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INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF KUALA LUMPUR!

MAY 5, 2013

NEWSLETTER Human Impact on Our Environment:


How can we help make our earth a better place for the generations to fo!ow?
Have you ever stopped to think about the footprint your household makes on our environment? With over seven billion people in the world right now, the demand for resources is growing and taking its toll on our planet. We can all do our part by cutting down on what we use, after all, the change begins with you. If you dont stand up and make a change, nobody else will. ! For the past year, my family and I have been working to cut down on the amount of electricity we use. We have been making small changes throughout our household in the hope that it will lessen our overall kilowatt per hour, monthly usage. We followed an environmental action plan with dierent ways we could reduce our families usage. This plan required us to turn o unnecessary lights, reduce the amount we use our washing machine (using it only on a full load of washing), stop using our dryer, turn our computers o at night instead of putting them to sleep and set our ACs to a higher temperature. These small changes have helped to reduce the kilowatt per hour usage in my families monthly usage. To get a better idea of how these changes impacted my kilowatt per hour usage, have a look at the table adjacent. The table shows for each month my families average kilowatt per day usage from August 2012 to April 2013. ! I predicted that if my family wanted to continue to decrease our energy usage to a level of 300 kwh/month or 10 kwh/ day, it would take us 31 months from today or two years and seven months ( December 2015 ). To gure this out, you need to plot your average daily energy ! usage for each month on a line chart and place a line of best t on the chart, seen in the following graph.

To nd the equation of this line of best t, I found out where the line began and where it nished. The dierence between the nal usage and the start usage divided by the eight month period, told me the slope. The usage started at 79 kwh per day making this the y intercept of this graph. The equation of a linear line is y=mx+b. The slope (m) is -1.75 and the y intercept (b) is 79. This means that the equation of this line is y=-1.75x+79, where x is the number of months from August 2012. Now that we have done all this work, if we substitute 10 kwh per day into the equation as y and solve for x, with some simple algebra, you will gure out that : 10=-1.75x+79 then x = (10-79)/-1.75 x=39months from Aug 2012 (or 31 months from today) ! Simple changes, can make a huge dierence. It has helped my family and I reduce our carbon footprint on the world in such a short span of time. Look around your own household and make your own ! environmental action plan with your family and see the dierence in your kilowatt usage and your bill prices! -Stephanie Vesel! !

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