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How are people using the rainforests?

You need to choose one of these groups who are using the Amazon rainforest in some way:

a) Amazon indians (e.g. Kayapo Indians)

b) Miners of Iron Ore (e.g. at the Carajas Iron Ore Mine)

c) New Settlers (also known as colonists or colinistas tehse are farmers who were given land by the government this happened a lot ion the 1980s)

d) Cattle Ranchers

e) Conservation Groups

f) The Government responsible for Transport (e.g. the Trans-Amazonian Highway)

g) Loggers

h) The Government responsible for Energy (e.g. new Hydro Electric Power Stations)

Your mission is to create a truly awesome slideshow with an absolute maximum of three slides and a minuimum of one slide to explain:

1) How these people are using the rainforest and why they use it this way.

2) Examples of where these people are using the rainforest and for how  long – maps / satellite images would obviously help

2) Difficulties this might have caused

3) Possible solutions for the future

The slideshow has to be very visual with images, facts and figures – you are using the slideshow software to its full potential. We are not interested in text heavy information. This will be shown at the start of a lesson. You can include hyperlinks to websites if people want to learn more.

Obviously you will need to research this thoroughly, and the internet is an obvious resource.

[Image: nDevilTV  Some rights reserved]

The Cambridge IGCSE syllabus requires us to have a good understanding of the following:

describe the principle of profit maximisation as a goal.

We have seen useful videos on YouTube before, particularly MJMFoodie’s very visual explanations (which are often aimed at higher stages of education, such as IB). One of her useful videos (on fixed and variable costs) is here:

Another useful video by MJMFoodie gives an introduction to the topic and explains the idea of the law of diminishing returns.

A great idea for a learning activity to really understand this topic is for you to work with one other person towards producing your own video, MJMFoodie style. It should be simple – create a PowerPoint (or similar) with images. These images can be your own that you have drawn on the computer, scanned into the computer, or other images produced by other people. It is obviously preferable to use images that are not copyrighted, so some good places to visit for non-copyright images are here:

http://www.everystockphoto.com/

http://search.creativecommons.org/

As you assemble your slideshow, make sure you are working on your script to go with each slide. Later on you will want to record your voiceover while playing the slideshow. In that case, planning the video out is essential and you should start with your partner by story-boarding the video.

Your video should summarise this theory on costs, revenue and profit as outlined in the syllabus above. It should summarise it in a highly visual and accessible way. Your video should ideally last somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes.

A good starting point is to consult the relevant chapter in the text book you are using. A good text book is this one, which introduces the idea using Sue’s Teddy Bear Firm.

Economics: A Complete Course for IGCSE and O Level: Endorsed by University of Cambridge International Examinations

Other simple summaries of aspects of this topic are  found here:

Tutor2U – Simple Overview of Output, Fixed Costs and Variable Costs

Tutor2U – Simple Overview of Revenue, Costs and Profit

Tutor2U – Simple Overview of Average Costs and the Scale Of Production

The Cambridge IGCSE Economics syllabus requires students to describe (and therefore understand) the following as part of section 4.4 The private firm as producer and employer:

the type of business organisation in the public and private sectors: sole proprietors,
partnerships, private companies, public companies, multi-nationals, co-operatives, public corporations;

To start us thinking about some of these, we can refer to these youtube videos which essentially cover the same information.

1) Main Types of Business (by Yerlanstudent):

2) Accounting: Business Organizations (by Studio4Learning)

Notice that these videos are US based. Corporations are limited companies (but not all limited companies are corporations). We need to be able to distinguish between private and public limited companies.

The following websites are useful resources for understanding the differences between the different types of business organisation further:

1) Tutor2U: gcse economics – firms – types of business ownership

2) biz/ed: public liability (but also a comparison of business types) [more complex notes]

3) thetimes100: Types of businesses [note that the tables in boxes have overlap between the columns so need a bit of concentration]

Our eventual aim of this learning session is to understand (and know ‘like the backs of our hands’) the following diagram:

First we need to understand the difference between fixed and variable costs. This video by MJM Foodie handles this well:

This is a very good interactive exercise to consolidate your understanding of the different types of cost, and ends with a graph to show how their ‘curves’ will look. It introduces the idea of marginal costs and links changes in these costs to the theory of diminishing returns – crucial to understanding the shapes of the graphs. Read all of the text and work through the activities from start to end.

http://hspm.sph.sc.edu/COURSES/ECON/Cost/Cost.html

Now MJM Foodie begins to link us to the graphs more directly:

If you need another glimpse of how the product curve ‘translates’ to the cost curve so that the theory of diminishing marginal returns is transferred, see the first few slides of the following (after slide 3 , the slideshow gets too technical):

http://www.unc.edu/depts/econ/byrns_web/Flash/Chapter_8/8_2.swf

Back to MJM Foodie:

This link helps us understand how to achieve the graph at the top – work your way through these explantions very carefully:

http://www.reffonomics.com/TRB/chapter8/COSTS6.swf

This next link gives a useful summary of the different cost curves, and includes an interactive exercise to check your understanding on Average Total Costs

http://www.kmversteeg.com/mult/9_05.swf

This is very useful for understanding the shapes of each of the cost curves:

http://www.reffonomics.com/textbook2/microeconomics2/swiftfile/costofdoingbusiness/costcurvespart2.swf

Finally this interactive graph allows you to ‘play’ with the set of cost curves we see in the first image of this post, showing how labour prices and fixed costs can be altered to change the gradients of the graphs, but notice how their overall shapes remain:

http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/007334365x/student_view0/chapter9/interactive_graph_2.html

These YouTube clips help us to understand some of the ideas to do with Market Failure. Some of the ideas in the first clip are not needed for IGCSE understanding (adverse selection and moral panic).

