Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 31 to 40.

Fast fashion's appeal rests on speed and novelty, but the costs are dispersed across oceans and atmospheres. [I] Polyester-heavy garments leach microfibers during washing; dye effluents overwhelm rivers near manufacturing hubs; and overproduction ensures that surplus inventory becomes landfill fodder or is incinerated. Brands tout capsule “conscious” lines, yet throughput targets remain unaltered, meaning marginal efficiency gains are swamped by absolute volume, perpetuating systemic environmental degradation and deepening long-term ecological inequities worldwide. Such dynamics reveal a production model structurally predicated on acceleration and disposability, wherein ecological costs are externalized, regulatory asymmetries persist across borders, and vulnerable populations remain disproportionately exposed to the cumulative burdens of extraction, pollution, and climate volatility.

Supply chains, optimized for immediacy, rely on subcontracting lattices that outstrip public oversight.[II] When price points race downward, environmental externalities and labor protections are the first to be shaved off. Claims of circularity, absent durable design and infrastructure for large-scale recirculation, are marketing gloss rather than material transformation. Meanwhile, the logistics of reverse supply – collection, sorting, fiber-to-fiber recycling – struggle to keep pace with the torrent of low-grade blends that resist reprocessing, thereby perpetuating systemic waste, obscuring accountability, and delaying substantive structural reform across the industry. This persistent lag between extraction and recovery underscores how efficiency rhetoric masks structural imbalances, allowing production to expand unchecked while remediation systems remain chronically underfunded, technologically constrained, and institutionally fragmented across jurisdictions.

Consumer behavior complicates any remedy. [III] Social-media cycles fetishize perpetual newness, converting wardrobes into content pipelines; discount platforms train shoppers to treat clothes as near-disposable. Policy can counteract these incentives – extended producer responsibility, eco-modulated fees, and right-to-repair rules – but enforcement gaps and jurisdictional patchworks dilute impact. Retailers experiment with rental and resale, only to discover that additional channels often cannibalize quality while leaving aggregate volume largely intact, suggesting that without recalibrating demand itself, incremental reforms risk being absorbed by the very growth dynamics they seek to restrain and ultimately failing to curb the sector’s escalating material footprint.

What endures, then, beyond seasonal campaigns, is a structural arithmetic. [IV] Without binding caps on production and credible emissions accounting, sustainability talk risks net-greenwashing: relative improvements advertised as planetary salvation. The sector’s outsized water draw, chemical intensity, and fossil-fuel dependency cannot be reconciled with breakneck turnover unless growth becomes materially decoupled from throughput – a prospect that, so far, appears aspirational rather than achieved, and one that demands coordinated regulatory resolve, transparent metrics, and a fundamental reorientation of value away from volume-driven expansion toward genuine long-term ecological stability.

(Adapted from Earth.org, “Fast Fashion and Its Environmental Impact in 2025”)

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