Assignments
The assignments serve two main purposes: teaching and assessment. First, the teaching purpose
comes from your active interactions with the course materials and the textbooks while you are
working on your assignments. Secondly, the assessment purpose can be achieved when your
assignments are assessed by the tutors who give you marks and indicate how you can improve in
your assessment scores on your assignments.
As you work through your assignments, you will gain experience in a wide range of writing and
analytic skills such as essay writing, data analysis and interpretation, planning and field report
writing. In this way, assignments may help you to prepare for the final examination which often
requires your writing and analytic skills. To do well in assignments, you should write out the
relevant facts and ideas and, more importantly, you need to provide your independent analyses
and relevant examples to support your ideas or arguments.
There will be five assignments for the course ENVR S237. You will need to submit all FIVE
assignments in order to fulfill the course requirement/ pass the course. All the assignments will
contribute towards the final course grade.
ENVR S237 Environmental Control and Public Health
Spring term 2019
ASSIGNMENT 01
Covering Units 1–4 Cut-off Date: 28 Mar 2019
You should answer all questions.
Question 1 (30 marks)
Choose one of the pollutants that have raised local or global concerns and write an essay (within
1,000 words) describing the pollutant that includes the following contents:
(A) The way in which the pollutant concerned is classified; (6 marks)
(B) The properties of the pollutant; (8 marks)
(C) State two effects of the pollutant on the environment, human health or other
organisms; (8 marks)
(D) State two relevant measures of pollution control being done or suggested by the
governments or other parties (6 marks)
(E) Good organization and clarity of content (2 marks)
Include a reference with appropriate format for all the sources of information that you use
when writing. The reference list is not counted in the word count.
Question 2 (30 marks)
Examine the following diagram (Figure 1). Describe the nitrogen cycle (20 marks) and explain its
importance (10 marks).
Figure 1 The nitrogen cycle.
Question 3 (40 marks)
Based on the data of an epidemiological study on lung cancer in country X in 2018 below (Table
1), answer the following questions.
Table 1 Lung cancer incidence (new cases) in country X in 2018.
Overall
Smoking habit Age
Smoker Nonsmoker 20-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75-84 85+
Male 131,860 104,566 27,294 1319 1714 9626 24262 39690 41931 13318
Female 122,530 94,028 28,502 1525 2183 9925 23526 36146 36904 12321
- The population ratio of male: female is roughly 1:1.
(A) Outline the aims and objectives of this epidemiological study. (5 marks)
(B) Present the data using appropriates table(s) and/or figure(s). (15 marks)
(C) Based on the data and your table(s) and/or figure(s), suggest and discuss the risk factor(s)
of lung cancer in country X in 2018. (10 marks)
(D) Another epidemiological study of lung cancer tries to use death certificates as data sources.
Suggest four possible problems that may happen when assessing the validity of the data.
(10 marks)
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