Environment

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Environmental issues have become more important in people’s lives and feature regularly in the media, even affecting local and national elections. This topic looks at human impact on the environment and how it can be measured. Ways in which plants and animals can be improved in order to feed the world are at the forefront of modern agriculture and students will consider the energetics of food production. As usual, new food production techniques raise new ethical, social and environmental questions. Organisms are classified according to how closely they are related and students will learn to appreciate that ‘rules’ change as new evidence emerges. It is a competitive world, all organisms compete for resources and only those that are best adapted will survive in a changing environment; specific adaptations of organisms to extreme environments will be investigated. There is an opportunity to study populations using computer models and also to use secondary data to explore how human activity affects populations and the environment. Students will also discuss the evidence for natural selection, examining how Darwin’s ideas were received by his contemporaries and comparing this with how current scientific theory is received by today’s scientific community.