Essay Prompts: Science and Health | 50 Essay Topics for EmSAT Achieve PDF Download

Science & Environment

Essay 71: How Green Are You?

Sometimes trying to go green has its trade-offs. To save energy and reduce light pollution, New York City is considering dimming the lights on its iconic night skyline. What trade-offs do you make in your life to try to reduce your environmental footprint?

How green are you?

In “New York Plan to Save Energy May Mean a Dimmer Skyline,” Matt Flegenheimer writes:

The Manhattan skyline — glimmering, grand but not always environmentally efficient — may need to go darker to go green.

Amid a far-reaching push to reduce New York’s environmental footprint, city officials on Wednesday weighed a City Council bill to limit internal and external light use in many commercial buildings when empty at night, a change that could affect some 40,000 structures and rethink the shape, or at least the hue, of what residents see when they look up.

The environmental considerations are clear: reducing potentially wasteful energy use as part of the city’s bid to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has expressed support for passing a version of the bill, calling light pollution a citywide scourge for migratory birds and sedentary New Yorkers.

The hearing, accordingly, cast a wide net, touching on amphibious mating activity, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and even the very definition of nighttime. And it hinted at a host of complications in the proposed legislation, among them an exception for buildings found to be “a significant part of the city’s skyline.”

City officials expressed misgivings about playing favorites with cherished destinations, potentially empowering government workers to decide which structures were notable enough to stay lit.

“The mandate to curate, if you will, the skyline of the city of New York is not something the commission does currently,” said Mark Silberman, general counsel for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The proposal, he added, “does put the commission in a slightly uncomfortable position, perhaps, of choosing between landmarks.”

Councilman Donovan Richards Jr., the bill’s lead sponsor, joked that the change would “add excitement” to the lives of city regulators.

“We’re not looking for excitement,” Mr. Silberman said.

Some critics, including food industry and real estate leaders, worried that reduced lighting could affect safety.

“Security cameras would be useless in the dark, and police officers would no longer peek into darkened stores at night,” said Jay M. Peltz, general counsel for the Food Industry Alliance of New York State.

Administration officials said they shared concerns about maintaining adequate lighting to deter crime, suggesting that they would move to tweak the bill. It was not immediately clear how.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• How green are you? How have you tried to reduce your environmental footprint?

• Do you turn off the lights when you leave a room? Do you try to reduce, reuse and recycle whenever possible? Do you ever choose to save energy by riding a bike or walking instead of driving?

• Do you wish you could do better? Are there things you try to do but don’t always succeed in doing? Are there trade-offs you have decided to make or not to make?

• Do you think the City Council bill to dim the lights on New York’s skyline is a good idea? Do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages? Why?

Essay 72: How Do You Try to Reduce Your Impact on the Environment?

For the world to slow down or stop human-generated climate change, governments and corporations will need to enact major policy shifts. But still, each of us plays a small role in Earth’s overall health — through our everyday decisions like turning on or off the lights, buying and reusing clothing or electronics, littering and recycling, or turning up or down the air-conditioning and the heat.

How do you try to reduce your impact on the environment?

In “What You Can Do About Climate Change,” Josh Katz and Jennifer Daniel suggest seven guidelines:

1. You’re better off eating vegetables from Argentina than red meat from a local farm.
2. Take the bus.
3. Eat everything in your refrigerator.
4. Flying is bad, but driving can be worse.
5. Cats and dogs are not a problem.
6. Replace your gas guzzler if you want, but don’t buy a second car.
7. Buy less stuff, waste less stuff.

Here is how the authors explain the second tip, Take the bus:

To give ourselves a good shot at avoiding severe effects such as widespread flooding of coastal cities or collapse of the food supply, scientists have determined there’s only so much carbon dioxide we can safely emit. Divvying up this global carbon fund among the world’s population (and making some assumptions about future emissions) gives you the average amount each person can burn per year over a lifetime — an annual “carbon budget.”

