with correct capitalization and punctuation. The best version preserves the sentence exactly as it would appear in standard writing: it starts with a capital H in “Human,” uses normal sentence-case capitalization for the rest, and ends with a period inside the closing quotation marks. This matches how a complete quoted sentence should appear in English, and it keeps Barker and Pollan’s wording intact about how human activity has turned the carbon system in soil into a toxic atmospheric gas.

The other options falter because they mishandle capitalization at the start of the quote (beginning with a lowercase “human”) or otherwise misrender the quotation’s formatting, which would distort the original text. Keeping the original capitalization and punctuation is essential for a faithful quotation, so the version with the capitalized first word and proper sentence structure is the correct one.