Your examiner asks: "Your ship is alongside with no shore reception facilities available for garbage. What do you do?"

A. Retain the garbage on board for as long as practicable, segregating and storing it appropriately (refrigerated storage for food waste where available) until a port with adequate reception facilities is reached, and arrange collection through the ship's agent as early as possible; this must not be used as a justification to discharge garbage at sea outside the permitted Annex V criteria.

B. Discharge the garbage at sea immediately upon departure, since inadequate shore facilities create an automatic exemption from Annex V.

C. Burn all garbage types in the ship's incinerator regardless of category, since incineration removes any need for shore reception.

D. Annex V has no retention requirement — garbage can simply be left at the berth for port authorities to deal with, regardless of agreement.

A. Annex IV does designate Special Areas (e.g. the Baltic Sea) where stricter sewage discharge requirements apply — generally requiring treatment to a defined effluent standard or retention, rather than relying on the general 12 nm/comminution provisions that apply elsewhere.

B. Annex IV has no concept of Special Areas at all; only Annexes I and V recognise them.

C. In a Special Area, sewage discharge rules are relaxed because of the higher population density requiring more frequent disposal.

D. Special Area status under Annex IV applies only to passenger ships, not cargo ships.

A. Annex V categorises garbage into groups including plastics, food wastes, domestic wastes, cooking oil, incinerator ash, operational wastes, animal carcasses, fishing gear, and e-waste — each with its own discharge restrictions; critically, the discharge of plastics into the sea is prohibited everywhere, with no exceptions.

B. Annex V recognises only two categories: hazardous and non-hazardous, with identical discharge rules applied to both.

C. Annex V categorisation applies only to passenger ships; cargo ships are exempt from garbage categorisation.

D. Cooking oil is not covered by Annex V and may be discharged freely as it is considered a food byproduct, not garbage.