The current per capita emissions for Americans is about 10 times this limit, and given the relative affluence of this country, our emissions will not get down to the average anytime soon. But they can still fall from where they are. Consider this: If you drive to work alone every day, your commuting alone eats up more than your entire carbon budget for the year. Taking the bus — or biking! — would sharply reduce your output.

But even these simple suggestions are not universally agreed on, as the article’s comments section reveals.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Do you ever think about your ecological footprint — how much your individual actions affect the environment?

• How do you try to reduce your personal contribution to climate change and environmental degradation?

• Do any of the above suggestions make sense for you personally? Do you agree with them all?

• Are there other ways you try to make a positive difference, or make less of a negative difference? Are there other ideas you’d like to add to — or substitute for — the seven guidelines above?

Essay 73: Do You Ever Feel Guilty About What, or How Much, You Throw Away?

Americans throw away hundreds of millions of tons of trash every year. We throw away spoiled food, old sneakers, unwanted pianos and bulky televisions. That’s a lot of garbage.

Do you ever feel guilty about what — or how much — you throw away?

In “Unwanted Electronic Gear Rising in Toxic Piles,” Ian Urbina writes about the dangerous pile-up of computer monitors, televisions and other electronic trash:

Last year, two inspectors from California’s hazardous waste agency were visiting an electronics recycling company near Fresno for a routine review of paperwork when they came across a warehouse the size of a football field, packed with tens of thousands of old computer monitors and televisions.

The crumbling cardboard boxes, stacked in teetering rows, 9 feet high and 14 feet deep, were so sprawling that the inspectors needed cellphones to keep track of each other. The layer of broken glass on the floor and the lead-laden dust in the air was so thick that the inspectors soon left over safety concerns. Weeks later, the owner of the recycling company disappeared, abandoning the waste, and leaving behind a toxic hazard and a costly cleanup for the state and the warehouse’s owner.

As recently as a few years ago, broken monitors and televisions like those piled in the warehouse were being recycled profitably. The big, glassy funnels inside these machines — known as cathode ray tubes, or CRTs — were melted down and turned into new ones.

But flat-screen technology has made those monitors and televisions obsolete, decimating the demand for the recycled tube glass used in them and creating what industry experts call a “glass tsunami” as stockpiles of the useless material accumulate across the country.

The predicament has highlighted how small changes in the marketplace can suddenly transform a product into a liability and demonstrates the difficulties that federal and state environmental regulators face in keeping up with these rapid shifts.

Students: Tell us…

• Do you ever feel guilty about what you throw away, or how much you throw away?

• What kinds of things do you throw away in a typical week?

• How much effort do you put into recycling or reusing things, instead of putting them in the garbage?

• What do you think should happen with all the hazardous electronic equipment that Americans have generated over the past few years?

NOTE: Students, please use only your first name. For privacy policy reasons, we will not publish student comments that include a last name.

Essay 74: What Could You Live Without?

How many plastic bags do we briefly use and then throw away every week? We get our takeout food, drugstore purchases and clothing bagged, and our groceries double-bagged. All those single-use plastic bags may be cheap for consumers, but their costs add up. Plastic bags end up stuffing landfills, clogging sewers, polluting animal habitats and even fluttering in trees for years. California became the first state to ban plastic bags in 2014, although that law has been temporarily put on hold, and dozens of cities or counties have either banned the use of plastic bags or imposed a fee for their use.

Should single-use plastic shopping bags be banned in your state or community?

New York City is one of those places that has been considering a citywide ban. In the November 2014 article “New York City Council Hearing on Fee for Bags Becomes Heated,” Matt Flegenheimer writes:

For years, the plastic bag has doubled as a sort of urban tumbleweed, sweeping across New York City sidewalks and encroaching ominously on its waterways, clustering on subway tracks and drifting airborne to the tree limbs of residential blocks.

