PART 1. IELTS Graduation p.

197
PART 2

(Narrator) Okay, so I try to recycle. I’ve got my grocery tote bag. I even have solar panels on my
roof. But in the back of my mind, I can’t help thinking: “Does any of this actually make a
difference when it comes to climate change?”

If you read the headlines, you quickly begin to see that climate change is a massive problem. So
is my reusable bag really going to change the world? But not everyone feels that way.

Lauren: This is my trash all of my trash from the past four years

This is Lauren Singer. She runs a website where she gives tips and answers questions about
living a zero-waste life.

N: Okey, so you’ve got tiny little ends and bits and things. Are you really telling me that
everything else that you use for four years-Is (the woman)-you’ve found some other use for?

L: Totally, is compostable, infinitely reusable, or 100% easily recyclable.

You may look at the extremely eco-friendly way Lauren is living and find it inspiring. Or maybe,
like me, you’re totally skeptical. But a lot of what she’s doing is pretty simple.

When she wants coffee, she brings her own cup. Or let’s say she wants to buy a pastry; she’ll
put it into a reusable contton bag. A safety razor instead of plastic ones. There’s all this
disposable stuff in our lives that we’re not even thinking about. And what Lauren’s done is find
some easy substitutes. Everything else ends up in the jar.

L: This is macaroni –and-cheese packaging, and this was, like, four years ago, right when I
started. That was my weekend at Dad’s house. So these are plastic straws, hot chocolate.

N: this was a bad day, wan’t it, for you?

L: No, actually someone sent that to me in the mail.

These aren’t huge trash problems. The EPA isn’t up in arms about plastic straws. But you can
see how these little bits of waste can really add up. The United States is the No 1 trash
producing country in the world. If every country lived like the US, we’d need over four Earths to
make all the stuff we consume.

N: Do you think little things make a big difference?

L: Totally. If you reduce single-use coffee cups from your routine and you’re a daily coffee
drinker, that’s 365 cups per year. That’s not an insignificant change. If every single person did
that, that’s a massive shift toward a more sustainable future.
And good policy can encourage this kind of shift. Take plastic bags. Americans throw away
about 100 billion a year. But California is trying to change this. Three communities have found
that if you offer a plastic bag for free, 75 percent of people will take it. But if you charge 10
cents for a bag, only 16 percent take it. It’s subtle, but this small fee makes people question
whether they really need a bag. And it reminds people to bring their own. Communities across
the country are beginning to adopt this policy and it could create a large-scale shift. If New York
City had a bag free, we could save roughly 7 billion plastic bags a year.

And without good policy, it can be really hard to do the right thing. Take recycling: In a place
like Missoula, Montana, where I live, you can’t recycle glass because doing so, it turns out, costs
my city too much.

L: I think this is a fundamental flaw of governments and their relationship with businesses.
Businesses aren’t held accountable for products that they’re putting into the waste stream. So
they’re allowed to sell glass in Montana, where there’s no adequate recycling, and completely
wipe their hands free and not have to subsidize any infrastructure to adequately recycle their
product. So that responsibility for disposing of that product falls on you, as a resident and the
government. That is completely unfair.

PART 3. CAE Practice Test Plus

Being an environmentally and culturally responsible traveler can be hard. Whether you are planning a
safari to see lions and giraffes in the Africa savannas or a snorkeling adventure over brilliantly colored
coral reeves in Southeast Asia, there are several questions to grapple with: which hotel do you pick?
Which tour operator do you go with? In the 1970s and’80s, people thinking about these issues came up
with a solution: ecotourism. Ecotourism is the idea that in some places, tourism can be specifically
designed to support the conservation of biodiversity and the well-being of local communities. That is,
you can enjoy your travel and be good to both the planet and its people at the same time. In theory,
ecotourism sounds like a win-win solution. How it plays out in the real world, though, is not
straightforward. On the positive side, there are examples of ecotourism ventures that have fulfilled their
pledges to support conservation and culture. Ecotourism has brought in much-needed funding to
manage protected areas with threatened or rare species. For example, the management of Bwindi
National Park in Uganda depends heavily on revenue from gorilla-viewing ecotourism. Ecotourism
endeavors have also provided alternate livelihood options to nearby communities. This has prompted
them to move away from destructive forest practices like agriculture, logging or hunting, and invest
more in keeping the local wildlife and natural areas intact. In Madagascar’s Anja community reserve, for
example, ecotourism revenue has supported jobs and paid for community projects like public school.
This in turn has encouraged the local people to replant native trees on hillsides surrounding the reserve.
At the same time, the reserve’s lemur population increased from 80 in the early 2000s to roughly 350
now. In some cases, ecotourism has contributed to instilling a sense of pride among the local
communities for the wildlife and heritage. And this, in part, has inspired them to set aside some of their
own land to protect biodiversity and habitats. On the flipside, a 2018 review of existing scientific papers
pointed out that several ecotourism projects have led to deforestation. Too many tourists can create a
high demand for timber to build lodges and hotel. Immigrants can move in for the new tourism
opportunities, increasing demand for forest products, and patches of forests can be cleared to grow
more crops to meet the growing demand for food. High tourist number can also put pressure on wildlife.
Studies suggest that cheetahs, for example, sometimes abandon their kills when there are too many
tourists around, and fewer of the cubs survive. In one study, researchers saw 64 vehicles zoom in to
watch a mother and her cubs over a period of just 2 hours. Power dynamics within communities can also
mean that ecotourism benefits don’t get distributed equitably. Richer people may profit more than
those who are poor. In fact, study suggest that ecotourism ventures that don’t achieve their
sustainability goals have a few things in common: They try to accommodate too many tourists, stressing
the environment. They don’t include the local communities sufficiently in all stages of the project. They
don’t generate enough revenue for the local people to see value in conservation compared to more
destructive uses of the land. They often lack charismatic species or an accessible location to attract
enough tourists or they don’t market their venture well enough. When ecotourism succeeds and
becomes the primary support for conservation, that can be a problem too. Tourists flow can change due
to political instability, weather, unsatisfactory wildlife sightings, or even disease outbreaks like the
COVID-19 pandemic. And disappearing tourism revenue can trigger poaching or deforestation, and make
conservation less valuable for the local communities and governments. So the next time you see a tour
operator or hotel selling “ecotourism”, ask questions, do your research. What is the venture doing to be
environmentally friendly? Who runs the company? How are the local communities involved? The more
answer you get, the more informed a choice you can make.