ITSELF

Reading Theme: Global Warming

Theme of the texts in this unit: Climate change/Global warming

Learning Objectives
You will be introduced to an online tool that will help you identify important vocabulary for your academic writing. More specifically, you will find out about the Academic Word List and how the ‘AWL Highlighter’ can be used to help you identify words found on the Academic Word List.
Pre-reading questions:
In recent years, numerous reports in the media have given different answers to questions related to global warming. Recall what you have read and heard about global warming and use that information to answer these two questions:
  • Are recent extreme weather events due to global warming?
  • What are the likely consequences of global warming?


Let us take a look at some recent reports related to global warming.

New climate data
A meeting of scientists in the Danish capital Copenhagen took place in March 2009 with the aim of presenting and clarifying the latest information on global warming. BBC interviewed one of the scientists, Professor Katherine Richardson.
Watch the BBC news clip (10 March 2009) at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7935063.stm .

Question to help you sharpen your focus as you listen:
What does Professor Richardson expect to emerge from the discussion of the new data?


Antarctic ice bridge
Watch the BBC news clip (5 April 2009) at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7983975.stm .

Question to help you sharpen your focus as you listen:
What do the scientists from the British Antarctic Survey say about the ice bridge holding a vast Antarctic ice shelf in place?

Global Warming and Human Health
Text 1 highlights some opposing views regarding the impact of global warming on human health. Read Text 1 and fill in the blanks in Table 1.

Text 1

In recent years, numerous reports in the media and in research have discussed issues related to global warming. While most climatologists agree that temperatures are increasing, there is disagreement about the extent to which global warming will affect human health, with some researchers questioning if the effects global warming on human health will be as devastating as predicted.
One area of controversy is whether warmer temperatures will lead to more deaths. It has been reported that increasing temperatures are associated with higher risks of mortality, particularly among the elderly or infants [1]. Warmer temperatures are also believed to cause a greater concentration of ozone at the ground level, causing more incidences of respiratory illnesses [3]. However, an opposing argument is that rising temperatures may not cause as many deaths as feared if houses are fitted with air conditioning to minimize effects of the heat and people get acclimatized to higher temperatures [4].
Apart from heat-related deaths, risks of infectious diseases due to global warming have also been debated. On one hand, there is the concern that vector-borne diseases such as dengue, the world’s most important vector-borne viral disease, may spread further as higher temperatures and higher rainfall provide favorable conditions for dengue transmission [2]. On the other hand, it has been argued that the fear about the spread of insect-borne diseases is overblown given that insects or their hosts flourish within a relatively small temperature or climatic range [5].

The debate over the effects of global warming on human health cannot be easily resolved, but we must acknowledge that rising temperatures would bring more misery to a large population of the world. While it is true that the effects of higher temperatures may be mitigated by modern appliances, health and sanitation programs, these amenities are only available in the developed countries of the world. Sadly, a vast proportion of the global population is found in less developed or poorly developed nations and these people’s health could be exacerbated by changing climatic patterns. There is a pressing need to improve the health care, sanitation, public health and monitoring systems in these poorer countries to reduce the incidence of heat-related deaths and vector-borne diseases.

References
[1] Basu, R., & Ostro, B.D. (2008).A Multicounty Analysis Identifying the Populations Vulnerable to Mortality Associated with High Ambient Temperature in California. American Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1093/aje/kwn170
[2] Climate Change and Vector-Borne Disease 9 (n.d.) Retrieved June 5, 2009, from http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/teacher_resources/online_courses/health/disease_vectors.html
[3] Hopfl-Harris, K. (n.d.) The Potential Impacts of Global Warming on Public Health Retrieved June 25, 2009, from http://www.climatehotmap.org/impacts/humanhealth.html
[4] Impact of Climate Change on Human Health (n.d.) Retrieved June 5, 2009, from http://www.worldsolutionsinstitute.com.au/humanhealth.html

[5] Moore, Thomas Gale (1998). Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry about Global Warming. Retrieved June 5, 2009, from http://www.stanford.edu/~moore/Climate_of_Fear.pdf

Table 1

Experts have different answers to the following questions:

  1. Are the predicted effects of global warming on human health ___________?
  2. Will _________ temperature lead to an increase in the number of ________?
  3. Will global warming make conditions more ________ for transmission of insect-borne diseases?
Answers:
1. Overblown
2. Rising/increasing; deaths
3. Favorable

We will now use Text 1 to illustrate a tool that is helpful for identifying important vocabulary for academic writing.