Now the bags have divided a City Council that has found little about which to disagree. On Wednesday, a hearing grew heated as lawmakers considered what seemed to be a simple question: Are plastic bags a problem to be solved, as environmental advocates have long argued, or a necessary, and relatively harmless, part of city life?

The debate centered on a proposal to charge 10 cents for each single-use checkout bag at retail and grocery stores, in an effort to encourage customers to bring their own. The charge would also apply to paper bags, the bill’s sponsors said, because they are more expensive for businesses to purchase. (A ban on plastics alone could lead customers to switch exclusively to paper, harming the businesses, according to the bill’s supporters.)

Councilman Brad Lander of Brooklyn, a Democrat, one of the proposal’s co-sponsors, suggested that the specter of a fee — or, as opponents have called it, a tax — was in fact the legislation’s strength.

“People don’t want to pay for something that used to be free,” he said before a hearing of the Council’s committee on sanitation and solid waste management. “That’s why this bill works.”

The de Blasio administration expressed an openness to the bill on Wednesday, saying it was “supportive of efforts to reduce single-use carryout bags” and noting their “negative environmental impacts.”

At the hearing, Kathryn Garcia, the city’s sanitation commissioner, said the department collected an average of 1,700 tons of plastic bags per week. It costs $12.5 million annually to dispose of the materials outside the city. Ms. Garcia said the bags threatened marine animals that often mistook them for a food source, and could jam sorting machines at recycling facilities.

But opponents — including some activists, council members from both parties and plastic bag manufacturers — have framed the proposed fee as a regressive tax, most likely to affect low-income and minority communities. Critics noted that plastic bags were often reused, and many argued that they rarely encountered bags on the street. Some called on the city to focus instead on litter prevention and recycling campaigns.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Should single-use plastic shopping bags be banned in your state or community? Why?

• Do you think lightweight shopping bags are wasteful and polluting? Or do you think they are worth their weight in the benefits they provide to daily life?

• Do you think imposing a fee, or tax, for using plastic bags, as Washington has done, is a regressive tax? In other words, does it hurt poor people more? Or is it just good governance, creating an incentive for everyone to bring his or her own bags instead of constantly getting new bags after each shopping trip?

• Do you think about your use of plastic bags? Do you ever take your own bags, tell a store clerk you don’t need a bag or save your old bags for reuse?

Animals & Pets

Essay 76: How Do You Feel About Zoos?

When and where have you visited zoos in your life? How did those visits affect you?
For many New Yorkers, the closing of the Bronx Zoo’s 111-year-old monkey house is the end of an era. Do you think, in general, that zoos are essential for educating humans about animals, or do you think they’re too cruel to the animals to be worth what they might bring to humans? Why?

In his essay “Farewell to the Monkey House,” Charles Siebert writes:

In the old city zoos — at the height of what might be called zookeeping’s Colonial Era — the very harshness of the animals’ anthropocentric framing was a direct reflection both of the depth of our awe over their fearsome otherness and of our complete ignorance of their rightful homes. Over the ensuing century, however, with the increased knowledge of the wild and its inhabitants that — as is always the case with humans — only comes in concert with our relentless encroachment upon them, the old city zoo began to wither and fade.

… All zoos, from the major accredited to the ramshackle roadside, ultimately pivot around and profit from that bittersweet blend of awe and loneliness we humans feel over being the only animal who can look back at all the others and capture them: not just behind bars, but with names. From the dawn of consciousness, we’ve been trying to frame, in everything from creation mythology to zoological parks, the simultaneous sense of kinship with and irreparable separateness from animals that our consciousness calls to mind.

… Modern science, for its part, now repeatedly confirms our long intuited commonality with the creatures we continue to keep. Indeed, a number of major zoos have already closed down their elephant and chimpanzee exhibits because of the psychological trauma those animals have been shown to suffer in captivity. Major lawsuits are also being pursued against places like Sea World for “enslaving” orcas and dolphins.

