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English for Life
Integrated Language text
Learner’s Book
Grade 12
Home Language
Lynne Southey, Ian Butler, Megan Howard, Carol Jansen, Karen Naude
www.bestbooks.co.za
Pretoria • Cape Town
Introduction
There are still sceptics who don’t believe that climate change is happening, or that it is happening at an ever-increasing rate. They say that changes in weather patterns have always happened. One way to silence unbelievers is to confront them with facts. You will come across several facts to support your argument in this cycle. You will read an article with definitions, and listen to a text about how research is carried out. You will also read a cartoon, a poem and extracts from a novel. You will write sentences, a formal and an informal letter, work with genres and the parts of a book, practise different voices, and brush up on your editing skills by doing some proofreading.
Reading for comprehension
You have heard the phrases ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ bandied about in many contexts: news reports, ordinary conversations, informative articles you may have read, and in learning areas. But can you explain it clearly to a 10-year-old? To do that, you would have to understand it very well yourself. Here is an article that will help you.
Activity 1.1 - Reading about climate change (individual and pair)
Pre-reading:
Think about your purpose and audience before you read: you are going to have to explain climate change to a 10-year-old.
During reading:
As you read, try to grasp the points made.
What is climate change?
Climate change is a lasting change in weather patterns over periods of millions of years. It may be the average weather conditions that change, or there may be more or fewer extreme weather events: hurricanes, heat waves, cloud cover, storms, floods, droughts, tsunamis, and so on.
Climate change is caused by several factors: processes in the sea, such as the way the water circulates; variations in the amount of sun radiation received by the earth; movement of the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust; volcanoes and changes in the natural world caused by humans.
There are scientists who work specifically with climate change, and who try to understand what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future. They make observations and measurements of, for example, the temperatures in boreholes, what can be found in cores extracted from ice, types of flora and fauna, the processes by which the glaciers melt, types of sediment in rock and changes in sea levels. Modern instruments also provide them with much information.
Humans cannot do much about the natural causes of climate change. They can monitor them and try to predict them. However, global warming, one of the contributors to climate change, is a different story. The activities of humans are responsible for global warming, which is one of the causes of climate change and refers to a rise in the temperature of the earth’s surface. This has resulted from an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, water vapour, methane, ozone and nitrous oxide. The surface temperatures of the earth have risen by about half a degree Celsius since the 1970s, an irregular increase that cannot be explained by the natural causes of climate change.
It is only an increase in greenhouse gases that can explain these abnormal increases. Human activities that cause these greenhouse gases include things like deforestation, burning of fossil fuels, changes in wetland construction, and so on. These will lead to the following:
Increased surface temperatures
Rising sea levels
Melting of glaciers and sea ice
Changes in rainfall
Increases in intensity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, and heavy rainfall
Longer, more severe droughts
Expansion of subtropical deserts
Loss of animal species and biodiversity
Melting of permafrost (which speeds up global warming)
Drops in agricultural yields
Spread of vector-borne diseases because of increased range of insects
Acidification of oceans causing loss of fish
Death of coral reefs
These are serious problems, more serious than global warming (i.e. a rise in earth’s surface temperatures) which will be less disruptive and destructive than the other changes mentioned above. Likely a combination of all of these solutions must be tried if we are to protect our planet from the most severe of the predicted effects of climate change.
[Rewritten with information from http://www.ecolife.com/define/climate-change.html]
Post-reading:
With your partner, discuss the differences between what is meant by ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’. Discuss what causes each. You will need to link the two to do this.
Now each write a paragraph in answer to the 10-year-old’s question: what is climate change? This should be a slightly simplified summary of the information in the text. Use the writing process: plan, draft, write, edit.
When you have finished, swap your paragraphs with those of another pair. Check each other’s. Then discuss the differences in understanding if there are any, and anything else you pick up in your classmate’s paragraph.
Your teacher will ask several of you to read your paragraphs to the class for general discussion and feedback.
A visual text
satire: use of ridicule, sarcasm or irony to comment critically on something
Cartoonists often use satire to comment on social situations and political issues. A visual such as a cartoon can say with a simple drawing what would usually require many words to express. When we ‘read’ a cartoon we have to take different elements into consideration: not only the words, but the drawing, the expressions of the people, the juxtaposition of certain items and the context.
You will analyse a cartoon about climate change in the activity below.
Activity 1.2 - Analysing a cartoon (group)
Pre-reading:
Look closely at all aspects of the cartoon.
[From: Sunday Times May 4 2008 p. 6]
With your partner describe what you see.
Questions:
1. Do you think the two men in the cartoon have taken climate change seriously up until now? Give reasons for your answer.
2. What effect does the word ‘that’ have (instead of ‘this climate change’