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If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims (清教徒移民) sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks, their plastic waste would likely still be around, four centuries later. If the Pilgrims had been like many people today and had simply thrown their empty bottles and wrappers over the side, Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world’s oceans today, waiting to be eaten by unfortunate fish, and eventually perhaps by one of us.

Because plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and production really only took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a shocking 6.3 billion tons never made it to recycling facilities.

No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, Earth’s last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, a university of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons each year just from coastal regions. Most of it isn’t thrown off ships, she and her colleagues say, but is dumped carelessly on land or in rivers, mostly in Asia. It’s then blown or washed into the sea. It’s unclear how long it will take for that plastic to completely biodegrade (降解). Estimates range from 450 years to never.

Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly-strangled (勒死) by abandoned fishing nets. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from fish to whale, now eat microplastics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across. On Hawaii’s Big Island, on a beach to which no paved road, I walked ankle-deep through mocroplastics. After that, I could understand why some people see ocean plastic as an approaching disaster, worth mentioning in the same breath as climate change.

And yet there’s a key difference: Ocean plastic is not as complicated as climate change. There are no mean waste deniers (否认者), at least so far. To do something about it, we have to remake our planet’s entire energy system.

“This isn’t a problem where we don’t know what the solution is,” says Jambeck. “We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to deal with it. We know how to recycle.” It’s a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, she says--ideally before the ocean tums, for centuries to come, into a thin soup of plastic.

1.In the first paragraph the author emphasizes the fact that ______.

A.British people migrated to America four centuries ago

B.people have kept doing research in plastic for four centuries

C.there was no plastic pollution four centuries ago

D.plastic waste would remain in the ocean for four centuries

2.How are marine animals harmed invisibly by ocean plastic?

A.They eat microplastics.

B.They drown in microplastics.

C.They are coated with waste plastic bags.

D.They are struggling in abandoned plastic nets.

3.Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?

A.People all agree reducing plastic production is the solution.

B.People tend to agree plastic waste has caused ocean plastic.

C.It has been scheduled to reverse the trend of climate change.

D.It has been scheduled to reverse the trend of ocean plastic.

高三英语阅读选择中等难度题

少年，再来一题如何？
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