“In 2013, we’re going to prosecute the first cases,” Steven M. Wise, a lawyer and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project, recently told me. “Their goal will be to use the latest science to help persuade state court judges that such creatures as whales and chimpanzees should be accorded common law personhood and rights.”

And yet even with the latest science, the steady stream of riveting TV nature shows and the increasingly accessible array of eco-tourism excursions, millions still flock to zoos each year.

Students: Tell us about your zoo memories:

• When and where have you visited zoos, and how did they affect you?
• Do you agree with Mr. Siebert that we’re attracted to zoos to feel our kinship and commonality with animals, but also to feel the “bittersweet blend of awe and loneliness we humans feel over being the only animal who can look back at all the others and capture them?”
• Many zoos, including the Bronx Zoo, have evolved as scientists learned more about animal behavior, psychology and needs. Do you think this is enough, or do you think, as do some quoted in this piece, that zoos “enslave” animals regardless of how and where they’re kept?

Essay 77: Do Gorillas Belong in Zoos?

Are zoos essential for educating children and adults alike about wild animals, as well as promoting conservation and protecting endangered species? Or are they inherently cruel to animals by keeping them in enclosures away from their natural environment?

Do animals like gorillas — great apes that share a high degree of genetic, emotional and cognitive kinship with humans — belong in zoos?

In “Do Gorillas Even Belong in Zoos? Harambe’s Death Spurs Debate,” Natalie Angier writes:

Harambe, the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla shot dead at the Cincinnati Zoo late last month after a 3-year-old boy fell into his enclosure, may be physically gone, his tissues harvested for research and his sperm extracted to help diversify the captive breeding gene pool.

Yet the 440-pound silverback leaves another metaphorical gorilla in the room, raising questions that extend far beyond the particulars of the case, including whether the zoo or the boy’s mother were more to blame for Harambe’s death.

For primatologists and conservationists who devote their lives to studying the great apes and to doing what they can to help protect the rapidly vanishing populations of the primates in the wild, a linked set of ethical and practical dilemmas looms almost unbearably large.

As research continues to reveal the breadth of our genetic, emotional and cognitive kinship with the world’s four great apes — gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans — many primatologists admit to feeling frankly uncomfortable at the sight of a captive ape on display, no matter how luxe or “natural” the zoo exhibit may be.

“When I visit zoos, I have to turn off my feelings and just tell myself that I am at a museum admiring nature’s masterpieces,” said the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, professor emerita at the University of California, Davis. “Otherwise, I can’t really justify keeping great apes in cages.”

At the same time, researchers acknowledge that apes in today’s zoos, at least in the industrialized world, were all born and raised in captivity, and could no more survive being “set free” into the forests of Africa or Indonesia than could the average tourist on safari.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Do gorillas and other great apes belong in zoos?

• Ms. Angier summarizes both sides of the debate. She writes, “Some experts believe that well-designed zoos play an essential educational role, and that exposure to a flesh-and-blood ape can be a transformative experience, especially for children.” She continues, “Others deride most zoos as little more than amusement parks with educational placards that few people bother to read.” Which side of the debate do you find more convincing? Why?

• In general, do the benefits of zoos outweigh the drawbacks? Why?

• What’s your experience with zoos? When and where have you visited zoos? How did those visits affect you?

Essay 78: Is It Unethical for a Zoo to Kill a Healthy Giraffe?

This weekend a Danish zoo euthanized a healthy 2-year-old giraffe. Bengt Holst, the zoo’s scientific director, explained, “We don’t do it to be cruel; we do it to ensure a healthy population.” But many animal rights activists, who mounted a furious last-minute campaign to save the giraffe, angrily protested the killing.

Is it unethical for a zoo to kill a healthy giraffe?

In “Anger Erupts After Danish Zoo Kills a ‘Surplus’ Giraffe,” Nelson D. Schwartz writes:

Marius the reticulated giraffe died at the Copenhagen Zoo on Sunday. He was 2 years old.