Academic Word List

The Academic Word List (AWL) is a list of 570 words are valuable for all students preparing for academic study because the list was developed on the basis of a careful analysis of hundreds of academic texts from a wide range of subject areas. The Academic Word List consists of 10 sublists ranked in order of frequency with Sublist 1 containing the most frequently used academic words.
If you would like to find out more about how the Academic Word List came about, read the write-up provided by the University of Nottingham and Victoria University of Wellington at:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/ and
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/staff/Averil-Coxhead/awl/corpus.html

You will find the 10 sublists of the Academic Word List (AWL) at
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/wordlists.htm

Question: What does the number assigned to each sublist mean?

Selected words from AWL Sublist 1:
analysis approach assessment assume

consistent factors indicate interpretation


Selected words from AWL Sublist 2:
evaluation impact maintenance perceived

potential relevant strategies transfer

How well do you know the above words from the sublists 1 and 2?

  1. How does ‘analysis’ differ from ‘interpretation’?
  2. Both ‘factors’ and ‘impact’ are used to highlight cause-effect relationships. How do the two words differ in usage?
  3. Is there any difference in meaning for the words ‘indicate’ and ‘show’?
  4. Discuss the differences (meaning, usage) between the words in each of the following pairs: approach and strategy; assessment and evaluation; transfer and transmit; constant and consistent; assume and presume; maintain and sustain; relevant and suitable
  5. Is there any difference between a ‘potential solution’ and ‘attainable solution’?

The University of Nottingham web page also provides a useful tool, called the AWL Highlighter, for identifying core academic vocabulary in a text (contributed by Jiajin Xu):
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm.
You can copy and paste a text (up to a maximum of 2400 characters) into the box provided at the above website, select the AWL sublist level and the text will appear (in a new web page) showing the words from the Academic Word List in bold.
As an illustration, if we

  1. copy and paste Text 1 (excluding the references) into the box provided on http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm ,
  2. select ‘10’ for sublist level,
  3. and then click ‘submit’,

you will find that some words in the text are highlighted (in bold) as shown in Text 2. These highlighted words are found in the 10 sublists of the Academic Word List.

Text 2

File produced at level 10 *

In recent years, numerous reports in the media and in research have discussed issues related to global warming. While most climatologists agree that temperatures are increasing, there is disagreement about the extent to which global warming will affect human health, with some researchers questioning if the effects global warming on human health will be as devastating as predicted.
One area of controversy is whether warmer temperatures will lead to more deaths. It has been reported that increasing temperatures are associated with higher risks of mortality, particularly among the elderly or infants. Warmer temperatures are also believed to cause a greater concentration of ozone at the ground level, causing more incidences of respiratory illnesses. However, an opposing argument is that rising temperatures may not cause as many deaths as feared if houses are fitted with air conditioning to minimize effects of the heat and people get acclimatized to higher temperatures.
Apart from heat-related deaths, risks of infectious diseases due to global warming have also been debated. On one hand, there is the concern that vector-borne diseases such as dengue, the world's most important vector-borne viral disease, may spread further as higher temperatures and higher rainfall provide favorable conditions for dengue transmission. On the other hand, it has been argued that the fear about the spread of insect-borne diseases is overblown given that insects or their hosts flourish within a relatively small temperature or climatic range.

The debate over the effects of global warming on human health cannot be easily resolved, but we must acknowledge that rising temperatures would bring more misery to a large population of the world. While it is true that the effects of higher temperatures may be mitigated by modern appliances, health and sanitation programs, these amenities are only available in the developed countries of the world. Sadly, a vast proportion of the global population is found in less developed or poorly developed nations and these people's health could be exacerbated by changing climatic patterns. There is a pressing need to improve the health care, sanitation, public health and monitoring systems in these poorer countries to reduce the incidence of heat-related deaths and vector-borne diseases.

*Note: citations (shown in Text 1) have been omitted.

Because the highlighted words in Text 2 are frequently used in academic texts, you should have a good knowledge of the ‘rules’ governing their use.

You can start by doing a quick self-check on your familiarity with the use of a few of the highlighted words:

  1. Which preposition(s) would you use after the word ‘debate’?
  2. Which adjective(s) would you use with the words ‘debate’ and ‘issue’?
  3. Which nouns would you use with the words ‘transmit’ and ‘resolve’? (Consider these questions: What do we resolve? What gets transmitted?)

 

You will notice that the following words are not included in the Academic Word List:

  • acclimatized
  • amenities
  • exacerbated
  • mitigated
  • mortality
  • vector-borne diseases

We can categorize these words into two broad groups. Firstly, words such as ‘vector-borne diseases’ and ‘mortality’ are only used in specific contexts such as texts with a focus on disease or related medical aspects. Secondly, vocabulary items such as ‘exacerbate’ and ‘mitigate’ are not frequently used in academic texts; in using such words, you may impress your readers that you have a wide range of vocabulary but such words do not contribute significantly if your aim is to improve your writing for academic contexts. In terms of their infrequent usage in academic writing, it is not practical to make these two categories of words your central focus for vocabulary learning.





















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