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A pesticide is a chemical made to kill the living things that attack farms — insects, and also small animals such as mice or rats that ruin crops. Farmers spray it on fields; you will also hear the word for bug spray at home, though scientists split the family more finely ( for insects, rodenticide for rats, and so on). In news and school texts it often comes with a worry: it protects food, but too much can harm soil, water, bees, and the people who eat the plants. It is a neutral, slightly technical word — not slang, not poetic.
農藥。殺蟲劑多半只指殺蟲；pesticide 可以更廣，連殺小動物的藥也算。
組成From pest + -i- + -cide (“killing”). A pesticide is, in the pieces, a pest-killer.
同家族的字
- pestthe first piece: a harmful insect or animal
- insecticideshares -cide (“killing”); this one kills insects
- herbicideshares -cide; this one kills plants
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
pesticidenoun/ˈpɛstɪsaɪd/
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Anything, especially a synthetic substance but also any substance (e.g. sulfur), or virus, bacterium, or other organism, which kills or suppresses the activities of pests.
- “Twelve pesticides commonly applied to citrus groves are slated for study in the project’s plots,” reports Tom S. Bellows, UC Riverside assistant entomologist. They include four acaricides (Morestan, Kelthane, Pictran, Vendex), four thripsicides (Cygon, Carzol, Orthene, Sabadilla), and four scalicides (Parathion, Supracide, Lorsban, Sevin).
- Too much pesticide was applied and then washed from the fields by rains and surface runoff.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。