1. Is the situation really dangerous?

2. What can we do to protect the nature and to save our planet?

P1. I want to tell you about water pollution. The situation is really gloomy and sometimes even hopeless. Rivers, lakes, seas, oceans cover more then 70% of our planet. Scientists say “man will die if oceans die”. Over 5 million tons of oil products pollute the ocean each year. About 2 million tons of these products come from cars. First the oil products go into atmosphere. From the atmosphere they go into oceans. Experts believe life in oceans will be destroyed within 25 years.

P2. Well, we see that water which is necessary for our life is polluted awfully. As for me, I want to focus to another problem – the problem of air pollution. Nobody and nothing on the Earth could live without air. People pollute the air all over the world. A great number of trees growing on the planet produce oxygen and clean the air. But vast forests are cut and burn in fire. Their disappearance upset the oxygen balance.

P3. We must keep in mind that not only the industry pollutes the nature. Every year each family create one ton of rubbish. A great number of dumps are all over the country. Just only some facts: it takes more than 2 years to decompose paper. Cans and tins destroy more than 90 years. Plastic packets decompose more than 200 years, glass – more than 1000 years.

Exercise 8. Do the following exercises:

1. PLANET AT RISK: What’s at risk? Complete this table with your partner(s). Change partners and share what you wrote. Change again and share what you heard:

	What’s going wrong?	How can we reverse it?
Oceans
Forests
Deserts
Animals
Weather
Rivers

2. THREATS: What are the biggest threats to our planet? Rank these and share your rankings with your partner. Change partners and share your rankings again:

Deforestation Pollution Nuclear war Climate change

Species extinction Deadly viruses Overpopulation Globalization

3. ECOSYSTEM: Spend one minute writing down all of the different words you associate with the word ‘ecosystem’. Share your words with your partner(s) and talk about them. Together, put the words into different categories.

4. TRUE / FALSE: Read the headline. Guess if  a-h  below are true (T) or false (F):

a.	A new United Nations report says loss of biodiversity costs economies.	T / F
b.	The report gives us tips on points to help nature.	T / F
c.	The report says all coral reefs have already died.	T / F
d.	The rate of biodiversity loss is 1,000 times higher than ever before.	T / F
e.	Scientists are confident governments will tackle the damage.	T / F
f.	World leaders will adopt a new biodiversity framework in October.	T / F
g.	The report says more than 25% of corals might soon become extinct.	T / F
h.	The article predicts pollution will cause fish to start fighting each other.	T / F