BBC - Extinction - David Attenborough - Worksheet to support the BBC Documentary
With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases.
Extinction is now happening up to 100 times faster than the natural evolutionary rate, but the issue is about more than the loss of individual species. Everything in the natural world is connected in networks that support the whole of life on earth, including us, and we are losing many of the benefits that nature provides to us. The loss of insects is threatening the pollination of crops, while the loss of biodiversity in the soil also threatens plants growth. Plants underpin many of the things that we need, and yet one in four is now threatened with extinction.
Last year, a UN report identified the key drivers of biodiversity loss, including overfishing, climate change and pollution. But the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss is the destruction of natural habitats. Seventy-five per cent of Earth’s land surface (where not covered by ice) has been changed by humans, much of it for agriculture, and as consumers we may unwittingly be contributing towards the loss of species through what we buy in the supermarket.
Our destructive relationship with the natural world isn’t just putting the ecosystems that we rely on at risk. Human activities like the trade in animals and the destruction of habitats drive the emergence of diseases. Disease ecologists believe that if we continue on this pathway, this year’s pandemic will not be a one-off event.
Written in Publisher and formatted for A3 printing, the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
The worksheet is a 3 page resource
Christopher Eccleston narrates a docudrama about the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more than 50 million people. Told using powerful personal testimony.
It is 1918 and the end of WWI. Millions have died, and the world is exhausted by war. But soon a new horror is sweeping the world, a terrifying virus that will kill more than fifty million people - the Spanish flu. Using dramatic reconstruction and eyewitness testimony from doctors, soldiers, civilians and politicians, this one-off special brings to life the onslaught of the disease, the horrors of those who lived through it and the efforts of the pioneering scientists desperately looking for the cure.
A four page worksheet, written in Publisher for A3 printing but can be amended and saved as a PDF for A4 printing.
Scream: A History of Anaesthetics - Worksheet to support the documentary presented by Phill Hammond for the GCSE History Edexcel 9-1 specification.
The worksheet supports the content of the programme from the beginning up to c. 38 minutes covering the development of pain relief, from Nitrous Oxide, ether and Chlorform to the evolution of local anaesthetics and Curare
Brian Cox explores the ingredients needed for an intelligent civilisation to evolve in the universe - the need for a benign star, for a habitable planet, for life to spontaneously arise on such a planet and the time required for intelligent life to evolve and build a civilisation. Brian weighs the evidence and arrives at his own provocative answer to the puzzle of our apparent solitude.
4 page worksheet
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the resource can be saved as a PDF for A4 printing
James May’s Things You Need to Know …about Evolution - Worksheet to support the Documentary
‘You might relish cabbage about as much as a two-month bout of chickenpox, but would you consider it as a leafy long lost relative? James May does, thanks to the genius of a man who changed the world, Charles Darwin.
But exactly how does Darwin’s famous theory of natural selection explain why we are all mutants and what war is actually good for? James treks off into the wilderness with the natural advantage of fantastic motion graphics and vivid animation, to show us just how.’
Written to support independent/flipped/ extended learning with a variety of data collection activities
Written in Publisher and formatted to A3 the document can be saved and amended as a PDF for A4 printing