way2go! 6. Practice Pack, Arbeitsheft

30 Unit 05 | Wild world 0 Plastic is used for carrier bags because A everyone carries them around. B the material doesn’t cost much. C it lasts at least one year. D there’s no other choice. 1 A problem in our society is A our airplanes are made of plastic. B there’s too much plastic in hospitals. C we throw things away unnecessarily. D we don’t have sufficient plastic. 2 Jambeck warns that by 2025 A there could be twice the amount of plastic waste. B the problem will be the most serious one in the world. C we will feel overwhelmed by plastic. D we will need more environment workers. Read the text about plastic pollution, then choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D) for questions 1–6. Put a cross (  ) in the correct box. The first one (0) has been done for you. READING 8 The oceans are drowning in plastic Do you always accept a plastic carrier bag when you go shopping? Every year approximately 500 billion plastic carrier bags are used worldwide – more than 1 million bags are used every minute. There’s no question that plastic is cheap, versatile and long-lasting, but a plastic bag only has an average ‘working life’ of 15 minutes. Plastic is used in everything from medical equipment to parts of airplanes. However, we have developed a ‘disposable’ lifestyle, which means that we are too quick to get rid of things, thereby creating environmental problems. We are now producing nearly 300 million tons of plastic every year. Half of this is for single use; used once, then thrown away. Packaging is the largest part of this, accounting for just over 40% of total plastic usage. “We’re being overwhelmed by our waste,” says Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer. According to Jambeck’s research, the amount of plastic waste will double by 2025 unless something is done worldwide to stop it. Do you buy your water and soft drinks in plastic bottles? The process of producing bottled water requires around 6 times as much water per bottle as there is in the container. Additionally, 14% of all litter comes from beverage containers. This is a disaster for our oceans as more than 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into them every year. Plastics are the number 1 type of trash found in the sea. Ocean Conservancy, an organisation that holds an annual coastal clean-up event in more than 150 countries worldwide, says that plastic debris makes up around 85 percent of all the trash collected from beaches, waterways and oceans – and that’s just the stuff we can see. So it pays to think twice about how we use and dispose of plastic items, otherwise we could be adding to the problem – the plastic bag wafting in the wind that finds its way to a storm drain; the potato crisp bag forgotten on a beach; the plastic soft drinks bottle washed away in a stream that leads to a river and, finally, the sea. The coastal clean-up event collected almost 1 million plastic beverage bottles, 800,000 plastic bottle caps, and about half a million each of plastic bags and drinking straws – and this was in just a single day. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv