Year 11 - Science
Factors affecting human food security, and possible solutions
Maintaining biodiversity and human impacts
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This pupil-friendly study guide includes a unit summary, clear notes, common mistakes, and quick questions with answers.
Unit Summary
This unit explores trophic levels, biomass pyramids, and the efficiency of biomass transfers in ecosystems. It examines human impacts on biodiversity, factors affecting food security, and biotechnological solutions. Emphasis is on evaluating environmental changes and ethical considerations.
Lesson Summary
You will learn to describe factors affecting food security, and explain how biotechnological and agricultural solutions can help to ensure food security.
Key Notes
- Factors affecting food security, e.g. human population size, changing diets in wealthier populations, sustainability.
- Factors affecting food security, e.g. cost of agricultural inputs, environmental change, new pests and pathogens.
- Roles of biotechnology in food security, e.g. genetic engineering to improve yields; use of microorganisms to make food.
- Benefits of biotechnology must be weighed against risks, costs and ethical issues.
- Other ways to improve food security, e.g. sustainable production and use of food, limiting climate change.
Vocabulary To Learn
- food security: having reliable access to enough safe and nutritious food to meet the needs of the human population
- climate change: climate change is a long-term shift in weather patterns
- genetic engineering: modifying the genome of an organism by adding, removing or altering genes, to introduce a desirable characteristic (or remove an undesirable one)
- biotechnology: the alteration and use of organisms to produce products for human use
- ethics: whether an action taken is right or wrong
Common Mistakes To Avoid
- Pupils may have a belief that genetically engineered organisms are not safe. While there are risks with GM organisms, there are a wide range of benefits which can help humans.
3 Quick Questions (With Answers)
1. Explain the scientific idea in this lesson using two key points.
Factors affecting food security, e.g. human population size, changing diets in wealthier populations, sustainability. Factors affecting food security, e.g. cost of agricultural inputs, environmental change, new pests and pathogens.
2. Define this scientific word and use it in context. 'food security'
having reliable access to enough safe and nutritious food to meet the needs of the human population. Include the word in a full scientific explanation, not as a single label.
3. Correct this common scientific misunderstanding.
Mistake: Pupils may have a belief that genetically engineered organisms are not safe. While there are risks with GM organisms, there are a wide range of benefits which can help humans. Correction: The lesson highlights the benefits of genetically modifying crops to address food security challenges, especially in the context of a growing human population and other factors that threaten food availability.
More Lessons In This Unit
- Benefits and challenges of maintaining biodiversity Study Guide
- Climate change and biodiversity: changes in the distribution of organisms Study Guide
- Climate change and biodiversity: forests and oceans Study Guide
- Examples of human interactions with ecosystems, including fish farming Study Guide
- Examples of human interactions with ecosystems, including use of peat Study Guide
- Negative human interactions with ecosystems and impacts on biodiversity Study Guide
- Transfers of biomass between trophic levels Study Guide
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