Lesson 17

Environment. Global problems

Aims and objectives:

• developing personal awareness

• developing basic skills

Equipment: writing paper, handouts

Sequence

I. Warming-up

The teacher divides the class into two groups and offers the words "Nature” for the first one and "Environment” for the second one to work with.

The students in turn should say their associations to the given words in the following order:

Noun — adjective — adverb — verb repeating the sequence until the last student in the group says a word.

Each correct word is given a point. The group, which gets more points, wins.

II. Main part

1. Checking on Homework

The teacher gets the key questions written on the board so that the students could have them as a visual support.

The students make their reports, the teacher encouraging discussion.

1. When did it happen?
2. Where did it happen?
3. What was the problem?
4. How did it influence the environment?
5. How was it solved?

2. Reading and speaking

Read the facts about the things we could do in our daily lives and their effects on the planet.

1) Buy the right appliance. The older the appliance, the more energy it needs to run. Replacing your old refrigerator with a high-efficiency type can reduce your energy cost and also reduce pollution.

2) Check to see if your car tires are properly inflated. For example, America could save up to 2 billion gallons (8 billion litres) of gas per year with properly maintained tires.

3) If you have a car, drive alone less. Americans drive more than a trillion miles a year, with the average motorist driving more than 10,000 miles and burning up to 500 gallons (2,000 litres) of gasoline a year. Every gallon of gasoline burned produces 22 pounds (about 10 kilograms) of carbon dioxide (CO2). Adding just one person to the cars would help to save more than 33 million gallons of gasoline a day.

4) Bring your own grocery bag to the store. The idea seems so simple that you would not think it may be very important. However it is. It takes one 15-year-old tree to produce 700 paper grocery bags.

5) Cut down on meat and increase the amount of vegetables and fruit that you eat. It takes seven pounds (about 3 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound (453 grams) of beef, by contrast, it takes only two pounds of grain to produce a chicken. Cows also use up a tremendous amount of water and produce methane gas, which contributes to the greenhouse effect.

6) Putting a plastic bottle in toilets will not affect the toilet system but will save several hundred gallons of water a year per household.

7) Turn off your water when you are brushing your teeth. This could save approximately 300 gallons (1,200 litres) of water per year per person. In America, this could translate roughly into more than 67 billion gallons (260 million tons of water each year. Isn’t it shocking, how such a small thing can have such a tremendous impact!

• Which of those do you do in your family?

• Which of those do you not do but will start doing?

• Which of those do you believe are waste of time and effort?

• Which of those can not be done in this country?

The students discuss the facts in groups and answer the questions.

Some calculations may also be done to produce concrete figures, which will definitely impress the students.

3. Writing

The teacher has the students to revise the idea that to help save the environment much more can be done at a family or local level rather than wait for the national authorities to start doing something.

In this respect the groups are asked to think about, discuss and note down more things to do in their households to help the environment safe (turning off the lights, saving gas for heating etc.)

The results of the discussion could be used in the following pattern and then spoken out to the whole class.

Example

4. Grammar revision. Conditional I

The teacher uses a few students’ sentences from the previous activity to demonstrate the format of Conditional I.

Example

If I use recycled paper products, it will save trees.

Special attention is paid to using Present Tenses after "if”.

The students rearrange their sentences in Conditional I and report them to the class. Any possible mistakes are corrected until the students get the firm grasp of the idea.

Then the teacher divides the class into groups of 4–5 students and suggests creating a sequence of Conditional I sentences each.

Example

If I use recycled paper products, it will save trees. — If it saves trees, the air will be cleaner. — If the air is cleaner, people will ne healthier. — If the people are healthier, they will live longer, etc. The students create their sentences, the teacher facilitating group work and helping correct the mistakes if necessary.

III. Summary

IV. Homework

Use sentences 1–7 from activity 2 and write Conditional I sentences showing the way of helping save the environment.

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