Barnacle Basketball

Read the paragraph from the article.

In January 2012, I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with five other sailors. We started at Cape Verde, an island country off the west coast of Africa. We were about 500 nautical miles from our starting point. Nautical miles measure distance in the ocean for ships. A nautical mile is slightly less than a mile on land. Way out there, we came across a lone surfboard riding the tall ocean waves.

HOW does this paragraph support the MAIN idea of the article?

• It highlights the fact that sailors are very upset about how much garbage gets dumped into the sea.

• It describes a popular place where sailors like to go when they want to find something strange at sea.

• It gives an example of the author’s own personal experience with finding something unusual at sea.

• It shows how some sailors often see things in the water that indicate someone is in trouble.

Read the following statement from the article.

Every sailor has seen trash like this and shed a tear, but sometimes you come across something surprising, something out of place, that can generate a smile.

Which sentence from the article provides the BEST support for the above?

• This includes the approximately eight million tons of plastic each year that harms the entire ocean food web.

• In July 2015, my friend and fellow amateur sailor Paolo Fresia found an intact small white boat a few miles off the coast of the Greek island of Rhodes.

• “We decided to deviate course toward it since it looked adrift and we were worried someone might be lost at sea.” Fresia had a doctor on board with him.

• He bumped into a bright pink inflatable flamingo as he was sailing in the notoriously breezy Strait of Bonifacio, between the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.

Read the section “SPALDING!”

Select the sentence from the section that BEST suggests the basketball Gilbert found was unusual.

• She specializes in line-caught, sustainable fishing, and was sailing out of Poole, Dorset, when she spotted something weird.

• “We saw something bobbing and I thought: 'What’s that?'” she writes on Twitter.

• Covering the bottom of the basketball was a thick beard of goose barnacles.

• After posting a photo on social media, the skipper and her husband released the ball back into the sea.

Which sentence from the article would be MOST important to include in a summary of the article?

• In January 2012, I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with five other amateur sailors.

• Everyone who has spent any time at sea has a story about a weird encounter with manmade objects

• Stefano Minini and Sebastiano Gili found a lone fruit crate about 30 nautical miles from the coast.

• It states that whatever you find at sea, unless reclaimed by its original owner, is yours to keep.