1) General understanding of Market Failure

2) Negative Externalities Explained

Note this uses Marginal Costs and Marginal Benefits curves. Marginal Benefits is the same as the Demand Curve. Marginal Costs is the same as the Supply Curve.

3) Public Goods

From flickr.com. Uploaded on April 2, 2007 by SideLong

Before starting to understand Price Elasticity of Supply, it is worth recapping Price Elasticity of Demand. Click on the following link:

www.business2000.ie provides an interactive quiz on PED

This site introduces the main concepts of Price Elasticity of Supply:

Slideshow from http://www.econ.ucsb.edu

This site gives a useful overview of PES:

PES from tutor2u.net

This web page details price elasticity of supply, but is a little complicated:

http://dotlearn.com/topics/Economics/1040/content/

This web page provides information on how time effects PES:

Welkerswikinomics on PES

This site gives a useful interactive demonstration of PES calculations:

http://www.college-cram.com/study/economics/presentations/619

Uploaded on November 25, 2005 by mknobil Some rights reserved

Create a case-study document about the crisis in Darfur using the following resources:

1) The Guardian – Photo/Audio summary of  the crisis.

2) Map-based interactive GIS to show the geographic situation.

3) An organisation called ARC show some possible solutions.

4) Geographyalltheway on the Sudan crisis

Good recap video:

Good overview video:

Activity: Recapping Factors Affecting Demand and Supply

Econedlink Site

Activity: Exploring changes in Supply and Demand

Ecedweb Site

Activity: How changes in Supply and/or Demand affect Market Equilibrium

College Cram Site

More sophisticated diagram analysis of teh same issue

Whitenova Site

Activity:

Activity: Changes in Supply and Demand Effect Equilibrium Price and Price Ceilings and Price Floors. Click here:

McConnell Brue Economics Site

[Source: flickr.com Image by sludgegulper Some rights reserved]

According to the International Monetary Fund (2000) the following economies can be categorised as making the transition from command to free market economies in recent history.

Transition economies in Europe and the former Soviet Union

CEE
Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, FYR Macedonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia

Baltics  
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

CIS
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan

Transition economies in Asia

Cambodia, China, Laos, Vietnam

Source: Transition Economies: An IMF Perspective on Progress and Prospects  (2000)

Use your text book and the web to find out what a transition economy is in theory. Then, having selected one of the above, work in a pair to research a real life transition economy. Your 3 specific goals are to:

1) Evaluate how well the economy fits the general theory behind transition economies. Make sure you use headings from the theory to structure this aspect of your research.

2) Evaluate the impact of the transition on different stakeholders (groups of people) – for example: firms, low income groups, high income groups, other nations, the government.

3) Evaluate the transition in terms of both the short term and long term consequences on that economy.

A very tongue-in-cheek comic take on transition economies can be seen here:

Free Market Economy

[Source: commons.wikimedia.org Author fargomeD License GNU Free Documentation License]

A population pyramid (or age sex structure) often tells a story. Detective Discussion points:

1. What are the unusual features of the above age-sex structure?
2. Can you suggest possible reasons?

So how might this story look if we plotted the birth rates and death rates on the same line graph, over time – in other words China’s actual demographic transition.

Click the thumbnail below to see the graph in full (source unknown).

The extreme demographic events of 1958-1961 can be understood by viewing the following 5 minute clip:

Interested the discussion points above? Read more details at the following excellent page by geographyfieldwork.com:

China: Demographic Transition

The One Child Policy

[Source: opengecko.com]

The next steps of this learning activity concerns the well-known one-child population policy first introduced in 1979. You can follow the activities on the following link from here:

Population Policies at geographyalltheway.com

To gain more understanding of the impact of the population policy you can watch this ten minute video:

The main things to be aware of are:

1) Why was the policy introduced?

2) How did the policy work?

3) What were the successes of the policy?

4) What were the problems with the policy?

Some other websites can help here. As always, reference any sites you refer to.

Wikipedia on the One Child Policy

geography.about.com on China’s One Child Policy

BBC News Article asks Has China’s one-child policy worked?

 Time.com on China’s One-Child Policy

Very recent news at time of writing this post:

MailOnline has an article called ‘One-child China is a success, says Labour aide Adair Turner’

Any Google search for key words china one child will reveal masses of information. Always try to be aware of bias in the websites you access.