KUALA DAILY

HUMAN IMPACT ON THE ENVIRONMENT

ISKL MATH 2012-2013 SAVING ELECTRICITY YEARLONG PROJECT

Introduction
What are some of the impacts that we, human beings, give the environment and affect it? The three elements we will be talking about today are electricity and water usage, along with trash production.

ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION Electricity is used pretty much all over the world. However, some people use it wisely and some dont. Examples of not using the electricity provided are turning the A.C. on when you leave the room so its nice and chilly when you come back, leaving your lights on simply because youre scared of the dark, and many more. People all around the world should seriously stop wasting energy, because our Earth has very limited sources of energy like fossil fuels, and we are not used to using other electricity- making materials that are eco- friendly, such as solar panels. In 2008, we used 117.076 PWh of fossil fuel electricity all around the world. This is a huge amount, and once the fossil fuels are burnt, they do not come back again. Thus why not personally work on saving electricity?

WATER CONSUMPTION Although we may not need electricity everyday, we do need water everyday. Not just any kind of water, but clean water that we can drink, bath, clean, and use to cook. However we are wasting this water by Wlushing the toilet unnecessarily, not turning the sink taps off when we are brushing our teeth, wasting too much time with the shower, etc. There are children in Africa who are dying from drinking dirty water and being infected by the bacteria in it, but we are here, able to afford clean water yet using it as much as we want? We have to care not only for the poor people who cannot afford the clean water but for our future generation. If we use up all the clean water now what will they use? How will they live? In order to keep us from dying of thirst, we must try to waste less water.

TRASH / WASTE Each year we human beings waste tons and tons of materials. The materials can take up hundreds and hundreds of square miles of plain land that we can build houses and live on, but the trash is taking up all the space. But the worst part is, most of them are recyclable! Even elementary school teach their students the three green vocabularies: reduce, reuse, and recycle. But honestly, have YOU seen anybody who actually does this?

THE PROJECT: In order to make the environment cleaner and better, ISKL students have done a project where they focused on either their electricity or water consumption or the amount of trash they throw away. They collected the data monthly, their goal was to decrease the consumption or amount of trash thrown away for a year.

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The Plan

SHARED PLANS OF JINNY LEE, A STUDENT FROM ISKL WHO PARTICIPATED IN THIS PROJECT

My choice for helping the environment was to save electricity, mostly because I think I can control my water consumption easier than electricity, so I wanted to give it a go for saving the harder one. I also think because with water, you can always get it back in ANY kind of form - ice, rain, river, sea, cloud, moisture in the air, water fountain, and many, many more. You can always purify it when it gets dirty (although it takes LOTS of money to do so, but still it's not impossible). But for electricity, you can't really get it back. Once you use it, the energy is gone, and all you can do is just try to stop that from happening unnecessarily. So I wanted to save electricity and make Earth a better place. My electricity use impacts the environment in many ways. The more I use, the more fossil fuels the workers have to burn for our electricity use. But the less I use, the less fossil fuels will be burnt. Burnt fossil fuels can harm the environment in many ways. Therefore, I decided to set my topic as saving electricity.

1. Ceiling Fans & Lights This picture shows my ceilIng fan and my lights turned on. I can save electricity by using less lights since I have two of them (hidden way next to the ones under the fan), I can just turn on one, and for fans, maybe lowering the power for my fan if I'm not feeling that hot. Speaking of fans, I rarely use Air Conditionings except for rare nights that are too hot and hasn't rained heavily for some days.

2. Television In this picture, our Television is turned on because my dad is watching it (Korean Drama). But to save electricity in this picture, whenever nobody's using it, I can always just stop by it and check if it's on or not and turn it off if it is. I can also save electricity by doing something that doesn't include as much electricity than watching the TV and helping me too, like reading a book or something.

3. My laptop This is a picture of me and my laptop. This is my hardest challenge of saving electricity. To save it, I can shut it down whenever I go to sleep, not just let it sleep too, because while it's sleeping, it wastes a lot of electricity for almost 8 hours! How scary is that when all you have to do is press the On/Off button and click 'Shut Down'! I can also remove the charger whenever it's done charging and turn my plug-in off and on when nearly it's out of battery. I mean, I can't charge more than 100%.

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The Results

SHARED PLAN RESULTS OF JINNY LEE, A STUDENT FROM ISKL WHO PARTICIPATED IN THIS PROJECT

There is a table and scatter plot below that shows my monthly electricity usage throughout August to April. You cant exactly tell by looking at the table but by looking at the scatter plot, you can clearly tell that our family is slowly making progress. But the slope is not that steep, therefore I can Wigure out that although our monthly electricity consumption is decreasing, our progress is extremely slow. And in some months like October (3), February (7), and March (8), I even decreased in our electricity consumption. The reasons to that may be various, like during March Spring Break, 3 of my relatives came over so of course our whole familys energy consumption mustve increased.

The Witted line is passing through the 9 points representing the data collected. It was the line of best Wit, because it went through the middle of all these points (even the outliers). It also touches 3 points as it passes through (0, 3, 8) and it has 3 points below the line and 3 points above the line.

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How Long Will It Take For My Family to Consume 300 KwH per Month?
To Wind out how long it will take to consume only (?) 300 KwH per month, I must Wind the slope of my Witted line Wirst. Two random points from the Witted line are (3 , 600) and (5 , 580). I can use the subtracting equation to Wind the slope: 600-580 = 20 = -10 3-5 -2 The slope (m) is -10

Next, I have to put in the -10 for the slope in the equation y = mx + b and replace y and x with one of the ordered pairs to get the b (3 , 600): 600 = -10 (3) + b <-- simplify and get rid of brackets 600 = -30 + b <-- add 30 to both sides to get b by itself 630 = b The y intercept (b) is 630

Now that I know the equation for my Witted line, y = -10x + 630, I will substitute y for 300 to get the answer for the actual question (how long it will take for my family to consume no more than 300 KwH per month). That would be: 300 = -10x + 630 <-- subtract 630 from both sides -330 = -10x <-- divide both sides by -10 to get x by itself 33 = x It would take 33 months (2 years and 9 months) for our family to reduce our monthly electricity usage to 300 KwH.

Lastly, I need to check my answer by substituting 33 in for x in the equation. That would be: y = -10 (33) + 630 <-- simplify and get rid of brackets y = -330 + 630 <-- add~ watch negative sign for 330 y = 300 My answer makes sense because my check indicates that y = 300 and x = 33.

~ Jinny Lee, Advanced Algeo Period 2