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 ugly 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 _________ 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 ____________.”