The cause of death was a shotgun blast, and after a public autopsy, the animal, who was 11 feet 6 inches, was fed to the zoo’s lions and other big cats.

Administrators said they had decided to kill Marius, who was in good health, because his genes were well represented among the captive giraffe population in European zoos. But that explanation did not satisfy animal rights activists who had mounted a furious last-minute campaign to save him.

Besides nearly 30,000 online signatures from those who did not want Marius killed, Copenhagen Zoo officials received death threats after they turned down adoption offers from other zoos, as well as a bid of 500,000 euros, or $682,000, from an individual who was willing to take Marius in.

One group, Animal Rights Sweden, urged people to stop visiting zoos as a protest, The Associated Press reported. “It is no secret that animals are killed when there is no longer space, or if the animals don’t have genes that are interesting enough,” the organization said in a statement.

Students: Tell us …

• Is it unethical for a zoo to kill a healthy giraffe?

• Do zoos have a responsibility to try to ensure that all animals under their care live a long and healthy life? Or, do zoos have a different mission? For example, should zoos focus more on preserving a healthy gene pool in captive animal populations?

• The zoo fed the giraffe to lions after it was killed. What is your reaction?

• How could the Danish zoo have handled this situation differently? Should it have done so?

Essay 79: Should Farm Animals Have More Legal Protections?

The Animal Welfare Act, enacted in 1966, protects dogs, cats, rabbits and reptiles — but excludes farm animals. For example, Nicholas Kristof recently wrote about how chickens are often raised to have breasts so large that their legs can’t support their body weight. And other Times writers have written about abuse of pigs, sheep and cattle.

Should farm animals have more legal protections?

In “U.S. Research Lab Lets Livestock Suffer in Quest for Profit,” Michael Moss writes about inhumane conditions on a United States government farm animal research facility:

At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer the farm animal to fit the needs of the 21st-century meat industry. The potential benefits are huge: animals that produce more offspring, yield more meat and cost less to raise.

There are, however, some complications.

Pigs are having many more piglets — up to 14, instead of the usual eight — but hundreds of those newborns, too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed each year when their mothers roll over. Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been retooled to have twins and triplets, which often emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even meat producers have been repulsed.

Then there are the lambs. In an effort to develop “easy care” sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where newborns are killed by predators, harsh weather and starvation.

Last Mother’s Day, at the height of the birthing season, two veterinarians struggled to sort through the weekend’s toll: 25 rag-doll bodies. Five, abandoned by overtaxed mothers, had empty stomachs. Six had signs of pneumonia. Five had been savaged by coyotes.

“It’s horrible,” one veterinarian said, tossing the remains into a barrel to be dumped in a vast excavation called the dead pit.

These experiments are not the work of a meat processor or rogue operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over 55 square miles in Clay Center, Neb. Little known outside the world of big agriculture, the center has one overarching mission: helping producers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and produce.

Since Congress founded it 50 years ago to consolidate the United States Department of Agriculture’s research on farm animals, the center has worked to make lamb chops bigger, pork loins less fatty, steaks easier to chew. It has fought the spread of disease, fostered food safety and helped American ranchers compete in a global marketplace.

But an investigation by The New York Times shows that these endeavors have come at a steep cost to the center’s animals, which have been subjected to illness, pain and premature death, over many years. The research to increase pig litters began in 1986; the twin calves have been dying at high rates since 1984, and the easy care lambs for 10 years.

As the decades have passed, the center has bucked another powerful trend: a gathering public concern for the well-being of animals that has penetrated even the meat industry, which is starting to embrace the demand for humanely raised products.

It is widely accepted that experimentation on animals, and its benefits for people, will entail some distress and death. The Animal Welfare Act — a watershed federal law enacted in 1966, two years after the center opened — aimed to minimize that suffering, yet left a gaping exemption: farm animals used in research to benefit agriculture.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Should farm animals have more legal protections? Or are farm animals different from other animals, because they are being raised to provide food for humans?

