シャドーイング練習: The Truth About Ocean Plastic - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ
レッスンを作成中...
1
I was a teenager on a cruise when I first saw ocean pollution up close.
2
Late at night I heard noise over the railing.
3
I looked down and saw a crew dumping garbage into the ocean.
4
A stream of trash stretching off towards the horizon.
5
That image stuck with me.
6
But that garbage spilling into the ocean was just the tip of the trashberg.
7
And that trashberg is mainly plastic.
8
Plastic makes up about 80% of marine pollution.
9
It doesn't always come from where you'd expect.
10
Most people think of waste plastics as straws, bottles and grocery bags that are washing off of beaches.
11
But when a Dutch non-profit called the Ocean Cleanup sailed out to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to scoop it all up, they found something else entirely.
12
More than three quarters of the plastic wasn't consumer trash at all.
13
It didn't even come from the shore.
14
Even worse, cleaning it up was a lot harder than anyone hoped.
15
So they did something surprising.
16
They turned around, returned to shore and started tackling the plastic problem upstream.
17
This is the story of what the ocean cleanup discovered once they started studying the problem up close, and why solving ocean plastic might mean turning off the tap and not just mopping up what's already spilled.
18
I'm Matt Farrell, welcome to Undecided.
19
This video is brought to you by Surfshark.
20
Not all ocean plastic ends up on a beach.
21
Some sinks and some drifts, pulled by currents into giant, slowly spinning vortexes in every ocean basin.
22
The largest is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between Hawaii and California.
23
It covers an area twice the size of Texas or three times the size of France.
24
It contains roughly 80,000 metric tons of floating plastic.
25
That's about 1.8 trillion pieces.
26
Newspapers and television crews painted a picture of an island of floating bottles
27
and other household trash blown in from litter and open landfills.
28
However, the Dutch non-profit The Ocean Cleanup found something completely different when they sailed there.
29
The biggest surprise?
30
It wasn't just bottles and bags from land.
31
More than 75% of it was debris from the fishing industry.
32
It wasn't cruise ships dumping trash, it was an entire industry losing its equipment at sea.
33
Almost half of it is ghost nets and ropes that are abandoned or lost at sea.
34
This gear keeps fishing when the fishermen have gone home.
35
It entangles turtles, sharks, even whales.
36
Much of the rest of the plastic is fishing gear like floats and crates.
37
What makes plastic such a problem is that it doesn't go away on its own.
38
Over time, this plastic breaks into smaller pieces that end up in the stomachs of seabirds and fish.
39
Eventually, it fragments into microplastics that are impossible to recover.
40
The fishing gear is stranded in the middle of the ocean, far from the countries that dumped it and left.
41
The ocean cleanup began trialing different cleanup systems at sea in 2018, hoping to clean up the fishing gear.
42
But they faced major challenges immediately.
43
There's a huge amount of plastic there, but it's dispersed over a large area.
44
So it seems like something, it's there, you just scoop it up and bring it back, but actually it's constantly moving.
45
It's a very difficult environment.
46
The open ocean is far from shore." That's Hank Von Dahlen, the nonprofit's VP of Science and Technology.
47
First, the organization tried using a passive system
48
that let ocean currents do all the work to gather up plastic in a huge net.
49
But the ocean was not on board.
50
The net just drifted with the plastic and then part of it broke.
51
After three generations of designs, the organization settled in a system where two ships tow a giant net between them.
52
The net stretches 2.2 kilometers, roughly a mile and a third.
53
And it works!
54
In just one trash haul, the ocean cleanup can land as much as 11 tons or 25,000 pounds of trash.
55
But this approach comes with a catch.
56
The garbage patch is still an ecosystem.
57
Dragging a huge net catches not only plastic, but sea life, also known as bycatch.
58
The ocean cleanup has been transparent about the animals caught from sharks, turtles, and fish to tiny drifting creatures that live in the ocean's surface.
59
They've also modified the design of their nets to reduce their impact.
60
Their latest system uses a bigger mesh to let creatures pass through, plus escape hatches and underwater cameras to spot turtles.
61
The Ocean Cleanup says about 99.9% of what it captures is plastic, with roughly 0.1% as bycatch.
62
That's not nothing, especially when it involves protected species like turtles.
63
But there's another approach to cleaning up ocean plastic, and one that avoids fishing for plastic with a net.
