Garbage Patch"
by Nsikan Akpan
... The Great Pacific Garbage Patch stretches across 617,000 square miles of the northern Pacific Ocean, based on their survey, and plastics make up 99.9 percent of the trash in the patch.
And while 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic might seem extraordinary, oceanographer Laurent Lebreton of The Ocean Cleanup foundation said the composition of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the noteworthy takeaway.
While microplastics made up 94 percent of the total number of pieces of plastic in the patch, they only accounted for 8 percent of the mass.
That means the overwhelming bulk of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is large pieces of trash. Most are hard plastics - think plastic food containers, bottles, lids, buckets, ropes and lots of fishing nets. Fishing nets made up nearly half the plastic discovered.
The large and medium-sized plastics bigger than 2 inches, known as megaplastics and macroplastics, comprised more than 75 percent of the total mass of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Based on inscriptions, most of the plastic collected in the study originated in Asia - namely China and Japan - but that makes sense given the North Pacific Current runs west to east. The oldest piece of plastic they found dated to 1977.
Use the excerpt from the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch weighs more than 43,000 cars and is much larger than we thought" article to answer the question.
Which matter is left uncertain by the excerpt?
(1 point)
• which types of materials make up the garbage patch
• where most of the trash is manufactured
• how the plastics are finding their way into the ocean
• how much area the garbage patch covers
1 answer
The matter left uncertain by the excerpt is:
• how the plastics are finding their way into the ocean
While the excerpt provides information about the composition of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where most of the trash is manufactured, and the area it covers, it does not address or explain how the plastics are entering the ocean.
