Tough Truths About Plastic Pollution: Author: Dianna Cohen Date: Time: Level: Ted Talk Link

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Plastic topic 3

Tough truths about plastic pollution


[listening test questions]

Author: Dianna Cohen


Date: April 2010
Time: (5:18)
Level: ***** [B1/B2]

TED TALK Link:


https://www.ted.com/talks/dianna_cohen_tough_truths_about_plastic_pollution?language
=en

Check these words before listening:

Key vocabulary
1. Plastic pollution
2. Coalition
3. Installations
4. Fissure
5. Ephemeral
6. Marine environment
7. A proposal
8. Decommissioned
9. Gyre
10. The Pacific Garbage Patch (Google this)
11. An initial reaction
12. The bigger picture
13. A faucet
14. A small drop in a bucket (metaphor)
15. Disposable
16. Potentially
17. Toxin
18. To leach into
19. Debris
20. Increased
21. Sustainable
22. Old-school
23. Pyrex containers (Google this)

Copyright: These materials are photocopiable but please leave all logos and web
addresses on handouts. Please don’t post these materials onto the web. Thank you
Student
TED Talks Comprehension Questions [6 minutes]
Time: Approximately 60 minutes

1. Read the title

 Try to predict the content of lecture


 Write down key terms / ideas
 Check key vocabulary using a dictionary

Try to listen ONLY two times

Three types of lesson

Lesson#1: [hard]
1. Listen once – take notes
2. Give 3 minutes to tidy notes
3. Listen again and add to notes (use a different colour pen).
4. Answer questions – set 10-15 minutes to answer.
5. Check answers
6. Listen again to check answers

Lesson #2: [medium]


1. Listen once – take notes.
2. Answer questions: 10 minutes
3. Listen again – answer the questions as they listen
4. Give yourself 10 minutes to tidy answers. Then check answers
5. Listen again to check answers

Lesson #3: [easier]


1. Read questions – highlight key terms
2. Listen once and answer questions
3. 3 minutes to tidy notes
4. Listen again answer missed question
5. 5-10 minutes to tidy answers. Then check answers
6. Listen again to check answers
Tough truths about plastic pollution
Dianna Cohen [Apr 2010 – 5:18]

1. Short answer questions

i. What's her profession?


1
2
/2

ii. What does she use plastic bags for?

/1

2. Matching – match the endings [one has been done for you]

1 Plastic A to clean it up with three ships


2 The gyre B to turn the plastic into bricks for building
3 Reaction C breaks down into smaller bits
4 Proposal D an ocean area where plastic has accumulated
5 Raise awareness E most people are surprised
/4

3. Multiple choice – choose only one

a She couldn't afford it


b Cleaning up wouldn't do much to solve the problem
c The idea was ridiculous
/1

4. True, false, not given [T/F/NG] – The bigger picture

i. The world should stop making plastics

ii. There 11 gyres in four major oceans

iii. Plastic is absolutely everywhere.

iv. Her main concern is the plastic toxins in the marine environment
[
/4
5. Sentence gap fill – fill in the gaps with a suitable word

i. marine debris % is plastic


ii. Plastic in the ocean should be called p pollution
iii. Only % of plastics in the US are recycled
iv. Plastic bottles are down cycled, i or shipped to China
v. A glass bottle can b a glass bottle again and again

/5
6. Solutions

i. What are the four R’s


R Reduce
R
R
R
/3

ii. What does she recommend to use instead of disposable/ single-use plastics?
1
2
/2

7. Summary – fill in the gaps with a suitable word

This is a huge problem in the oceans, but this is a problem that we've created as
and we can solve. We can solve this by raising of
the issue and teaching people to choose . So whenever possible, to
choose alternatives to single-use plastics. We can cut the stem and, our
oceans.

/4

Overall score / 26
People have written their greatest regrets on a blackboard in New York in a video that
has been viewed by millions.
In answer to the invitation to "write your biggest regret", New Yorkers and tourists
framed their hindsight wishes in often similar terms.
The video, created by online college Strayer University, said most answers focused not
on what had been done, but what had not - sending a message about "missed chances".
Some of the secret yearnings shared included: "Not pursuing acting", "not having kids
before my dad passed away" and "not being a better husband".
One young man who said he had been homeless said he regretted "not building bridges"
and allowing relationships to break down.
Another said: "I did all the things that were plan 'B'. I just never did it."
The video then urged viewers to treat every day like a "clean slate" and start again if
they so wished.
Some of the top regrets of a typical American involve, in order, romance, family,
education, career, finance and parenting,according to a psychology study at the
University of Illinois.
Women reported more regrets relating to love than work compared to men, while higher
educated Americans were more regretful about career decisions they made than those
with a lower level of education.
"Worrying" too much was highlighted as one of the biggest regrets, meanwhile, in
research by Cornell University - over and above major mistakes such as addictions,
affairs or bad business decisions.
APPLY FOR MBM
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/crash-course-bio-ecology/crash-course-
ecology-2/v/crash-course-ecology-11
8 MINUTOS
Watch the video
Make a mind map with main ideas.

TRANSCIPT OF THE VIDEO

I think we should do this one outside this is better this is beautiful


that's just oh god of course except for this letter is the kind of
pollution for like barely like I would rather it not be here it makes
me kind of angry and mixed nature less pretty but environmentally
there's a pretty low chance that this can or even a million more like
it is going to have a significant negative impact on an ecosystem
the kind of pollution that we really have to worry about is the kind
of we don't see either because it's invisible or because it's being
done in places that are way out of the way that we're less likely to
encounter that's by design of course because when people
actually see the impacts that their lifestyle can have on the world
they tend to sometimes James the way that they live and also the
way that they buy and we can't have that so it's time to get our
hands dirty [Music] pollution is kind of catch-all term for any
substance that's in the wrong place or in the wrong concentrations
in the environment trash in the environment that's pollution but
chemicals both naturally occurring in synthetic those are the real
killers now we tend to think of pollution in terms of weird synthetic
chemicals made in big chemical processing plants and they're
certainly a problem but as we'll see in a bit you got to understand
that natural compounds in the wrong concentrations can do just
as much damage as whatever Petro insecticides were making one
of the main ways we're altering concentrations of natural
compounds is by messing with the biogeochemical cycles that we
talked about a couple of weeks ago you're probably tired of
hearing about it but the most obvious cycle that we're screwing up
is the carbon cycle which shuffles carbon around the planet into
various reservoirs the atmosphere the oceans rocks the bodies of
living thing the cycle keeps going on thankfully but we're
overloading it by digging up all that carbon rich coal oil and gas
and burning it to fuel our 21st century lifestyles all of a sudden
there's more carbon getting released and the reservoirs can
handle plants and animals are like we're cool we got all the carbon
we need and the oceans are like yeah we're good on carbon too
and it can't just go back into the rock so it hangs around the
atmosphere is a greenhouse gas insulating our planet and
changing the climate we've also been tampering with the nitrogen
and phosphorus cycles to similar effect nitrogen and phosphorus
are nutrients which we and other organisms need like really need
in order to grow and respire and exist so when we go and make
like ludicrous amounts of these nutrients available ecosystems get
very confused it's like the day in fifth grade when I realized that I
could spend my entire allowance on Cadbury cream eggs at the
after Easter candy sale at Walgreens it was fun at first then it was
not phosphates and nitrates are basically the main ingredients in
fertilizers and phosphates are also found in some detergents so
when wastewater from our houses our runoff from farms washes
those compounds into rivers and streams it can cause huge algal
blooms that choke out the rest of the plants and animals in the
stream and totally gross looking but that's not the end of it when
all the phosphorus and nitrogen are used up the algae die and
then bacteria gets started on decomposing that dead algae but of
course the decomposers need oxygen which they take out of the
water and then the oxygen levels in the water plummet killing all
the fish and just about everything else that needs oxygen this is
how phosphated nitrate pollution causes dead zones the biggest
example of this happening right this very minute is in the Gulf of
Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River the Gulf of Mexico
dead zone covers 18,000 square kilometers of River Delta and
coastline and is basically a swath of totally deoxygenated water
caused by all the fertilizers from the entire Mississippi River Basin
which drains 2.6 million square kilometers of land train to this one
point in the Gulf the size of the dead zone fluctuates seasonally as
it depends on how much fertilizer is being used by pretty much
half of the farms in America so yeah pollution isn't just synthetic
compounds with like 17 syllable long names sometimes they're
just imbalances of chemicals that we need for our survival however
not all chemicals found in nature are good for us in fact sweet old
Mother Earth comes up with some of the most toxic stuff that
you've ever heard of fake cyanide for instance it's in a lot of stuff
that we come in contact with everyday foods like almonds spinach
and lima beans contain cyanide and so do the seeds of apples
which you have heard and the pits of peaches sign out of us-- little
plants because it's a primitive insecticide causing a sort of
molecular asphyxiation preventing a bug cells from being able to
use oxygen now it takes a lot more cyanide than you'd find in an
almond to finish off a human but guess what we've figured out
how to collect all bunch of cyanide in one place because we really
love gold good my precious mining operations use cyanide in large
quantities in order to separate gold silver and other precious
metals from the ore and the cyanide process of ore extraction
ground up or is sprayed with a cyanide solution which dissolves
the metal in the ore and draws it out the solution is then collected
and the precious metal is taken out but the byproduct of all of this
is of course a big pile of cyanide laced rock powder aka hazardous
waste to deal with or try to deal with anyway mines do all kinds of
stuff to reduce the concentration of cyanide in these leftovers
called tailings or they try and convert the cyanide into less toxic
cyanate but the toxin is never totally eliminated so then it can end
up leaking into the groundwater supplies aren't gonna sit there and
keep dissolving other toxic metals out of the rock that also end up
in our water like mercury and mercury is another important
pollutant it's super toxic naturally-occurring metal found in coal
among other place is and it's just fine when it's hanging out
underground in a coal scene but when that coal is burned to make
electricity the mercury is released into the air and then the mercury
falls on the land where it makes its way into groundwater and
eventually into the food chain especially into the marine food chain
as a result only about 25 percent of the mercury released by us
power plants and factories actually ends up in the US the rest
enters the global cycle which most people end up ingesting by
eating fish and mercury acts as a powerful neurotoxin and animals
interfering with our brains and our nervous systems finally two
more naturally-occurring compounds that we keep pumping out
our sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide the most common natural
sources of these things are volcanic eruptions or the waste of
some algae and bacteria but we release millions of tons of these
things into the environment every year by burning fossil fuels like
coal and when these compounds react with water vapor in the
atmosphere they turn into sulfuric acid and nitric acid and then
returned to the surface as acid rain in soils these acids can cause
the release of natural but toxic elements like aluminum in water
they can poison aquatic wildlife and on land the acidity can cause
animals eggs to not hatch and plants to lose nutrients now things
have gotten significantly better since a lot of countries put
emissions controls into place but for a while there back in 1980
rain in much of North America had the same pH as tomato juice
which objectively speaking is the grossest so that's how we're
amping up the levels of naturally occurring chemicals to toxic
levels but of course we're also synthesizing chemicals that Mother
Nature never even dreamed of and they wreak their own special
brand of havoc the problem here is choosing just one as an
example because there are so many chemicals out there doing so
many different things it's a whole class of chemicals called
endocrine disruptors which we put in pharmaceuticals pesticides
and plastics but some of them are also just byproducts of industry
and agriculture endocrine disruptors like bisphenol A or BPA which
baby-bottle manufacture has been scrambling to take out of their
products in recent years hang out in plastics and leach into our
drinks or our flushed off of agricultural fields and into rivers or our
just flushed down toilets when we feed them out because they're
in some drug that we've been taking the result is that they get into
waterways sometimes in high concentrations and animals there
they just soak them all in the endocrine system basically just your
hormones controls a vast array of an organism's functions and as
concentrations of EDC's have increased we've spotted male fish
and rivers all over the world with female reproductive tracts or
testes that make eggs especially living in the water but we we're
drinking it people of all ages are susceptible to EDC's but research
suggests that those most at risk are fetuses and infants because
their organ and immune systems are still forming scientists are still
studying the developmental reproductive in neurological effects
that these compounds are having on us and as far as I'm
concerned they can't do it fast enough so the chemicals we're
making are affecting us in ways that we could guess and also
probably ways that we've never even dreamed of at the same time
we're rearranging where and how much some naturally-occurring
compounds are showing up and that adds to those five other
impacts that we're having on the biosphere and yeah the past two
weeks have been a real bummer but hopefully an enlightening
bummer and this leads us to the next stage of ecology and the last
lesson in this course conservation biology and restoration ecology
which together comprise the science of saving our planet and
ourselves from ourselves
30/6/2016 Sentimientos y Emociones ­ Vocabulario en Inglés ­ Feelings and Emotions |  Sherton English

affection (afékshon) - afecto
agitation (adchitéishon) - agitación
agony (ágoni) - agonía

alarm (alárm) - alarma
amazement (améissment) - asombro
amusement (amiúsment) - divesión
anger (ánguer) - cólera, ira

anguish (ángüish) - angustia
annoyance (anóians) - molestia
anxiety (angssáiti) - ansiedad
apprehension (apriénshon) - aprehensión

arousal (aráusal) - excitatión
astonishment (astónishment) - asombro
attraction (atrákshon) - atracción
bitterness (bíternes) - amargura

bliss (bliss) - felicidad No se ha podido cargar el complem


caring (kéering) - preocupación
cheerfulness (chíirfulnes) - alegría
compassion (compáshon) - compasión

contempt (contémpt) - desprecio
contentment (conténtment) - alegría
defeat (difíit) - fracaso
dejection (didchékshon) - desánimo

delight (diláit) - placer
depression (dipréshon) - depresión
desire (disáier) - deseo
despair (dispéar) - desesperación

disappointment (disapóintment) - desilusión
disgust (disgást) - repugnancia
dislike (disláik) - aversión
dismay (disméi) - consternación

distress (distrés) - angustia No se ha podido cargar el complem


dread (dréd) - temor
eagerness (íguernes) - afán
ecstasy (ékstasi) - éxtasis

elation (iléishon) - euforía
embarrassment (embárrasment) - vergüenza, bochorno
enjoyment (indchóiment) - placer
enthusiasm (enzúsiasm) - entusiasmo

envy (énvi) - envidia
euphoria (iufória) - euforia
exasperation (egsásperéishon) - exasperación
excitement (eksáitment) - entusiasmo

exhilaration (egsileréishon) - regocijo
fear (fíar) - miedo

http://www.shertonenglish.com/resources/es/vocabulary/feelings­and­emotions.php 1/3
30/6/2016 Sentimientos y Emociones ­ Vocabulario en Inglés ­ Feelings and Emotions |  Sherton English

ferocity (ferósiti) - ferocidad
fondness (fóndnes) - cariño

fright (fráit) - susto No se ha podido cargar el complem


frustration (frostréishon) - frustración
fury (fiúri) - furia
gaiety (guéiti) - alegría

glee (glíi) - regocijo
gloom (glúm) - tristeza
greed (gríid) - avaricia
grief (gríif) - pena

guilt (guílt) - culpa
happiness (hápines) - felicidad
hate (héit) - odio
homesickness (hóumsíknes) - nostalgia

hope (hóup) - esperanza
hopelessness (hóuplesnes) - desesperación
horror (hórror) - horror
hostility (hostíliti) - hostilidad

humiliation (hiumiliéshon) - humillación No se ha podido cargar el complem


hurt (hert) - daño
hysteria (histéria) - histeria
infatuation (infatiuéshon) - encaprichamiento

insecurity (insekiúriti) - inseguridad
insult (ínsolt) - insulto
irritation (irritéshon) - irritación
isolation (aisoléshon) - aislamiento

jealousy (dchélosi) - celos
joy (dchói) - alegría
jubilation (dchubiléishon) - júbilo
liking (láiking) - gusto

loathing (lóuding) - odio, aversion


loneliness (lóunlines) - soledad
longing (lónguing) - anhelo
love (lov) - amor

lust (last) - lujuria No se ha podido cargar el complem


melancholy (melánkoli) - melancolía
misery (míseri) - aflicción, sufrimiento
mortification (mortifikéishon) - mortificación

nervousness (nérvosnes) - nerviosismo
optimism (óptimism) - optimismo
outrage (áutreidsh) - indignación
pain (péin) - dolor

panic (pánik) - pánico
passion (páshon) - pasión
pity (píti) - compasión, lástima

http://www.shertonenglish.com/resources/es/vocabulary/feelings­and­emotions.php 2/3
30/6/2016 Sentimientos y Emociones ­ Vocabulario en Inglés ­ Feelings and Emotions |  Sherton English

pleasure (plésher) - placer

pride (práid) - orgullo
rage (réidsh) - rabia
rapture (rápcher) - éxtasis
regret (rigrét) - remordimiento, lamento

rejection (ridchékshon) - rechazo No se ha podido cargar el complem


relief (rilíif) - alivio
remorse (rimórs) - remordimiento
repentance (ripéntans) - arrepentimiento

resentment (risséntment) - resentimiento
revulsion (rivólshon) - asco, repulsión
sadness (sádnes) - tristeza
satisfaction (satisfákshon) - satisfacción

scorn (skórn) - desprecio
shame (shéim) - vergüenza
shock (shók) - conmoción
sorrow (sórrou) - pena

spite (spáit) - rencor, despecho


suffering (sáfering) - sufrimiento
surprise (sorpráis) - sorpresa
sympathy (símpazi) - compasión

tenderness (téndernes) - ternura No se ha podido cargar el complem


tenseness (ténsnes) - tensión
terror (térror) - terror
thrill (zríl) - emoción

torment (tórment) - tormento
triumph (tráionf) - triunfo
uneasiness (anísines) - inquietud
unhappiness (anjápines) - infelicidad

woe (wóu) - aflicción
worry (uérri) - preocupación
wrath (raz) - ira
zeal (ssíil) - celo

zest (ssést) - entusiasmo

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