  We calculate the damping rate of collective excitations for a nearly pure
Bose-Einstein condensate regarding the recent experiments in MIT [M.-O. Mews et
al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 988 (1996)]. The decay time of collective excitations
obtained in our theoretical calculations agrees well with their experimental
result. We argue that the damping of collective excitations is due to thermal
contributions rather than interactions between collective modes.
