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LISTENING FLUENCY LIBRARY

#20

The Earth Is Growing

These lessons are designed to improve your listening and pronunciation.


Shadow along with the audio and match the speaker’s intonation and stress.

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#20 The Earth Is Growing

We generally think of islands as being fixed in


size, but some islands are actually growing. On
erupt:
to explode or to the island of Hawaii, the Kilauea volcano has
come forth been continuously erupting since 1983. Lava
suddenly or has been pouring out of this volcano
violently continuously for the past 30 years. Some of this
lava reaches the ocean, which has caused the
island to grow fresh land. Between 1983 and
2002, the island’s landmass grew by 542 acres.

While Hawaii is a natural example of the earth’s


growing landmass, there are also growing islands
of trash in five different places in the world’s
oceans that are completely man made. The
biggest island of trash is called the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch, which is in the Pacific Ocean
between Japan and Hawaii. Some estimates say
it is twice the size of the Continental United
States. Its actual size is hard to say, because it is
not really an island of solid trash, but is better
described as a ‘trash soup’. In some areas this
ton: soup is thick and up to 10 meters deep, and in
a unit of weight other areas it thins to very small pieces of plastic
equaling 2,000 that are not visible from the surface. It is
pounds estimated to weigh 100 million tons and is
continuing to grow daily.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is held together


by wind and water currents, but that doesn’t
mean it is contained. It kills many different types
of sea life including turtles, penguins, and birds
that mistake the plastic trash as food. In the
encourage:
inspire with Midway Islands, the bodies of birds that have
confidence or died from eating the plastic have been
spirit or courage photographed, which has encouraged some
people to decrease their use of plastics.

© Deep English, 2011-2016 | www.deepenglish.com 02


#20 The Earth Is Growing

Zooplankton are a variety of tiny organisms in the


ocean that are a necessary food source for many
pound: of the ocean’s creatures. They are rapidly being
a unit of weight outnumbered by plastic, however. In 1900, there
equal to 12 ounces were zero pounds of plastic per pound of
or 373 grams zooplankton in the ocean. In 2000, there were six
pounds of plastic per pound of zooplankton in
the ocean. And today, there are 60 pounds of
plastic per pound of zooplankton. This isn’t just a
exposed: problem for sea life, but also for us. So if you eat
without protection; seafood, you are probably being exposed to all
susceptible to this plastic. In 2011, researchers found plastic in
9% of fish caught in the Pacific Ocean.

The truth is that we are using plastic at an


increasing rate. In the U.S., 2 million plastic
bottles are thrown away every 5 minutes. And
about 1 million plastic bags are used every
minute worldwide. They’re thrown in landfills and
in the oceans of the world, where they stay. All of
this plastic is designed to last forever, or at the
very least, hundreds to thousands of years.

© Deep English, 2011-2016 | www.deepenglish.com 03


#20 The Earth Is Growing

immense: When we are faced with such immense


large, huge, great
pollution problems like this, it’s easy to bury our
bury your head heads in the sand. But there is a solution and it
in the sand: starts with each one of us. Watch the video
this is a popular below as you ponder whether you can give up
idiom meaning to plastic and instead make reusable bags and
ignore obvious bottles a part of your life.
danger or signs of
warning. It comes
from the behavior
of the ostrich, MIDWAY - A Message from the Gyre : a short film
which often buries by Chris Jordan from Midway on Vimeo.
its head in the
sand in order to Video: http://vimeo.com/25563376
deal with threat

Photos / Credits:
Photo #1 (cover) – by Fe Ilya:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/renneville/2908748583/
Photo #2 –
https://www.flickr.com/photos/10646468@N02/4369920104
(CC BY 4.0)

© Deep English, 2011-2016 | www.deepenglish.com 04

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