e challenge is huge. For one thing, the garbage is spread over millions of square miles. For another, it’s made up mostly of degraded plastic, broken down by sunlight and waves into tiny bits the size of grains of rice. 1 “at’s what makes it so horrifying,” Haymet says. “e micro-plastic 1 is the same size as the stuff living in the water column. 2How would we ever go out and collect it? So far no one’s come up with a plan to separate all the micro-plastic from the living life that’s the same size.” . . . 2 “If we are doubling what we are putting into the ocean on a ten-year basis, there’s no way to keep up,” says Chris Wilcox, an ecologist at CSIRO. 3 “It would be as if you were vacuuming your living room, and I’m standing at the doorway with a bag of dust and a fan. You can constantly keep vacuuming, but you could never catch up.” 3 Charles Moore, who “discovered” the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the late 1990s and plans a research trip there in July, estimates that altogether the globe’s garbage patches contain 200 million tons of floating debris. He came up with the figure based on calculations that 2.5 percent of the world’s plastic ends up in the sea. 4 Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist and co-founder of the California-based 5 Gyres, which studies the five main garbage patches, estimates the total floating debris is just 500,000 tons. 5 In either case, the harm to fish and other sea creatures is increasing. A 2009 research trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by Scripps found 9 percent of the fish had ingested plastic. Eriksen, with help from seven other scientists, recently analyzed material in all of the garbage patches. Of 671 fish collected, 35 percent had ingested plastic particles.Haymet and like-minded ocean scientists haven’t given up. ey favor a low-tech, more practical approach to protecting the oceans from trash: Persuade the world’s people to stop littering. 7 Only about 20 percent of ocean plastic comes from marine sources, such as discarded fishing equipment or cargo ship mishaps. About 80 percent of it washes out to sea from beach litter or was carried downstream in rivers, according to the CSIRO study, which is considered the most comprehensive. 48 About half of that litter is plastic bottles. Most of the rest is packaging. 9 “All of that stuff was in a human’s hand at one point or another,” Wilcox says. “e essence 5of the solution is to provide incentives 6for people not to throw this stuff away. It is the cheapest, simplest, and far most eڂcient solution to the problem.” . . . 10 “When you think about climate change, it’s hard to reduce our carbon footprint, 7 because we have to go through a fundamental shiѕ in our economies,” Wilcox says. “With plastic, when you’re throwing a bottle cap on the ground, that should be an easy impact to get rid of.”

Question

using this context ” how do details in the section “thwe Garbage Patches” help develop a central idea of the article?

Answer 1

The central idea of the article is the magnitude of the challenge posed by the garbage patches in the world's oceans. The details in the section "The Garbage Patches" support this central idea by highlighting the vast size and abundance of the garbage, as well as the difficulty of collecting and separating the micro-plastic from the living life in the water column. This reinforces the notion that the problem is immense and requires urgent attention. Additionally, the section presents varying estimations of the amount of floating debris, illustrating the ongoing debate and uncertainty surrounding the issue. The harmful impact on marine life, as evidenced by the ingestion of plastic by fish, further emphasizes the severity of the problem. Finally, the suggestion of persuading people to stop littering as a low-tech solution underscores the need for individual and collective action to address the issue.