Physical Resources Video Lecture - Class 9

[Intro]
You’ve probably noticed by now -- in your
years of being a human -- that human beings
need a lot of stuff to live: food, water,
shelter, YouTube.
Well, maybe not that last one.
So where does all of this stuff come from?
Why, it comes from our very own Earth!
We live on a planet has all of the stuff we
need to survive.
There’s fresh water to drink, fruit on trees,
and wood to build our houses.
Convenient, right?
We call this “stuff” resources.
Because humans need so many of these resources
to live, it’s easier for us to form communities
-- like cities or neighborhoods -- where these
resources are plentiful, so we don’t have
to travel long distances to find them on our
own.
That’s why you don’t normally see big
cities in the middle of deserts --where there’s
no water -- or at the tops of freezing mountains
--where there’s no food.
Think about your own town, and where it’s
located.
If it’s close to things like water and agriculture,
that was probably no accident.
Humans, and other animals, tend to thrive
in places that are near the resources they
need to survive.
Of course, the stuff we need to live doesn’t
come ready-to-use right out of the Earth!
Although I would personally love it if there
were, say, a lake full of pure hot fudge.
But, in order for us to use the resources
around us, we have to transform them first.
Because I’m kinda hungry right now, let’s
use food as an example.
In fact, let’s make a cake!
Think about all the ingredients that you need
to put together in order to bake one of these
delicious treats.
Let’s start with some water.
The water that comes out of your kitchen faucet
most likely came from the rivers and lakes
around your town.
But before the water is safe to drink, it
has to be cleaned and stored in places like
reservoirs and water towers.
K, what next?
Flour, eggs, sugar and milk.
These ingredients, and a lot of the other
foods that we eat, have to be cultivated -- which
means, grown on farms -- before they can be
shipped to grocery stores.
In order to do this, farms have to be where
crops and livestock can live and grow.
Alright, now we need to mix these ingredients
all together.
That means that our electric mixer needs power.
The energy we use to power all of our gizmos
can come from a lot of different places.
Sometimes it comes from materials that we
have to dig underground to find, like oil
and natural gas.
Some houses get their energy from the sun,
or by wind.
Some towns that are close to large dams can
even get their energy from moving water--
but more on that later.
Now, how do we bake this bad boy?
The same kinds of energy that powered our
mixer also help do things like heat our homes
and cook our food.
So from start to finish, everything we used
to make our cake came from the transformation
of the resources around us.
The effect the natural world has on our lives
is immense, and something as simple as baking
a cake shows that we wouldn’t be able to
live the way we do without the abundance of
natural resources on our planet.
And it doesn’t hurt that the end result
of those resources can be a cake!