Pollution and Recycling

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 442.

Unit 6

1. Read comments to the photos. Why do these facts look alarming? What elements does pollution threaten? Answering these questions use the appropriate speaking strategies for describing the photos and general conversation.

An open-air garbage dump tarnishes the sapphire coast of Barrow, Alaska. Trash that makes its way into the oceans decomposes very slowly, littering coastlines, polluting ground water, and harming marine creatures that mistake the trash for food.

Heavy rains in northwest Iowa washed away soil, leaving this scarred tableau. This type of erosion, termed sheet-and-rill erosion, occurs when there is insufficient vegetation to hold soil in place. As rain falls, it forms sheets of surface water that transport soil away. As more water accumulates, it forms runoff channels called rills, which further displace soil.

China's burgeoning urbanization has also increased rates of air pollution, such as the haze seen in this photograph of downtown Beijing, where people walk past a billboard advertising the Olympics.

Despite China's promise to present cleaner air to the world in time for the Olympics, a new World Health Organization report says nearly a quarter of a million Chinese die each year from air-pollution-related diseases—the highest incidence in the world.

2. The first element is water and oceans. Read about oceans pollution.

The oceans are so vast and deep that until fairly recently, it was widely assumed that no matter how much trash and chemicals humans dumped into them, the effects would be negligible. Proponents of dumping in the oceans even had a catchphrase: "The solution to pollution is dilution."

Today, we need look no further than the New Jersey-size dead zone that forms each summer in the Mississippi River Delta, or the thousand-mile-wide swath of decomposing plastic in the northern Pacific Ocean to see that this "dilution" policy has helped place a once flourishing ocean ecosystem on the brink of collapse.