1 . Afroz Shah, a lawyer in Mumbai, hasn’t had a weekend off in four years. But he hasn’t spent this time preparing for _________.

His mission? Saving the world’s oceans from _________ pollution.

It’s a calling he found in 2015 after moving to a community in Mumbai called Versova Beach. He had played there as a child and was_________to see how much it had _________. The sand was no longer _________ because it was covered by a layer of garbage more than five feet thick — most of it plastic waste.

“The whole beach was like a_________of plastic,” he said. “It hurt me. The _________ mess.” What Shah had seen is part of a global environmental crisis. More than 8 million tons of plastic _________in the world’s oceans each year. It’s predicted that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. “Plastic in the ocean is a _________. And the sea species have no choice at all, ” Shah said. “We are ______________ their habitats.”

In October 2015, Shah began ________________ up plastic waste from the beach every Sunday morning. At first, it was just him and a neighbor, and then he began calling on others to join in. Word ________________ and with the help from social media, more volunteers got ________________.

For Shah, the work has always been a ________________ journey, but it has earned global attention. After he was ________________ as a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations in 2016, Shah now devotes nearly all of his free time to this ________________.

He’s now spent 209 weekends on this mission, ________________ more than 200,000 volunteers, some of whom are young students, to join him in what’s been called the world’s biggest beach cleanup. By October 2018, Versova Beach was ________________ clean and Shah’s cleanups expanded to another beach as well as a stretch of the Mithi River and other regions of India.

“This world talks too much. I think we must talk ________________ and do action more, ” he said when interviewed by CNN in October 2019.“We are a smart species. Well adapt. We’ll learn. And with these youngsters rising up, I see ________________.”

2 . Steven Stein likes to track garbage trucks. He says, “It’s hard to resist.” Stein’s strange habit makes sense when you consider that he’s an environmental scientist who studies how to reduce litter, including stuff that falls off garbage trucks as they run down the road. What is even more interesting is that one of Stein’s current plans is defending an industry behind a source of trash: plastic shopping bags.

Americans use more than 100 million plastic bags every year. So many end up in tree branches or along highways that a growing number of cities are banishing (排除) them from checkout lines. The bags are outlawed in some places in the USA.

Facing these situations, plastic-bag manufacturers are hiring scientists like Stein to make the case that their products are not as bad for the planet as most people assume. “It’s important to base your decisions on facts,” says Stan Bikulege, CEO of Hilex Poly, which has hired Stein.

Among the bag makers’ argument: many cities with bans still allow shoppers to purchase paper bags, which are easily recycled but require more energy to produce and transport. And while plastic bags may be ugly to look at, they represent a small percentage of all garbage on the ground today.

The industry has also taken aim at the product that can take the place of plastic bags: reusable shopping bags. The sturdier a reusable bag is, the longer its life and the more plastic-bag use it cancels out. But this plan has another side. Longer-lasting reusable bags often require more energy to make.

Environmentalists don’t agree with these points. They hope paper bags will be banned someday too and want shoppers to use the same reusable bags for years. So are reusables our destiny? The answer is probably yes. And Andy Keller, inventor of reusable polyester (聚酯纤维) bags, says, ”If you can carry it out in your hands or put it back in your car, you don’t need a bag.”

5 . A major new facility to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere has started operating in Iceland, which is a boost to an emerging technology that experts say could eventually play an important role in reducing greenhouse gases.

The plant in southwest Iceland is the biggest of its kind, its builder says. It is able to capture 900 tons of CO₂ every year but it needs heat and electricity to work. It is using energy produced from waste and is built on the roof of a waste incineration plant, and through the burning of rubbish, energy is generated.

Human-sized fans are built into a series of boxes. They take CO₂ out of the air, catching it in spongelike filters (过滤器). The filters are blasted with heat, freeing the gas, which is then mixed with water and pumped deep into deep underground basalt caves, where over time it turns into dark-gray stone. Pumping CO₂ into the ground is just one way to deal with it. The makers are also selling the gas to be used again. The CO₂ can be captured just a few 100 miles away. It is pumped through an underground pipeline directly into a greenhouse. Vegetables and plants love CO₂ and higher concentrations of the gas within the greenhouse improve the growth of plants.

By 2050, humanity will need to pull nearly a billion metric tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere every year through direct air capture technology to achieve carbon neutral goals, according to International Energy Agency recommendations. The plant in Iceland will be able to capture 4000 metric tons annually — just a small amount of what will be necessary, but an engineer in Climeworks, the company that built it, says it can grow rapidly as efficiency improves and costs decrease.

“This is a market that does not yet exist, but a market that urgently needs to be built,” said Christoph Gebald who co-founded Climeworks. “This plant that we have here is really the blueprint to further increase the size and really industrialize.”

6 . Eradajere Oleita thinks she may have a partial solution for two of her country’s persistent (持续的) problems: garbage and poverty (贫困). It’s called the Chip Bag Project. The 26-year-old student and environmentalist from Detroit is asking a (n) _________ of local snack lovers: Rather than _________ your empty chip bags into the trash (垃圾桶), _________ them so she can turn them into sleeping bags for the _________.

Chip eaters drop off their _________ bags from Doritos (多力多滋薯片), Lay’s (乐事薯片), and other favorites at two _________ in Detroit: a print shop and a clothing store, where Oleita and her volunteer helpers collect them. After they _________ the chip bags in soapy hot water, they _________ them open, lay them flat, and iron them together. They use soft materials from old coats to line the insides.

It _________ about four hours to sew a sleeping bag, and each takes around 150 to 300 chip bags, __________ whether they’re single-serve or family size. The result is a sleeping bag that is “waterproof, lightweight, and easy to carry __________,” Oleita told the Detroit News.

Since its start in 2020, the Chip Bag Project has __________ more than 800,000 chip bags and, as of last December, __________ 110 sleeping bags.

Sure, it would be simpler to __________ the money to buy new sleeping bags. But that’s only half the __________ for Oleita—whose family moved to the United States from Nigeria a decade ago with the hope of __________ a better life—and her fellow volunteers. “We are__________ ourselves to making an impact not only socially, but environmentally,” she says.

And, of course, there’s the symbolism of recycling bags that would otherwise land in the __________ and using them to help the homeless. It’s a powerful reminder that environmental problems and poverty often go __________. As Oleita told hourdetroit.com: “I think it’s time to show __________ between all of these issues.”

10 . My wife and I moved into our home nine years ago. We have a yard a “rock garden”. There the rocks appear to be just thrown up onto the dirt as if someone were in a hurry to finish. Very often when we have more flowers, Denise or I would plant them between the rocks, just to bring some color to the area.

Last summer I found, in the rock garden, a tiny little plant that I could not immediately recognize. I knew I didn’t plant it and Denise said she didn’t either. We decided to let it continue growing until we could find out what it was.

Weeks passed and as I made my way back to the strange plant, it appeared to be a sunflower. It looked thin and tall with only one head on it. I decided to baby it along and weed (除草) around it. As I pulled rocks from the area to get to the weeds, I noticed something unusual. The sunflower had not started where I saw it begin. It actually had begun under a big rock and grown under and around it to reach the sun.

If a tiny little sunflower didn’t let a big rock stand in its way of developing, we too have the ability to do the same thing. If we believe in ourselves like that little sunflower, we can reach where we aim to go and get what we need for growth.

We need to believe in ourselves knowing we have the ability to achieve our goals. Like the sunflower, it knew it had the ability to get over the rocks because it had faith in itself that it would succeed. Stand tall like the sunflower and be proud of who and what we are, then other things will begin to support us. We will find a way to go under or around any “rocks” in order to realize our goals.