64
Before I get into that, there's another piece of tech that helps with a different kind of net, the internet.
65
And that's today's sponsor, Surfshark VPN.
66
In the past few months I've attended conferences like CES, and between the hotel and conference WiFi, I leaned heavily on Surfshark VPN to keep my browsing secure and private.
67
Recently there was a massive BrightSpeed data breach that leaked more than 1 million customers' personal data.
68
Things like names, emails, phone numbers and more.
69
But with Surfshark you can protect yourself while online.
70
When signing up for new website accounts you can use Surfshark's alternative ID to mask your name and contact info.
71
That helps you avoid spam and data leaks.
72
They also have an email scam checker that uses AI to spot phishing attacks in your Gmail.
73
It works through their Chrome extension and catches suspicious content and malicious links before you click on anything dangerous.
74
It's really cool.
75
Right now they're running a special deal.
76
Start your 7-day free trial and unlock 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN.
77
Go to surfshark.com slash undecided or use the code undecided at checkout.
78
Surfshark offers a 30-day money back guarantee so there's no risk to try it out for yourself.
79
I've been using Surfshark for years and I love it.
80
Don't miss out on this great deal.
81
The link's in the description below and thanks to Surfshark and to all of you for supporting the channel.
82
So back to that other approach.
83
A California nonprofit called Ocean Voyages Institute asked recreational sailors crossing the Pacific to tag ghost nets with GPS trackers.
84
When those nets gathered in the same area, a wind-powered cargo ship headed out and collected them by hand.
85
Over 10 trips they removed 362 metric tons of debris.
86
However, there are plastic hotspots that we don't need GPS trackers to find.
87
Places where trash flows right through the net.
88
It's rivers.
89
The cruise I took as a kid, the ship probably sailed right past rivers carrying more plastic than any garbage bag I saw go overboard.
90
Trash ends up in rivers when wind and storm runoff carry it into the water.
91
Most of it washes up along coastlines or floats nearby.
92
This is a whole different and bigger trashberg than what's floating in the ocean vortexes like the patch.
93
Here's the surprising part and it kind of blew my mind.
94
The ocean cleanup found that of the more than 100,000 rivers around the world, just 1,000 or so carry about 80% of the plastic reaching the ocean.
95
There's a thousand rivers, but actually if we look a step closer, we can identify 200 cities
96
which are responsible for most of this outflow." The organization is
97
setting its sights on the roughly 1 to 3 million metric
98
tons of plastic it estimates flows into the oceans from rivers each year.
99
That's the equivalent of about 600 dump trucks of trash every single day.
100
But exactly how will this work and where?
101
These are urban rivers, many of them in Asia.
102
The people living along them typically generate less trash per person than Americans or Europeans.
103
Part of the problem is that the garbage collection and properly lined landfills cost money, and a lot of rapidly growing cities simply don't have these systems in place.
104
So trash ends up on the ground, and the ground leads to the river.
105
The organization plans to tackle the 1,000 most polluting rivers, working with local governments and communities and adapting the tech to each location.
106
They have a whole system, and they call it the Interceptor.
107
It does what it says on the label, it intercepts trash before it hits the ocean.
108
The Interceptor comes in a couple different flavors, each suited to its local conditions.
109
The original model lets local boat traffic keep flowing in places like the Dominican Republic.
110
But trash is funneled by a long barrier towards a conveyor belt
111
that lifts debris out of the water and dumps it into the collection barge.
112
When it's full, it techs local operators for pickup because, even though it's voracious, the Interceptor still has manners.
113
The Ocean Cleanup has a different approach for places like Rio Las Vacas outside of Guatemala City, where seasonal rains send tsunamis of trash rushing down the river.
114
It's called the Interceptor Barricade.
115
It's a tall floating barrier designed to hold back massive surges of debris.
116
In its first year anchored to the riverbanks of the Rio Las Facas, it prevented more than 10,000 metric tons of trash from entering the Caribbean.
117
10,000 metric tons.
118
Compare that to the 500 tons collected at sea.
119
It's no wonder the ocean cleanup turned their efforts upstream.
120
But to me, operating within countries seems a lot more complicated than working at sea.
121
I asked Hank how they navigate that.
122
Before we go to a country, we want to understand what is the environment, what are the communities.
123
If we deploy an interceptor in a certain area, who's affected by that?
124
How can we make sure that this works for them?
