Life Pre-Intermediate Textbook: 5C A Boat Made of Bottles p.62-63

(Supplemental Materials for Specific Textbooks--Life Pre-Intermediate)

Quizlet (drive, docs, pub)

Match the Headings to Paragraphs (drive, docs, pub)

Doreamon Game for Backs to the Boards (drive, slides, pub)

Vocabulary (drive, docs, pub)

Life Pre-Intermediate 5C A Boat Made of Bottles p.62-63

https://quizlet.com/_1uw9ul

Life Pre-Intermediate 5C A Boat Made of Bottles p.62-63

https://quizlet.com/_1uw9ul

Life Pre-Intermediate 5C A Boat Made of Bottles p.62-63

https://quizlet.com/_1uw9ul

Life Pre-Intermediate 5C A Boat Made of Bottles p.62-63

https://quizlet.com/_1uw9ul

A boat with a difference

How did the Plastiki begin?

Designing the Plastiki

The Journey

How well did the Plastiki survive?

The Plastiki looks similar to many other boats or yachts in Sydney harbor.  It’s 18 meters long, six meters wide and it weighs about 12,000 kilograms.  it carries a crew of six people and has an average speed of five knots.  However, once you get near to the Plastiki you realise there’s a huge difference.  It’ made of twelve thousand five hundred reclaimed bottles.

One day, the environmentalist David De Rothschild was reading some information about all the plastic in the seas and oceans.  He couldn’t believe what he was reading.  For example, humans throw away four out of every five plastic bottles they use and plastic rubbish causes about 80% of the pollution in the sea.  To create publicity for the problem, he started building a boat made of plastic bottles.

As well as building the boat with recycled plastic, it was important for him to make the boat environmentally –friendly and user-friendly.  The boat uses renewable energy sources including wind power and solar energy.  The crew can make meals with vegetables from the small garden at the back of the boat.  They can take a break from work and get some exercise by using the special exercise bicycle.  The energy from the bike provides power for the boat’s computers.  And if anyone needs to take a shower, the boat’s shower uses saltwater from the sea.

De Rothschild sailed the Plastiki  across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Sydney.  That’s fifteen thousand three hundred and seventy two nautical kilometers.  On the way, De Rothschild took the special boat through the “Great Garbage Patch”.  It is a huge area in the Pacific with 3.5 billion kilograms of rubbish.  You can see every kind of human rubbish here: shoes, towy, bags, toothbrushes, but the worst problem is the plastic.  It kills birds and sea life.

The journey wasn’t always easy and De Rothschild and his crew had to take care during storms.  There were giant ocean waves and winds off over one hundred kilometers per hour.  The whole journey took one hundred and twenty nine days.  Originally, De Rothschild thought the boat could only travel once but it survived so well that he is planning to sail it again one day.