Look through this outline text without completing any of the sentences.

You will read five people talking about environmental problems. For Questions 1-5, choose which of the subjects A-F each speaker is talking about. Use the letters only once. There is one extra letter which you do not need to use.

A air pollution

В pollution of the sea Speaker 1

С climate change Speaker 2

D new illnesses Speaker 3

E nuclear radiation Speaker 4

F loss of forests Speaker 5

READING

One

I think one of the biggest threats to our health comes from attempts to interfere with nature, as we saw when they starting feeding animal remains to cattle, which after all are vegetarians. The result, as we know only too well, was BSE, mad cow disease, and its human form CJD. And now there's all this genetically modified stuff flooding into our supermarkets from the US. I know the aim is to create plants that are more productive and resistant to disease but my fear is that however good the intentions, it is only a matter of time before something goes badly wrong and we have a mass outbreak of something awful.

Two

What really worries me is all these strange things like hurricanes and tornadoes in places where they didn't use to happen. There's been a lot about El Nino, this huge mass of warm water that moves across the South Pacific and causes droughts and then there are warnings about the rise in sea level causing entire island groups like the Maldives to disappear. And I read the other day that an increase of just one degree centigrade would be the equivalent of moving all the plants 500 kilometres to the south. Even if that happened over a period of 50 years it would still be twice as fast as vegetation can adapt to different temperatures by evolution.

Three

I got really angry when I heard how much rubbish they were still dumping there and I saw all those seals and dolphins that had been poisoned. Now whenever there's a storm we get loads of garbage from deep-water sites washed up on the beach. It's just so incredibly selfish and short-sighted and I'm delighted when there's the occasional victory against the big boys, as when Shell tried to sink that oil platform - the Brent Spar, I think it was called - in the Atlantic, and Greenpeace made them back off. It gave me a good feeling, that.

Four

I feel passionately that we must do something to save it. Over half of it has already gone, and with it vast amounts of animal and plant life as entire ecosystems Are destroyed. And it's not just the tropical areas which, important though they are, account for only a third of the earth's total. The biggest in the world are in Siberia and government inaction has led to more and more trees being cut down there as multinational companies turn their attentions to parts of the world where their destruction of the natural environment gets far less negative publicity than it does in areas like the Amazon and Malaysia. It must stop, it really must.

Five

As far as I'm concerned there's no doubt at all: the reason all three of my kids have asthma is the stuff they have to breathe in every day. It's worst when the weather's hot and sunny, like it was last July, and when there's lots of Traffic. Sometimes when that horrible brown cloud is hanging over the city I start coughing too, and there was one day when our eyes were streaming and all red. When there's smog like that the hospitals are full of people with chest trouble, and I know of at least one old person who died of it. If something isn't done soon we'll all have to wear gas masks just to stay alive.

2. Read again and note down:

(Speaker 1) two kinds of victim.

(Speaker 2) two things that are rising.

(Speaker 3) two words for things that have been thrown away.

(Speaker 4) three kinds of thing that have disappeared; three parts of the world where this has happened.

(Speaker 5) two things that cause the problem; at least two results of it.

Look through this outline text without completing any of the sentences.

Which of the following questions does it answer?

a What do you think are the biggest dangers to the world's environment?

b What should we do about the biggest dangers to the world's environment?

с What do you think is the biggest danger to the world's environment and what should we do about it?

Our planet is under attack. On land, in the air and in the water there is a greater threat to the continued existence of life on Earth than there has been for many millions of years.

Firstly,........................................................................................................................

As a result,..................................................................................................................

A further problem is...................................................................................................

As well as that,............................................................................................................

Finally, there is ..........................................................................................................

In spite of this,.............................................................................................................

To sum up, all this is doing tremendous harm to the world: above, on and below the surface. The fact that these are often international problems makes them even more serious.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 462