• Are new laws needed to ensure that farm animals are raised — and slaughtered — in a more humane way?

• How concerned are you about where your food comes from? Do you feel a responsibility to try to eat animals that are raised humanely?

Essay 80: Is It Wrong to Focus on Animal Welfare When Humans Are Suffering?

Would you be surprised to hear that a study found that research subjects were more upset by stories of a dog beaten by a baseball bat than of an adult similarly beaten? Or that other researchers found that if forced to choose, 40 percent of people would save their pet dog over a foreign tourist? Why or why not?

In “Choosing Animals Over People?,” Nicholas Kristof writes:

The cutest primates on earth may be Inguka and Inganda, gorilla toddler twins who playfully tumble over each other here in the vast Dzanga Sangha rain forest, one of the best places to see gorillas, antelopes and elephants play.

The only risk: They are so heedless and unafraid of people that they may tumble almost into your lap — and then their 375-pound silverback dad may get upset. His name is Makumba and he expresses displeasure with a full-speed charge, hurtling toward you until he’s only inches away.

This area where Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Republic of Congo come together is one of the wildest and most remote parts of the world, and the three countries have established bordering national parks. I also visited a forest glade filled with 160 elephants and a large herd of bongo antelopes, plus a few African buffalo. It was like a scene from a Disney movie, and I felt myself melting.

Yet when I turn sentimental at the majesty of wildlife, I sometimes feel uneasy. I wonder: Does honoring animal rights come at the expense of human rights?

One study found that research subjects were more upset by stories of a dog beaten by a baseball bat than of an adult similarly beaten. Other researchers found that if forced to choose, 40 percent of people would save their pet dog over a foreign tourist.

When the shooting of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe attracted far more outraged signatures on a petition than the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland police officer, the writer Roxane Gay tweeted, “I’m personally going to start wearing a lion costume when I leave my house so if I get shot, people will care.”

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

• Considering the causes about which you care most, are you more dedicated to helping animals or humans? Why?

• Why do you think many people are more empathetic toward the suffering of animals than that of people?

• In your opinion, is it wrong to focus on animal welfare when humans are suffering? Why do you think so?

• Mr. Kristof writes: “At the broadest level, it’s a mistake to pit sympathy for animals against sympathy for humans. Compassion for other species can also nurture compassion for fellow humans. Empathy isn’t a zero-sum game.”

  Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Exercise & Health

Essay 81: Do You Like to Exercise?

A recent genetics study of lab rats seems to suggest that the motivation to exercise — or not — may be partly inherited, at least for small rodents. Perhaps some of us are born to enjoy exercise, while others — not so much.

Do you like to exercise?

In “Are You Programmed to Enjoy Exercise?,” Gretchen Reynolds writes:

It’s possible that some of us are born not to run. According to an eye-opening new genetics study of lab rats, published in The Journal of Physiology, the motivation to exercise — or not — may be at least partly inherited.

For years, scientists have been bedeviled by the question of why so few people regularly exercise when we know that we should. There are obvious reasons, including poor health and jammed schedules. But researchers have begun to speculate that genetics might also play a role, as some recent experiments suggest. In one, published last year, sets of fraternal and identical adult twins wore activity monitors to track their movements. The results indicated that the twins were more alike in their exercise habits than a shared upbringing alone would explain. Their willingness to work out or sit all day depended to a large extent on genetics, the researchers concluded.

But which genes might be involved and how any differences in the activity of those genes might play out inside the body were mysteries. So scientists at the University of Missouri recently decided to delve into those issues by creating their own avid- or anti-exercising animals.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Do you like to exercise? Why?

• How do you feel while you are exercising? What about afterward?

• What kind of exercise do you mostly do? Do you play sports? Work out in a gym? Run, walk or go bike riding?

• How often do you exercise? Do you wish you exercised more?

Essay 82: Do You Get Enough Exercise?

