2.1 Answer the following questions

1. What are the sources of water pollution?

2. What are the consequences of water pollution?

3. Why do fertilizers and chemicals used by the farmers cause pollution?

2.2 Match these words from the text with their meanings:

1)acid rain,

2) sewage,

3)to choke,

4)oxygen,

5)fertilizers

a) waste and used water, that is carried away from buildings through passages and pipes;

b) rain containing a high level of acid that can damage the environment;

c) a gas in the air that all animals depend on to breathe;

d) a chemical substance added to soil in order to help plants grow;

e) to fill so that it is difficult to move;

2.3Complete the following sentences.

1. Air pollution can become water pollution as we ... .

2.Many towns still pour their... .

3.Without oxygen none of the ... .

4..... can also cause water pollution.

5. ..... poisonous drain in which nothing can live.

6. ... crops against pests, weeds and disease sometimes get into rivers and kill fish.

2.4 Agree or disagree with the statements below. Begin your sentence with one of the following :

I fully agree

I quite agree here

I suppose so

I am afraid so

I disagree

I don not think so

On the contrary

It is not so

Far from it

1. Air pollution can become water pollution as we have seen with acid rain.

2. Factories never cause water pollution by pouring poisonous wastes into streams and rivers.

3. The chemicals used by the farmer to protect crops against pests, weeds and disease sometimes get into rivers and kill fish.

4. The fertilizers which the farmer uses to make crops grow sometimes cause pollution when the rain washes them into rivers.

5. When they rot, they take all the oxygen out of the water, so that fish can live in it.

2.5 Retell the text using the scheme:

W ater pollution

a cid rain sewage factories wastes fertilizers

consequences

3.Read the text. Pay attention to the words after the text:

Text 2

Sea or Sewer?

Forecasts of what the sea will do are becoming more necessary depending on what we are doing to the sea; it has become mankind’s great sewer. Lakes, rivers and the air itself have become clogged with our wastes. The sea, in its immensity, would appear to have an indefinite capacity to hide anything that might be thrown into it.

On the face of it there does not seem to be much of a problem. The North Sea, for example, contains 54 000 cubic kilometers of water. Consequently, if 54 000 tons of any substance were dumped into this sea and perfectly dispersed, it would show up in a concentration of only one part per billion. This kind of reasoning has encouraged the use of the North Sea as a receptacle for everything from the raw sewage of the cities to the wastes of industry along the Rhine, one of the world’s busiest areas of economic activity.

Such reasoning does not stand up because the sea is not a tub of water mixed every day by wind and tide. Currents not only disperse waste, they also concentrate it. That was what happened in spring 1965 when the beach near The Hague was suddenly covered with rows of dead fish. Analysis of the water just off the beach showed that its copper content was no less than 500 times higher than normal.

It has been estimated that one or two truckloads – twenty tons in all – of copper were enough to do the trick. Dumped stealthily on some beach at low tide they were not diluted by the sea. Instead tides and currents concentrated the waste into a narrow lethal river about 200 yards wide and flowing north ever so slowly.

Another case where the inability to predict the behaviour of the atmosphere and the sea had a disastrous effect was the wreck of the Torrey Canyon in March 1967. She piled up on the Seven Stones off Cornwall dumping 117 000 tons of crude oil into the sea from her rent hull. 14 000 tons landed on the Cornish coast where it was fought with 10 000 tons of detergents that destroyed the oil but at same time killed most marine life on the shore as well. The French followed the event from a “safe distance”. They had every right to expect that the beaches of northern Brittany would be spared thanks to the south-west winds that usually prevail at that time of the year. Meteorologists and oceanographers could not forecast what wind and sea would do. It was ten to one that the wind would not back around to the north-east. But it did – and 15 000 tons of oil came ashore in a black tide that had to be fought with only shovels, buckets and bulldozers.

The problem of oil pollution grows more complex every day with new technological developments. The opening of the Northwest Passage from Alaska to the east coast of North America has drastic implications for the Arctic environment. If a giant tanker were to be wrecked in those waters, the effect would be more lasting than in the temperate zone. In a cold climate the volatile components of oil are no longer volatile and the breakdown of petroleum by bacteria in the sea occurs at much slower pace.

More and more we realize that we live on what has been called Spaceship Earth. We cannot just throw out garbage away into the environment; sooner or later we will have to go on living with it – unless we blast it off into outer space.

The most frightening case in point is the pesticides. The scientists see them to be the most immediate danger to the ocean because their threat is invisible. Chlorinated hydrocarbons of which the oldest and best known DDT were first considered to be a blessing, the all-time world champion insect killer. They have become part of our life on land.

Unfortunately, they have also become part of life in the sea. Pesticides are present in sea water in only minute quantities but they are not evenly diluted. They are taken up by plants, then by shellfish and fish. Traces of DDT have been found even in the penguins of Antarctica; heavy dozes have been observed in seals caught off the coast of Scotland. It has been blamed too, for the mysterious disappearance of sea birds colonies.

So the sea is threatened on all sides. The worst of it is that often we do not know we are polluting the environment until it is too late. To avert such a fate for the world ocean the nations that have joined the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission have recommended the establishment of a world-wide system to monitor marine pollution. Under their recommendation samples would be collected sources at regular intervals, then submitted for analysis and the results of these analyses published widely.

Finally we must learn more about the ocean itself and the life it contains so that we will be able to recognize changes, whether harmful or beneficial, when and if they occur.

Notes:

sewer сток, сточная труба

to clog засорять

consequently следовательно

to be dumped быть сброшенным (о мусоре)

to disperse распределять

receptacle хранилище

raw sewage сырые отходы

content содержание

truckloads грузовики

crude oil сырая нефть

drastic решительный

volatile летучий

minute незначительный

to dilute разбавлять, разжижать

to monitor контролировать

WORDS STUDY