125
Maybe there's local employment can be gained.
126
The organization doesn't guesstimate the location and build of each interceptor.
127
It optimizes it after extensive surveys.
128
That means placing cameras along rivers to track plastic with AI, flying drones to map debris hotspots and sending GPS trackers downstream to see how trash moves.
129
In Mumbai, India, the Ocean Cleanup found that 80% of the plastic comes from just 30% of the rivers.
130
That's allowed the organization to target their interceptors for maximum payoff.
131
Stopping the plastic upstream doesn't remove the debris already tangled in riversides, mangroves, and beaches.
132
So alongside its interceptors, the Ocean Cleanup works with local partners to remove that legacy plastic.
133
Today, interceptors are operating in rivers across more than a dozen locations from Guatemala and Jamaica to Malaysia and Vietnam.
134
Together, the Ocean Cleanup says that these pilot projects are already preventing 2-5% of the river plastic from hitting the ocean.
135
It's not just the sea that's seeing the benefits.
136
Like local fishermen, they see the health of their rivers increase.
137
People that live near the river actually, you know, they can swim in the river again.
138
The next step is scaling up.
139
The organization plans to roll out interceptors in 30 cities, which it says could cut the global flow of plastic into
140
the ocean by as much as one-third by the end of the decade.
141
Next up is Panama City, the one in Panama, and then Mumbai.
142
So the plastic problem is solved, right?
143
Not exactly.
144
Pulling plastic out of the water doesn't make it just disappear.
145
It just moves the problem back onto land where we already struggled to to recycle it.
146
But I recently covered how that's starting to change.
147
Where local infrastructure exists, some river plastic is put to use.
148
PET bottles get recycled, organic waste gets composted, the rest goes into landfills or incinerators.
149
Also, river cleanup doesn't touch the plastic that's already out there, circling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
150
Most of it came from fishing boats, so there's no river to trace it back to.
151
But given how much easier and cheaper it is to catch trash in rivers than out in the open ocean, I asked Hank, why focus on cleaning up the Great Garbage Patch at all?
152
If you have a bathtub which is overflowing, you can close the tap, but you still need to mop the floor, empty the bath and do all that stuff.
153
For me personally, I'm all in on mopping up the plastic in the patch.
154
We have to do it in a way that benefits the ecosystem out there.
155
We don't want to make the situation worse.
156
The ocean cleanup is weighing the cost of its plastic removal against the cost of just leaving it there.
157
Their own environmental assessment put it bluntly.
158
Cleanup operations hurt some marine populations in the short term, but leaving plastic in the ocean lets it break into microplastics that could do more damage in the long run.
159
It's a difficult balance.
160
The ocean cleanup has been collecting data in the Great Pacific
161
Garbage Patch long enough to clock a serious rise in plastic fragments.
162
Five-fold in just seven years.
163
The organization says that by volume, there is now much more plastic in the patch than fish in other critters.
164
The problem is accelerating.
165
And yet the Ocean Cleanup has hit pause on, well, Ocean Cleanup.
166
But in a way that makes sense.
167
Recovering plastic at this scale is expensive.
168
So the organization has shifted its focus to learning how to do it more efficiently.
169
What we saw with Ocean Voyages Institute's GPS tracking approach is
170
that knowing the exact location of the plastic is the biggest part of the battle.
171
In 2025, the Ocean Cleanup asked sailors in the Trans-Pacific Yacht Race to tag ghost nets
172
and deployed another 144 trackers in a remote region of the patch.
173
These trackers pinged satellites over months, helping model how plastic moves and clumps together.
174
The organization is also mounting cameras on cargo ships which use AI to detect and photograph plastic recording its GPS location.
175
But to pinpoint plastic more precisely, the ocean cleanup is betting on drones.
176
We actually get more accuracy in there being out there in the patch itself, flying with drones, getting more information about where these hotspots are.
177
The idea is that better data leads to smarter cleanup.
178
The organization says this new approach could drop the cost and timeline for cleanup nearly in half.
179
And I do hope that in five to 10 years time, the Ocean Cleanup no longer exists.
180
We've achieved our mission and everybody says, wow, I never thought that would happen, but we all proved them wrong.
181
That would be amazing.
182
But cleaning up the plastic that's already in the patch won't stop fishing gear from being lost next year, or plastic continuing to wash into rivers.
