1 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.

Since people can’t always eat out or cook for     1     (they), they get takeout or order delivery. More takeout and more food delivery equal more waste, especially plastic waste. That includes cups, bottles, and bags, most of     2     are only good for one use. That’s a big problem and it is getting even     3     (bad). The use of those plastics     4     (increase) by 300% since 2019. The world won’t survive if this situation continues.

4 . Human beings have somehow managed to engineer the night to receive us by filling it with light. This kind of control is no different from the feat ( 壮 举 ) of damming a river. Its benefits come with_________ — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design. _________ lighting washes out the darkness of night, altering light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have_________. Wherever man-made light spills into the natural world, some aspects of life-migration, reproduction, feeding-is affected.

For most human history, the phrase “light pollution” would have_________. Imagine walking towards London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, _________ candles, torches and lanterns, as they always had. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been more likely to_________ London than to see its dim collective glow.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were a(n) _________ country. As a matter of fact, among mammals (哺乳动物) alone, the number of species active at night is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet attracting them to it. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being_________ by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop.

It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need a_________ view of the night sky for our work. __________, like most other creatures, we do need darkness. __________ darkness is pointless. It is as essential to maintaining our biological welfare as__________ itself; the price of modifying our internal clockwork means it doesn’t operate as it should, causing various physical discomforts. So fundamental are the regular rhythms of waking and sleep to our being that__________ them is similar to altering our center of gravity.

In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to__________ our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best__________ against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.

Plastic pollution at sea is reaching     1     (worry) levels. According to a review of hundreds of academic studies, it will continue to grow even if significant action is taken now     2     (stop) such waste from reaching the world’s oceans. The review by Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute examined almost 2, 600 research     3     (paper) on the topic to provide an overview ahead of a United Nations meeting later this month.

As plastic breaks down into smaller pieces, it also enters the marine food chain,    4     (take) in by sea creatures from whales to turtles. What’s worse, some regions already contain dangerous levels of plastic, and others risk becoming     5     (increasing) polluted in the future. Getting that plastic out of the water again is nearly impossible,    6     policymakers should focus on preventing any more of it entering the oceans in     7     first place. Matthew MacLeod, a professor of environmental science at Stockholm University,    8     (involve) in a separate study not long ago,    9     also concluded effective measures are required immediately because of the possible global impacts.

While consumers can help reduce plastic pollution by changing their behavior, governments have to step up and accept     10     (responsible) for solving the problem. It’s a global problem and it needs global solutions.

The Communist Party has made great progress in reducing China’s pollution, but     1     perfect storm of northern winds and an industrial rebound has created dangerously high levels of pollution countrywide.

Sandstorms used     2     (be) a regular occurrence in spring. In previous decades, each May saw at least two rounds of sandstorms, according to state-run Xinhua news agency. The     3     (frequent) and severity of sandstorms was partly due to drought,     4     (grow) population pressure and poor progress in revegetation,     5     caused rapid desertification of land in the north and northwest.     6    , sandstorms have since decreased dramatically. The annual number of sandstorm     7     (impact) days in Beijing fell from a peak of 26 in the 1950s to just three days after 2010, Xinhua reported.

Since 2000, the Chinese government     8    (invest) billions of dollars toward sandstorm prevention. Authorities have launched     9     (variety) reforestation and ecological projects, and installed satellites to monitor sandstorms and alert weather agencies     10     of time.

Researchers say they have found microplastics (微塑料) -tiny pieces of plastic that come as a result of the disposal of industrial waste-deep in the lungs of living     1     (human) for the first time.

The research, which     2     (publish) in the journal Science of the Total Environment last week, is the first study     3     (identify) the plastics in the lungs of living people. The plastics have     4     (previous) been found in human blood, waste and in the depths of the ocean.

In the study, researchers     5     (collect) lung tissue from surgical procedures on patients as part of their routine medical care. Researchers identified 12 types of microplastics,     6     are commonly found in bottles, packaging, and clothing, along with other manufacturing processes.

The study notes     7     “increasing concern” with the harm that could come with swallowing and breathing in microplastics.

The world produces about 300 million metric tons of plastic a year and about 80% ends     8     in landfills and other parts of the environment. Microplastics can range from 10 nano-meters-    9     (small) than the human eye can see-to 5 millimeters in diameter, about the size of the eraser on the end of a pencil. Researchers have found them     10     (float) in the air, in tap or bottled water, and in the sea or soil.