Teenagers have a reputation for just hanging around, whether with friends or screens or both, without doing all that much physical activity. A new study says that most adolescents aren’t getting enough exercise, even during the school day.

What about you? Do you get enough exercise?

In “Teenagers Aren’t Getting Enough Exercise at School, or Anywhere,” Roni Caryn Rabin writes:

Teenagers can be a notoriously sedentary group. Now a new study showed that school may be a big part of the problem.

The study, which used GPS devices to track when and where teenagers were getting physical activity, found that, on average, they were physically active only 23 minutes a day while at school. Meager as that figure is, it made up over half the 39.4 minutes of physical activity the average teenager got every day.

Teenagers are “one of the tougher groups to get active,” said Jordan A. Carlson, a research assistant professor at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., and one of the authors of the new study, which was published in Pediatrics. By some estimates, fewer than one in 10 adolescents get the 60 minutes of physical activity a day recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Do you get enough exercise? Do you think you get the 60 minutes of physical activity a day recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?

• What kind of exercise do you mostly do? Do you play sports? Work out in a gym? Run, walk or go bike riding?

• Do you usually have time to exercise during the school day?

• Do you like to exercise? Why?

• How often do you exercise? Do you wish you exercised more?

Essay 83: How Has Exercise Changed Your Health, Your Body or Your Life?

The value of physical exercise is well known.

Do you exercise regularly? If so, what does it do for you?

In the Op-Ed “Fitness Crazed,” Daniel Duane writes about his experiences with fitness and the degree to which it can transform one’s body:

The real harm, however, is caused when this fog of misinformation distracts from a parallel truth. Namely, that athletic coaches the world over conduct applied research all the time, and know precisely how to get people fit. If you train for a sport, you already know this, whether you realize it or not. Anybody who has trained for a marathon, for example, knows that regardless of what some TV fitness reporter says about some uncontrolled observational study with 11 elderly subjects somewhere in Finland, the web abounds with straightforward marathon-training plans that go like this: Every week for several months, take a few short runs midweek and a single long run on the weekend. Make sure the long run gets a little bit longer each time. Before you know it, you’ll be able to run 26.2 miles.

Those plans work for the same reason Mr. Rippetoe’s protocol works: The human body is an adaptation machine. If you force it to do something a little harder than it has had to do recently, it will respond — afterward, while you rest — by changing enough to be able to do that new hard task more comfortably next time. This is known as the progressive overload principle. All athletic training involves manipulating that principle through small, steady increases in weight, speed, distance or whatever.

So if your own exercise routine hasn’t brought the changes you’d like, and if you share my vulnerability to anything that sounds like science, remember: If you pay too much attention to stories about exercise research, you’ll stay bewildered; but if you trust the practical knowledge of established athletic cultures, and keep your eye on the progressive overload principle, you will reach a state of clarity.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …

• Do you think people put too much emphasis on ways to get the best results from exercise?

• What is your exercise regimen?

• How has working out changed elements of your life?

• Why do you exercise?

• What advice would you give someone who wants to start exercising regularly but lacks the motivation?

Essay 84: How Much Do You Think About Your Weight?

America has an obesity problem. It also has an obsession with skinniness. As such, stepping on the scale and weighing oneself is a regular habit for many.

How much do you think about your body weight? Is it something that’s important to you? Why?

In “After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight,” Gina Kolata writes about what researchers have uncovered about losing weight and keeping it off:

Danny Cahill stood, slightly dazed, in a blizzard of confetti as the audience screamed and his family ran on stage. He had won Season 8 of NBC’s reality television show “The Biggest Loser,” shedding more weight than anyone ever had on the program — an astonishing 239 pounds in seven months.

When he got on the scale for all to see that evening, Dec. 8, 2009, he weighed just 191 pounds, down from 430. Dressed in a T-shirt and knee-length shorts, he was lean, athletic and as handsome as a model.