183
Without fixing how much plastic we make and how it's handled, Ocean Cleanup becomes maintenance, like an annual beach cleanup.
184
And that means more cost and more disruption to the ecosystem.
185
The UN has been negotiating a global plastics treaty since 2022, but talks have stalled over whether they're focused on the waste management or cut production itself.
186
For now, the treaty is dead in the water, along with a lot of plastic.
187
But many nations and groups, including the ocean cleanup, are still pushing to make it happen.
188
We are part of lobby groups there.
189
We bundle our strengths.
190
And I think what the ocean cleanup brings to the table is a lot of data showing actually the problem itself.
191
And we're also showing that there are solutions available to do this.
192
Here's where I land on this.
193
Cleaning up the ocean is worth doing.
194
Intercepting plastic in rivers is worth doing.
195
We've got to mop that plastic up.
196
But for now, the tap is still open.
197
As hard as it is to clean up plastic at sea, turning off the tap to new plastics may be the biggest challenge of all.
198
It all comes down to money, policy, and whether we're willing to change how we make and use this stuff in the first place.
199
And right now, global plastic production is still growing.
200
But here's what sticks with me.
201
I saw a cruise ship's crew dumping bags of trash, but the real problem was always bigger than that moment.
202
And so are the solutions.
203
In El Catalito, Guatemala, the organic waste pulled from the Rio Las Vacas gets composted.
204
In the wood, it goes to nearby communities hit by deforestation.
205
Families use it for cooking fuel.
206
Trash from a river literally keeping people warm.
207
That's not going to solve the plastic crisis, but it shows that even partial solutions still help, especially for people living closest the problem.
208
But what do you think?
209
Do you think capturing plastics from rivers is a good solution?
210
Jump in the comments and let me know.
211
You can also check out my extended cuts of many of my videos, like this one, over on Patreon.
212
And a big welcome to News Supporter Plus member P.
213
Bernstadt.
214
If human-written and research videos matter to you, Patreon helps a ton.
215
I'll link this in the description if you'd like to join, but still just watching, subscribing, and turning on notifications is awesome.
216
And check out my follow-up podcast, Still to be Determined, while we keep this conversation going.
217
Keep your mind open, stay curious.
218
I'll see you in the next one.
📺 同じチャンネル
C11
How Solar Is Beating Nuclear's Best Idea
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
C18
How Quantum Batteries Break Every Rule of Charging
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B21
The Hidden Problem With Home Batteries
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B23
Is Solar About to Get WAY Better? (I Did the Math)
Business EnglishUniversity StudentsWorking Adults
B22
How the Worst Oil Crisis in History is Backfiring
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
B28
Why Australia’s Solar Is So Cheap (And Ours Isn’t)
Business EnglishDaily ConversationUniversity Students
✨ おすすめ動画
B23
46 文
The Story of Plastic (Animated Short)
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B242
18 文
Why are coral reefs so important?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B2100
14 文
Scientists Solve the Mystery Behind the Oumuamua 'Alien Spacecraft' Comet
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B24
200 文
Why Are 96,000,000 Black Balls on This Reservoir?
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B211
157 文
Greenland Gave Trump EVERYTHING
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B226 文
China Wrapped Entire Mountains in Solar Panels — And That's Just the Start
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B24
150 文
Whale Hunting Was Absolutely Crazy
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B2270
21 文
Turn Off The Tap | Plastic Bank | David Katz 2 Minute TED Talk
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepBusiness English
B2635
19 文
⏰The nature crisis we need to solve. Narrated by Jason Momoa, UNEP Advocate for Life Below Water.
