The tourism industry started to ____ rapidly in the middle of the last century and it’s been growing ever since. In the last twenty years especially, more and more people have been ____ to distant places around the world. It’s a wonderful thing, to be able to ____ to destinations we had previously only read about or ____ on television. But what kind of impact do large numbers of people ____ on these places? A large cruise ship can ____ as many as six thousand passengers at a time, with about twenty-four million people going on cruises every year. Cruise ships ____ about ninety thousand tons of waste into the oceans every year and each ship ____ as much air pollution as five million cars. The effects of this are made even worse by the fact that cruises ____ the same places over and over again, so the damage is repeated. In Patagonia, this has been having an effect on wildlife. The numbers of Magellanic penguins have been ____ for some years now, for example. Far fewer people go climbing or trekking in the Himalayas than take a cruise, but in the short climbing season each May, about a thousand people try to ____ Everest. At times, there are actually queues of climbers on the route to the top. The difficult conditions mean that everyone needs to ____ a lot of equipment with them. Unfortunately, for the last few decades, climbers have been ____ their equipment on Everest. In recent years, clean-up teams have been ____ expeditions just to pick up this rubbish. The teams are made up of local and international climbers. One group has ____ over eight tons of rubbish down from the mountain! What happens when a region of about a million people is visited by thirteen million tourists every year? The Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea have been ____ with this situation for decades. Where has the freshwater, the food, the petrol and the electricity for thirteen million tourists ____ from? And how have the islands maintained the quality of the beaches, the roads and the countryside? Recently, the government of the Balearic Islands ____ to charge tourists an ecotax of two euros a day. This has been ____ once before, but it wasn’t a success. However, the challenges have been ____ harder every year. The money from the tax is used to ____ the negative effects of tourism on the local environment. So, should we ____ or simply ____ at home? Many destinations ____ low-impact tourism such as ecotourism. It’s time to ____ ourselves some difficult questions. Can we really ____ the world’s beautiful places without ____ them?

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