Port One - IELTS Reading Answers & Explanations

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1—13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.

Port One

A Air pollution is increasingly becoming the focus of government and citizen concern around the globe. From Mexico City and New York, to Singapore and Tokyo, new solutions to this old problem are being proposed, Mailed and implemenred with ever increasing speed. It is feared that unless pollution reduction measures are able to keep pace with the continued pressures of urban growth, air quality in many of the world’s major cities will deteriorate beyond reason.

B Acrion is being taken along several fronts: through new legislation, improved enforcement and innovative technology. In Los Angeles, state regulations are forcing manufacturers to try to sell ever cleaner cars: their first of the cleanest, titled "Zero Emission Vehicles’, hove to be available soon, since they are intended to make up 2 per cent of sales in 1997. Local authorities in London are campaigning to be allowed to enforce anti-pollution lows themselves; at present only rhe police have the power to do so, but they tend to be busy elsewhere. In Singapore, renting out toad space to users is the woy of the future.

C When Dritain’s Royal Automobile Club monitored rhe exhausts of 60,000 vehicles, it found that 12 per cent of them produced more than half the total pollution. Older cars were the worst offenders; though a sizeable number of quire new cars were also identified as gross polluters, they were simply badly tuned. California has developed a scheme to get these gross polluters off rhe streets: they offer a flat $700 for any old, run-down vehicle driven in by its owner. The aim is to remove rhe heaviesr-polluring, most decrepit vehicles from rhe roads.

D As part of a European Union environmental programme, a London council is resting an infra-red specrrometer from rhe University of Denver in Colorado. It gauges the pollution from a passing vehicle - more useful than the annual stationary rest that is the British standard today - by bouncing a beam through the exhaust and measuring what gets blocked. The councils next step may be to link the system to a computerised video camera able to read number plates automatically.

E The effort to clean up cars may do little to cut pollution if nothing is done about the tendency to drive them more. Los Angeles has some of the world’s cleanest cars - far better than those of Europe - but the total number of miles those cars drive continues to grow. One solution is car-pooling, an arrangement in which a number of people who share the same destination share the use of one car. However, the average number of people in o car on the freeway in Los Angeles, which is 1.0, has been falling steadily. Increasing it would be an effecrive way of reducing emissions as well as easing congestion. The trouble is, Los Angelenos seem to like being alone in their cars.

F Singapore has for a while had o scheme that forces drivers to buy a badge if they wish to visit a certain parr of the city. Electronic innovations make possible increasing sophistication: rates can vary according to road conditions, time of day and so on. Singapore is advancing in this direction, with a city-wide network of transmittets to collect information and charge drivers as they pass certain points. Such road-pricing, however, can be conrroversial. When the local government in Cambridge, England, considered introducing Singaporean techniques, it faced vocal and ultimately successful opposition.

Part Two

The scope of the problem facing the world’s cities is immense. In 1992, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Healrh Organisation (WHO) concluded that all of a sample of twenty megacities - places likely to have more than ten million inhabitants in the year 2000 - already exceeded the level the WHO deems healthy in at least one major pollutant. Two-thirds of them exceeded the guidelines for two, seven for three or more.

Of the six pollutants monitored by the WHO - carbon dioxide, nittogen dioxide, ozone, sulphur dioxide, lead and parriculate matter - it is this last category rhar is attracting the most attention from health researchers. PM10, a sub-category of particulate matter measuring ten-millionths of a mette across, has been implicated in thousands of deaths a year in Britain alone. Research being conducred in two counties of Southern California is reaching similarly disturbing conclusions concerning this little-understood pollutant.

A world-wide rise in allergies, particularly asthma, over the past four decades is now said to be linked with increased air pollution. The lungs and brains of children who grow up in pollured air offer further evidence of its desttuctive power The old and ill, however, are the most vulnerable to the acute effects of heavily polluted stagnant air. It con actually hasten death, os it did in December 1991 when a cloud of exhaust fumes lingered over the city of London for over a week.

The United Nations has estimated that in the year 2000 there will be twenty-four mega-cities and a further eighty-five cities of more than three million people. The ptessure on public officials, corporations and urban citizens to reverse established trends in air pollution is likely to grow in proportion with the growth of cities themselves. Progress is being made. The quesrion, though, remains rhe same: ‘Will change happen quickly enough?’