Part 5 Reading (10 Marks)
Read the text and look at the questions below. Choose the best answer A, B or C according to what the text says.
Keeping our water clean
If you walk down the street and see someone throw a plastic bottle on the ground, you’ll probably think he or she is behaving badly. You might even say something to that person. But do we worry so much when people throw plastic rubbish in rivers or the sea? We all know that plastic is bad for the environment on land, but we often forget that it can have a bad effect on environments like lakes, rivers and the sea, too.
Over the last 70 years the amount of plastic we use has increased enormously; it seems that we simply can’t live without it. We are now producing nearly 300 million tons of plastic every year, and about three quarters of it is only used once and then thrown away. Plastic is cheap and it can be used in many different ways, so it is useful for many different purposes. We use plastic to wrap food and keep it fresh, and to make bottles, boxes and bags. Just over 40% of all the plastic we produce is used as packaging for food and drink. Every year approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used in the world, and more than one million bags are used every minute. However, they are not used for very long – scientists say that a plastic bag is used on average for just 15 minutes and is then thrown away.
We throw away most plastic on land, but a lot of it ends up in the sea. It is estimated that between four and twelve million tons of plastic is thrown into our oceans every year. Plastic takes a long time to break down and disappear; for example a plastic water bottle takes about 450 years to disappear completely. A lot of plastic in the ocean breaks down into smaller pieces and is eaten by fish and sea birds, which is very dangerous and can easily kill them. And some of it sinks to the sea bed, where it also causes damage to fish and to marine plants.
But most plastic rubbish stays in the sea and just floats around, and because of computer modelling we now know where it goes to. Erik van Seville, who works at London University, has shown that the ocean moves round and round in huge circles, so most plastic ends up in six ‘rubbish areas’ around the world. The largest of these is in the northern Pacific Ocean. So if someone throws a plastic bottle into the sea in Mexico, it will move slowly across the Pacific Ocean towards China, then it will go north and then back again to an area not far from the coast of North America. So it may travel thousands of kilometres, from one part of the world to another. This is why the beaches of even very small, remote islands in the middle of the ocean are covered in plastic. Plastic pollution really is international and it’s a problem everywhere in the world.
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B1+ Part 6 Writing (15 Marks)