Vocabulary
The differences among the following terms: Environmental Science, Environmental Activism, & Ecology
What is environmental science is ecology plus human impacts (interdisciplinary), ecology is the purely scientific study of nature, and environmental activism is a social movement to protect nature?
Two examples of renewable resources and two examples of nonrenewable resources
What is renewable resources include soil, water, and sunlight and nonrenewable resources include oil, natural gas, and coal (fossil fuels)?
The difference between quantitative and qualitative data
What is quantitative data is numbers or measurements and qualitative data is descriptions?
The process of deciding whether the gain brought by the resource is worth the cost
What is a cost-benefit analysis?
The 3 types of environmental policies used to protect the environment in the United States
What is regulations, incentives, and cap-and-trade policies?
Everything included in the term "environment"
What is all living and nonliving things (including humans)?
Materials and resources consumed and needed for disposal and waste
What is an ecological footprint?
80% of the frogs in a pond are spring peepers. If there are 200 frogs in the pond, this is how many peepers there are.
What is 160 peepers?
This is what happens to the cost of a resource when demand for the resource increases.
What is the cost increases? (When supply increases, the cost decreases. When supply decreases and demand increases, the cost increases.)
Residential homeowners adding solar panels to their homes is an example of this type of environmental policy
What is an incentive?
An individual at the same level of education or specialization
The areas of the world with the largest ecological footprint
What is industrialized nations (North America, Australia, Europe, Russia, etc.)? They use more fossil fuels!!!
How the peer review process reduces faulty science
What is peer review looks at flaws in the experiment or conclusion to make sure the data is accurate?
Obtaining marine organisms from the ocean to eat as seafood is an example of this type of ecosystem service.
What is provisioning?
The Clean Water Act is an example of this type of environmental policy
What is a regulation?
The difference between the independent and dependent variable in an experiment
What is the independent variable is the one that is changed by the scientist and the dependent variable is what is measured?
When a public resource is unregulated, private self-interest can cause it to be used unsustainably leading to depletion of the resource and this "tragedy."
What is the "Tragedy of the Commons"?
The 5 steps in the scientific method in order
What is problem/question, hypothesis, experiment, data collection, and conclusion?
Trees along a slope prevent erosion. This is the type of ecosystem service the trees are providing.
What is regulating?
The reason why incentives are preferred over regulations when possible
What is incentives are self-policing and regulations are expensive to enforce?
The difference between inductive and deductive reasoning
What is inductive reasoning is creating a rule or pattern of the natural world based on multiple observations and deductive reasoning is comparing a new thing to an already established rule or pattern of the natural world?
The 2 major events that drastically changed the human population and its use of resources
What is the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution?
The 3 types of ethical worldviews regarding the environment
What is anthropocentrism (human-focused), biocentrism (focused on all organisms including humans), and ecocentrism (focused on ecosystem as a whole)?
The 4 types of ecosystem services
What is provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting?
This is how a cap-and-trade policy works.
What is cap-and-trade is a combination of regulations (pollutants are limited) and incentives (permits can be sold to others)?