Geography / Year 7 / Geographical Knowledge and Understanding / Unit 1: Water in the world

View on Australian Curriculum website Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority
Curriculum content descriptions

The quantity and variability of Australia’s water resources compared with other continents (ACHGK039)

Elaborations
  • investigating the main causes of rainfall and applying their knowledge to explain the seasonal rainfall patterns in their own place and in a place with either significantly higher or lower rainfall
  • interpreting the spatial distribution of rainfall in Australia and comparing it with the distribution of that of other continents
  • using the concept of the water balance to compare the effects of rainfall, run-off and evaporation on the availability of water in Australia and other continents
General capabilities
  • Numeracy Numeracy
  • Critical and creative thinking Critical and creative thinking
ScOT terms

Water resources,  Rainfall,  Climate

Text

Sustainable table: the coming famine

This is a website about the key issues related to global food insecurity. It contains sections on the scarcity of primary resources; land degradation; land scarcity; waste; climate change; consequences of inaction; and proposed solutions. Photographs, statistics, graphs, maps and figures support the information. This resource ...

Text

Sustainable table: meet your meat

This is a website about the environmental and animal welfare issues related to the consumption of meat. It contains sections on the amount of meat we eat; the environmental impacts of consuming meat; cattle, chicken, egg-laying-hen and pig-farming factories; and what can be done to improve the current state of the meat ...

Interactive

Sites2See – water education

Resources and information on water as a human right, global water equality, water management and water consumption, with a range of teacher resources for water education.

Video

The water cycle in the Murray-Darling Basin

This 12 minute video explains the water cycle in the context of the Murray Darling Basin and the great variability in rainfall in the region causing frequent floods and droughts. It highlights the importance of the rivers in the Murray Darling Basin for agriculture, environmental health, water supply, habitat for migratory ...

Video

Foreign Correspondent: The Mekong: A damming example

The government of Laos has plans for many revenue-raising dams along the Mekong River. Find out about a dam, the Nam Theun 2, which was completed in 2010 and lies across the Nam Theun river in the Nakai Plateau. This clip from the same year asks if the dam could be the flagship for others to be built along the Mekong. Discover ...

Online

Daily extremes

This resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page that provides tables of data for the top ten temperature and rainfall records around Australia on the day, month, season or year selected. Highest and lowest maximum and minimum temperatures, as well as the highest rainfall totals, are displayed and ranked. The tables ...

Online

Daily maximum temperature extremes graph for Australia

This resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page providing graphs that show the percentage area of the selected state or territory, or the whole of Australia, that experienced extremely hot, cold or wet conditions on each day of the year selected. The graphs are available for the previous seven years and are based ...

Online

GeogSpace: year 7 - exemplar

This is a web page consisting of an overview and five illustrations of practice on the GeogSpace website, a resource for teachers. The illustrations relate to the Geographical Knowledge and Understanding, and the Geographical inquiry and Skills strands of the Australian Curriculum: Geography. The five illustrations investigate ...

Online

Daily maximum temperature extremes graphs

This resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page that provides graphs that show the percentage area of the selected state or territory and the percentage area of Australia that experienced extremely hot, cold or wet conditions on each day of the month selected. Graphs on this page are available for the previous seven ...

Online

Australian climate variability and change - trend maps

This resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page that provides trend maps for a number of climate variables including mean, maximum and minimum temperature, total rainfall, sea surface temperature, density of highs and lows, cloud cover and pan evaporation for Australia and for each state and the Northern Territory. ...

Interactive

Water use and efficiency – sustainability action process (Years 7–10)

This resource guides students through an extended school-based or local investigation focussed on water use and efficiency using the five step sustainability action process. The resource supports the investigation of a real-world issue or problem. Students develop and implement a chosen sustainability action and then evaluate ...

Online

Locks, Weirs and Dams

This lesson sequence examines structures that are used by water resource managers in the Murray-Darling Basin including dams, locks, weirs, barrages, fishways, channels and levee banks and explores the positive and negative effects of river regulation. It includes a teacher PowerPoint presentation, separate teacher notes ...

Online

Running the rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin

This lesson sequence examines the role that river operators play in water resource management in the Murray-Darling Basin and explains how they direct water releases and track progress downstream for environmental watering and flood management. It includes a teacher PowerPoint presentation, separate teacher notes and a ...

Online

Climate data online

This rich resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page that provides data for rainfall, temperature, weather and climate and solar exposure recorded by weather stations around Australia. The user can access observations and statistics by entering a weather station number, or by using text or an interactive map to ...

Online

Rainfall and temperature records

This resource is a Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) web page that provides tables of data for the highest rainfall events, and the highest and lowest temperatures for each state and the Northern Territory since 1910. As well as detailed data within each state and the Northern Territory, national data compares the average figures ...

Video

Water management for poverty reduction

This is a three-minute animated video about the difference that access to motor pumps for irrigation can make to poor farming families' food security and livelihood. It aims to persuade viewers that irrigation technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa are a worthy investment. The video sets the scene by illustrating the importance ...

Video

What have we got here: Darling River song

This five minute video is a performance of a song inspired by the Darling River: the history of the river as well as the personal reflections of the singer. The lyrics of the song take the listener on a journey through concepts relevant to the river and its catchment such as human impacts, development by the Europeans, ...

Video

Show me the water!

Where does the water in your tap come from? Fresh water accounts for only 3% of the earth's water supply and only 1% of that is available to us in lakes and rivers or in the atmosphere. But how much do we use for drinking water and what else do we use fresh water for? Watch this video to find out how NASA's Global Precipitation ...

Video

Sciencey: Five things you need to know about climate change

Find out how carbon dioxide makes the Earth warmer, how oceans store heat and the way we can see climate history in ice. What are the consequences of changes in the global climate? What can we do as individuals and communities to stop these negative changes?

Video

Catalyst: How high will sea levels rise?

Much of the world’s population will eventually have to deal with the consequences of sea-level rise, but the question is: how high will the water get? Dr Graham Phillips investigates how scientists are turning to the distant past to predict the impact of rising sea levels. Watch scientists explore 120,000-year-old coastlines, ...