Moby Dick, one of the most famous novels of American Literature, was the story of the obssessive hunt

of a white whale in the XIX century. Playing with the title, Donovan Hohn has recently published a curious book called Moby Duck based on an incident which happened twenty years ago. A flotilla of 29,000 packaged ducks, frogs, turtles and beavers made in China for a US firm called First Years Inc. started a trip around the world. They were in a container of a cargo ship which fell off the deck during a journey across the Pacific from Hong Kong in January 1992. Since that moment those creatures have swum across oceans. Some ended up in the shores of Hawaii and Alaska; others reached the Artic ice. A few crossed the site near Newfoundland where the Titanic sank, and at least one is believed to have been found on a beach in Scotland. Hohn has followed their trace these years and their odyssey has taught him quite a lot about currents and a largely ignored threat to the marine environment: the vast numbers of containers that fall off the world's cargo ships. No one knows exactly how often containers are lost at sea, due to the secretive nature of the international shipping industry. But the book's author says that oceanographers put the figure at anything from several hundred to 10,000 a year. While some sink, others burst open, throwing their contents into the ocean where they often become a threat to wildlife. Plastic debris can be particularly hazardous, since it eventually breaks into small particles, which are eaten by fish and mammals. "I've heard tales of containers getting lost that are full of those big plastic bags that dry cleaners use," says Mr Hohn. "I've also heard of crates full of cigarettes going overboard, which of course end up having their butts ingested by marine animals. Plastic pollution is a real problem. It's far from the greatest environmental danger to the ocean, but it is one of the most visible, and that means it can be important as a symbol of less visible damage, such as overfishing, agricultural run-off and the warming of the oceans."
ARE THESE STATEMENTS TRUE OR FALSE? JUSTIFY YOUR ANSWERS WITH THE PRECISE WORDS OR PHRASES FROM THE TEXT, OR USE YOUR OWN WORDS.

1. Plastic pollution is the worst problem of the ocean 2. The shipping companies do not help much to find out how many containers fall into the sea 3. Some plastic toys reached the Atlantic Ocean 4. The increase of temperatures does not affect the seas
ANSWER QUESTIONS 5-7 ACCORDING TO THE INFORMATION GIVEN IN THE TEXT. USE YOUR OWN WORDS.

5. Why are oceans so polluted? 6. What lessons do we learn from the book? 7. Why did the toys end up in distant places ? USE OF ENGLISH 8. Find in the text a synonym of amount (noun) 9. Give a synonym of tales (noun) 10. Give a synonym of chronicles (verb) 11. Give a verb with the same root as threat