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C11
124 文
The Logistics of Living in Antarctica
American AccentIELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
C11
114 文
There's a Giant Hole In Earth's History
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
B192
15 文
D22_ ALBRECHT FUND SHADOWING_Our Ocean
IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepUniversity Students
このレッスンの語彙とスピーキングのポイント
このB2レベルのスピーキングレッスンは、動画「The Truth About Ocean Plastic」を教材にしています。 繰り返し出てくる語は次のとおりです：plastic, ocean, cleanup, river, trash。 この動画には、シャドーイング用の文が218文、単語が2880語あります。 音声の長さは14:49です。 話す速さは速く、1分あたり約194語です。音のつながりや弱く発音される音が多くなります。 英語の頻出3,000語に含まれる単語は78%だけなので、語彙は難しめです。
この動画の重要語彙
動画の中で特に難しい単語15語を、発音と意味つきで紹介します。
| 単語 | 発音 | 意味 |
|---|---|---|
| interceptor 名詞 | /ˈɪn.təɹˌsɛp.təɹ/ | 要撃機 |
| garbage 名詞 | /ˈɡɑɹ.bɪd͡ʒ/ | ごみ, 廃物 |
| debris 名詞 | /ˈdɛbɹi/ | 残骸 |
| float 動詞 | /fləʊt/ | 浮かぶ, 浮く |
| tracker 名詞 | /ˈtɹækə(ɹ)/ | 追跡者 |
| turtle 名詞 | /ˈtɝtl̩/ | 亀, カメ |
| upstream 形容詞 | /ʌpˈstɹiːm/ | 川上 |
| ecosystem 名詞 | /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/ | 生態系 |
| drone 名詞 | /dɹoʊn/ | 雄蜂 |
| sail 名詞 | /seɪl/ | 帆 |
| bycatch 名詞 | 混獲 | |
| compost 名詞 | /ˈkɑm.poʊst/ | 堆肥, コンポスト |
| fisherman 名詞 | /ˈfɪʃ.ɚ.mən/ | 漁師, 漁夫 |
| microplastic 名詞 | マイクロプラスチック | |
| mop 名詞 | /mɑp/ | モップ |
動画に出てくる句動詞
| 単語 | 意味 |
|---|---|
| clean up 動詞 | 掃除する |
| check out 動詞 | 試験する, 検査する |
| turn off 動詞 | 消す, 切る |
| turn around 動詞 | 振り向く |
| wash up 動詞 | 洗面する, 手を洗う |
繰り返し練習したい文
動画に出てくる短く完結した文です。日常会話でそのまま使えます。
- It doesn't always come from where you'd expect.
- How can we make sure that this works for them?
- We don't want to make the situation worse.
- Here's where I land on this.
- We've got to mop that plastic up.
この動画の文法
話し手がよく使っている文型を、動画の実際の表現とともに紹介します。
| 文型 | 動画での表現 |
|---|---|
| 現在完了進行形 have/has been + -ing — 以前に始まり今も続いている動作 | I've been using · has been collecting · has been negotiating |
| 受動態 be + 過去分詞 — 誰がするかより、何が起きるかに焦点を当てる | is brought · are abandoned · is stranded |
| 現在完了形 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去の出来事が今も関係している | have gone · has been · They've also modified |
注意したい発音
話し手はdoesn't, don't, wasn'tなど、短縮形や弱形を30回使っています。聞こえたとおりの短い形で発音しましょう。
- 「sh」と「zh」の音: fisherman /ˈfɪʃ.ɚ.mən/, pollution /pəˈluʃən/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/, suspicious /səˈspɪʃ.əs/, partial /ˈpɑɹʃəl/
- 長い単語（アクセントの位置に注意）: interceptor /ˈɪn.təɹˌsɛp.təɹ/, undecided /ˌʌndɪˈsaɪ̯.dɪd/, ecosystem /ˈikoʊˌsɪstəm/, underwater /ʌndɚˈwɔtəɹ/, negotiate /nəˈɡəʊ.ʃi.eɪt/
日本語話者が苦手な音：
- /r/ と /l/ の区別 — /l/ は舌先を歯茎につけ、/r/ はどこにもつけない: partial /ˈpɑɹʃəl/, precisely /pɹɪˈsaɪs.li/
- /v/ — /b/ にならないように、上の歯を下唇に当てる: vortex /ˈvɔɹtɛks/, passive /ˈpæs.ɪv/
- /f/ — 「フ」ではなく、上の歯と下唇で出す: float /fləʊt/, landfill /ˈlæn(d).fɪl/, fisherman /ˈfɪʃ.ɚ.mən/, fragment /ˈfɹæɡmənt/, modify /ˈmɑ.dɪˌfaɪ/
この動画での練習方法
- まず声を出さずに動画を最後まで聞き、知らない単語をメモします。
- まず0.75倍速で一文ずつシャドーイングし、慣れてきたら通常の速度に戻します。
- 自分の声を録音して元の音声と比べます。interceptor, garbage, debrisなどの単語に特に注意しましょう。
シャドーイングとは？英語上達に効果的な理由
シャドーイング（Shadowing）は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的：ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影（shadow）」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。