IELTS Reading: Matching Sentence Endings (Practice with Answers)

The plastic floating on the ocean's surface turned out to be the easy part. Sampling expeditions in the 2010s concluded that the visible patches, vast as they look, hold a small share of the plastic entering the sea. Most of it either washes back onto beaches within days, sinks under the weight of attached organisms, or breaks into fragments too small for any net.

Those fragments, microplastics, moved the problem from the water to the food chain. Filter feeders ingest them; fish retain the particles in their guts; and laboratory studies have shown chemicals moving from plastic into tissue. Whether the doses reaching humans matter is contested, and several researchers caution that the field's most alarming figures have failed replication.

What is not contested is the failure of cleanup at scale. The largest floating collector removed a few tonnes in its first years, against roughly ten million tonnes entering the oceans annually. Prevention, by contrast, behaves predictably: deposit schemes and container bans measurably cut the waste reaching rivers, and rivers carry most sea plastic. The uncomfortable arithmetic has shifted research funding toward stopping plastic before it is litter, rather than extracting it after.

Electricity grids were built on a bargain: power stations would adjust their output minute by minute to match demand, and the lights would stay on. Wind and solar generation, which produce when the weather allows rather than when the switch is flipped, have strained the bargain from the other side. The question every grid now faces is where flexibility will come from.

Batteries are the visible answer. Grid-scale storage installations have multiplied as battery prices, driven down by electric vehicle manufacturing, fell ninety per cent in a decade. A battery answers in milliseconds, making it ideal for smoothing the second-by-second fluctuations that once kept turbines spinning idle. The limitation is duration: most installations hold one to four hours of output, enough for the evening peak but not for a windless week.

Longer gaps call for other stores. Pumped hydro, water lifted uphill and released through turbines, still holds over ninety per cent of the world's storage capacity, and new projects are planned wherever geography cooperates. Compressed air, hot rocks and hydrogen each have advocates, and each converts electricity to another form and back at a cost that only long gaps justify.

The quiet alternative is demand. Freezers, water heaters and, increasingly, electric car chargers can pause for an hour without their owners noticing, and paying them to do so turns millions of small flexibilities into one large one. Trials suggest flexible demand can substitute for a fifth of the peaking plants a grid would otherwise build, at a fraction of the cost, if the meters and contracts can be made simple enough for anyone to join.

The alarm over disappearing bees is roughly two decades old, and in that time the picture has grown both better and stranger.

Honeybees, the species the alarm was first raised about, are not facing extinction. Managed colonies are livestock, bred, shipped and counted, and their numbers globally have risen while the panic played out. What declined, in specific regions and specific winters, were colony stocks that commercial beekeepers could rebuild, at a cost, the following spring. The livestock metaphor only stretches so far: individual bees still die at worrying rates, and the pesticides, parasites and poor forage behind those deaths are real.

The genuine extinction crisis is quieter and wilder. Wild bee species, of which there are some twenty thousand, plus the uncounted hoverflies and butterflies, do not have beekeepers. They have habitats, and habitats have beensimplified into monocultures and lawns. Species that nest in bare ground lose their ground to mulch; species that forage in April lose their willows to autumn-flowering ornamentals. No one restocks a wild bee.

Policy has largely chased the manageable problem. Pesticide bans target the compounds measured in honeybee studies, and conservation funding plants flower strips that help generalist species already common. The rare specialists, the ones actually sliding toward the red list, need old meadows kept unfarmed and messy, which pays nothing and photographs badly. The uncomfortable conclusion of two decades of pollinator policy is that it has successfully comforted the public about the wrong bee.