Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word duck derives from the Old English dūcan, meaning to dive or bend down low, a reference to the way dabbling ducks tip headfirst into water to feed. It replaced an earlier Old English word, ened or aenid, which was inherited from Proto-Indo-European and is still echoed in Latin anas, German Ente, and Dutch eend.
Ducks, geese, and swans all belong to the order Anseriformes and the family Anatidae. Ducks are not a monophyletic group, meaning they do not all descend from a single common ancestor exclusive of geese and swans, so the category of duck is a form taxon based on shared shape rather than strict evolutionary lineage.
Ducks eat grasses, aquatic plants, fish, insects, small amphibians, worms, and small molluscs. Dabbling ducks feed at the water's surface or on land, while diving ducks and sea ducks forage underwater; specialised species like mergansers are adapted to catch and swallow large fish.
Duck quacks do echo. The Acoustics Research Centre at the University of Salford debunked this urban legend in 2003 as part of the British Association's Festival of Science. The television programme MythBusters also addressed the same myth in one of its earlier episodes.
Humans have hunted ducks since prehistoric times. Excavations of middens in California have uncovered duck bones dating to between 7800 and 6400 years before present. Neolithic hunters in the Caribbean, Scandinavia, Egypt, Switzerland, and China all used ducks as a protein source.
The Anaheim Ducks were founded as the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, taking their name and mascot from the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks, which starred Emilio Estevez. The film chose the duck as its fictional team mascot because ducks are described as fierce fighters.