“I’ve got my life back,” he declared. “I mean, I feel like a million bucks.”

Mr. Cahill left the show’s stage in Hollywood and flew directly to New York to start a triumphal tour of the talk shows, chatting with Jay Leno, Regis Philbin and Joy Behar. As he heard from fans all over the world, his elation knew no bounds.

But in the years since, more than 100 pounds have crept back onto his 5-foot-11 frame despite his best efforts. In fact, most of that season’s 16 contestants have regained much if not all the weight they lost so arduously. Some are even heavier now.

Yet their experiences, while a bitter personal disappointment, have been a gift to science. A study of Season 8’s contestants has yielded surprising new discoveries about the physiology of obesity that help explain why so many people struggle unsuccessfully to keep off the weight they lose.

Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center who admits to a weakness for reality TV, had the idea to follow the “Biggest Loser” contestants for six years after that victorious night. The project was the first to measure what happened to people over as long as six years after they had lost large amounts of weight with intensive dieting and exercise.

The results, the researchers said, were stunning. They showed just how hard the body fights back against weight loss.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us:

• How much do you think about your body weight? Is it something that’s important to you? Why?

• Do you think of yourself as having a healthy body weight?

• Are you aware that attitudes about thinness and fatness change over time and in different cultures? Do you think current attitudes will eventually change — or are already changing?

• Have you ever tried to lose weight? Or gain weight? Why? How did you try? Did you feel successful at the end?

Essay 85: How Often Do You Engage in ‘Fat Talk’?

How often do you complain about your body — or overhear others doing so? Have you been known to say, “I’m so fat” to your friends?

What effect do you think public body self-disparagement like this has on the person complaining? On those who are part of the conversation?

In a Sunday Review article, “The Problem With ‘Fat Talk,’ ” Renee Engeln writes:

On Tuesday, in the wake of an online petition signed by thousands of people, Facebook announced that it was removing “feeling fat” from its list of status update emoticons. The petition argued that the offending emoticon, with its chubby cheeks and double chin, reinforced negative body images, and Facebook seemed to agree.

Is it really such a big deal if you tell everyone how fat you feel? After all, a simple “I’m so fat!” can result in a chorus of empathetic voices, saying, “Me, too!” or “You’re beautiful just the way you are!” And that will help you feel better, and help others feel better, too — right?

Wrong. As someone who studies this type of public body self-disparagement, known as “fat talk,” I can say that it probably will make you feel worse. And it may drag down other people with you.

Conversational shaming of the body has become practically a ritual of womanhood (though men also engage in it). In a survey that a colleague and I reported in 2011 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, we found that more than 90 percent of college women reported engaging in fat talk — despite the fact that only 9 percent were actually overweight. In another survey, which we published in December in the Journal of Health Psychology, we canvassed thousands of women ranging in age from 16 to 70. Contrary to the stereotype of fat talk as a young woman’s practice, we found that fat talk was common across all ages and all body sizes.

Most important, fat talk is not a harmless social-bonding ritual. According to an analysis of several studies that my colleagues and I published in 2012 in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, fat talk was linked with body shame, body dissatisfaction and eating-disordered behavior. Fat talk does not motivate women to make healthier choices or take care of their bodies; in fact, the feelings of shame it brings about tend to encourage the opposite.

Students: Read the entire essay, then tell us …

• If you are female, did the statistics in this article about how many women “fat talk” ring true? How often do you engage in conversations like this yourself? How do you think they affect you?

• If you are male, did you recognize the descriptions of typical female body-shaming conversations? What reactions do you have to those kinds of conversations? Do you ever have conversations like this?

• Are you glad Facebook removed the “feeling fat” status update emoticon?

• Why do you think women and girls are much more likely to engage in “fat talk” than men and boys?

• Did reading this article make you question how often you “conversationally shame” your body?

• Do you agree with the author’s conclusion that “we must change the conversation” because “when women question whether their bodies are good enough, they may well be causing other women to do the same”?