World News for Students of English

23-12-2022 15:00

According to researchers at the University of Portsmouth, UK, the traditional roast Christmas dinner could have nearly a quarter of a million pieces of microplastic in it.

Researchers cooked two different roast chicken dinners, one with all the ingredients wrapped in plastic packaging, and the other with no plastic packaging. They found about 230,000 pieces of microplastics in the wrapped dinner, which was seven times more than in the non-wrapped dinner.

If someone ate a similar plastic packaged meal every day for a year, he would consume approximately 10 grams of plastic, which is the equivalent of two plastic bags. Unfortunately, microplastic-free food doesn’t exist because microplastics are in the air and in the soil.

Global plastic production is projected to double within the next 20 years, and the amount of plastic waste flowing into the world’s oceans is projected to triple. Some people believe that if they avoid fish, they will not eat any microplastics; however, more microplastics are in our soil than in our oceans.

Difficult words: equivalent (the amount or value that is the same as something else), avoid (to keep away from something).

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