READING TEST: PARAGRAPH TOPIC HEADINGS
For each paragraph, choose the most suitable heading from the list which follows. There is one extra
heading you do not need to use.
THE NEED FOR A GREEN WORLD
A. Some countries do not do as much as others.
B. Publicity may encourage green attitudes.
C. Some people take a lot of trouble.
D. Pollution is all around us.
E. Government action is essential.
F. Wildlife suffers.
G. A heavy price paid for economic success.
H. Possible to take being Green to extremes.
I. The end of civilised society.
1
Possibly, in Europe, one person in ten has turned green. No wonder. You would have to lead a sheltered life not to be aware of the garbage in the air, on the land, and in the sea. Take the Adriatic coast of Italy where, all night long, the slime and the scum lap the moonlit beaches. At dawn, the shore is covered in a thick brown-green gunge. Dump trucks roar into action, and the splodge is collected and taken away, but by early afternoon, it has again started to drift inshore. The sludge is killing fish, clams and mussels. It is killing the tourist business, too.
2
Where does it come from? For years, nitrates and phosphates and God knows what other chemicals have been dumped into the Adriatic. As Italy’s economic miracle has worked its wonders, the industry of the Po valley has had its effluent combine with rising temperatures in the sea to produce a thick algae. The result is economic disaster for the tourist industry: 3,000 hotels, 26,000 villas and 800 restaurants take a lot of filling. One politician suggested the building of swimming pools.
3
Whatever may be happening south of the Alps, there is little doubt that Britain remains the least green country in Northern Europe. The average Britain does not sort as much garbage for recycling, does less to conserve energy, rarely votes on green issues, and only began driving on unleaded petrol once there was a tax incentive. Britain is probably about five years behind the leaders.
4
West Germany is ahead. The Greens are a real political threat there, so the government has been forced to deal with their issues. In German supermarkets, shoppers choose the green-friendly and the not-nasty. Fly-sprays are exchanged for old-fashioned fly-papers. A Green householder will have two dustbins, one for normal rubbish, and one for paper which is taken to be recycled. Glass goes into a special container down the road, and used batteries are taken to special collecting-points.
5
But if the German consumer takes his Greenness seriously, the American has elevated it to an art form. It is no longer a simple matter of separating the bottles from the chicken bones, and picking out the lettuce leaves for the compost heap. In offices, workers have lines of colour-coded wastepaper baskets, one for white paper with glue, one for white paper without glue, one for coloured paper, and yet more baskets for other types of rubbish. Trash Police are employed to report on Garbage Louts.
6
The science of garbology has taken hold. It has an official magazine, entitled, of course, Garbage. It lifts the lid on garbage for the common man. Its first print run of 100,000 was sold out with days. The magazine has a Garbage Index with lots of information for the fact-hungry. Americans throw away 1.6 billion ball-point pens every year, as well as two billion razor blades and 250 million car tyres. Greens are recommended to read the Los Angeles Times, 83 per cent of which is printed on recycled paper, rather than The Washington Post, none of which is.
7
Out on America’s beaches, there is a another problem: sixty per cent of the rubbish washed up on the beach is plastic. To keep the floating rubbish from reaching New York, the US Army Corps of Engineers uses skimmers to lift debris from the water. One result of the plastic garbage is dead fish. A rare three-metre-long beaked whale was washed ashore on Long Island. After a postmortem, scientists concluded that the animal had starved to death, its stomach blocked by plastic carrier bags.
8
On a larger scale, Western consumption patterns are wrecking the ozone layer over the Antarctic and destroying the Brazilian rain forest. Power stations in Britain are killing trees in Norway. Today’s central heating will produce tomorrow’s global warming, and the flooding of low-level lands the day after. These problems are too large to be left to the individual. They are probably too large to be left to the Greens. According to the British Green Manifesto, “Conservation must replace consumption as the driving force of our economy… Green politics is about `enough’, not about `more and more’… nuclear power stations are extremely dangerous. We want to see them phased out quickly… The growth of air traffic over Europe is unnecessary…”
(Answers: 1.E; 2.G; 3.A; 4.C; 5.H; 6.B; 7.F; 8.E)
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