World News for Students of English

08-09-2021 07:00

Reading Festival is one of England’s biggest music festivals, and thousands of people visit it every year.

Last year, organizers canceled the festival because of the coronavirus, which meant that this year, even more people came. Around 100,000 festival goers went to Reading last weekend, and they left tons of rubbish in the fields. There were mostly empty tents, plastic cups, underwear, and condoms. The most difficult things to recycle are the tents, which usually go to landfills, and they take up to 10,000 years to decompose. A report says that in the UK, people leave behind around 250,000 tents every year.

The problem is that shops sell tents as items you use one time, so people do not think that they could use them more than once. In 2019, people from Reading saved around 300 tents which they then used themselves.

Difficult words: condom (a thing which a man wears to protect him when he has sex), landfill (a large deep hole where people put things and material which they do not want or use anymore), decompose (to become small pieces).

You can watch the original video in the Level 3 section.