Monthly Archives: March 2015

Week 8 Application exercise

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Qn. The concerns of acid rain vary across the globe. What are the issues in Canada? Does the acid deposition occur outside the borders of Canada?

Ans. In Canada, acid rain has depleted calcium levels in lakes. This change in calcium concentrations has caused a shift in th ecological balance. Faced with this selection pressure, a species of plankton which requires less calcium to thrive than a competing species of plankton to gain a survival advantage and thrive. This plankton is thick and jelly like, which means that pipes used to extract water from the lake for drinking purposes get clogged more easily. Also the ecosystem may be further upset.

As for the source of said acid rain, “Between 50% and 70% of Canada’s acid rain comes from the United States, while only 2-10% of America’s pollution in this area comes from Canada.”

 

Sources:

http://www.citylab.com/weather/2014/11/acid-rain-has-turned-canadian-lakes-into-a-kind-of-jelly/382922/

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050810/full/news050808-10.html

Feedback on the course

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Hi Prof Felipe,

Hope you can see this haha.

Well, we mostly think the TBL format for this course is good because some of the chemical concepts were learnt by those of us who took chemistry at A levels and we can help those who didn’t learn it before during the tRA part.

However, we understand that the lecture theatre setting makes it easy for some students to blatantly refer to the notes on their computers during iRA. Maybe the next time you run this course you can split the class into two sessions, as a smaller class will take less time to complete the whole session, and hold the lessons in the new learning hub classrooms which are more conducive to team discussions.