so...jessica, here's what you missed @ the envirothon today.
got to humber college arboretum 'round 9:45 (15 minutes early). all these teams from other schools (UTS and some collegiate) were there w/ their teachers and who was there from LAT? me and kaley kennedy. no teacher, no teams, no idea what to do.
other abbeyites started arriving 'bout 5 minutes late...and still no teacher supervising. see jessica? you coulda been spazzing w/ me!!! we were missing 2 ppl to form the teams and a teacher supervisor!!!
anyhow...we finally got everything in order, ppl arrived, and we had to go as teams of 5 to these "testing sites" where you get quizzed. there's one for each of the topics: wildlife, forestry, soil and aquatics. so the first one was wildlife, which turned out to be the easiest. the questions were multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank, etc. there was a tree w/ its bark stripped off near the base and we had to determine what animal had done it. and then there was a poor dead star-nosed vole who was floating in a bottle of embalming liquid. it was sooo cute...but...kinda dead :'(
then we went to the soil test site and it was way harder 'cuz we they'd dug a hole so that we could see two different layers of soil. the top one was really sandy, dark and dry, and the second was clay-like and yellowy. >-< if there's one thing i dunno it's soil! we had to know stuff like what the four terms for particles ranging from largest to smallest were, the type of horizon of the soil, soil permeability, causes of soil erosion, etc. we had to guess a lotta the answers for that one.
the next one was aquatics which was okay...i think. they had questions like how wetlands are like kidneys (LOL), stuff 'bout benthic invertebrates ( i don't take bio and have no idea how all these niners know this stuff!!!), what are indicators of a healthy wetland, how aquatic organisms adapt to changing environments, identify two pictures (mayfly and dragonfly nymphs?), etc. there was a fair amount of knowledge there so less guessing hehe.
next one was forestry, which was definitely the hardest. we had to identify trees (umm...oak, pine, poplar, maple, beech, birch...dunno anymore!) and count them, and identify forest regions, and know about tree diseases and tree parasites, etc. lol we came up w/ an answer where we said an oak tree carries the dutch elm disease...then realized that couldn't work so had to switch oak to dutch elm. hehe. we guessed so much it was pretty funny and hopeless at the same time.
then we went back inside to eat lunch and work on oral presentations about urban sprawl. we had markers, big huge post-it notes that were the size of those big sheets of paper you use to do presentations on in religion, and poster boards. our situation was: we were an environmental group who had 10 minutes to make a presentation to the ministers of municipality, agriculture, and something else, about how urban sprawl must be stopped and how it affects wildlife, forestry, soil, and aquatics. our presentation was really organized, if i do say so myself, maybe not all too information-based, but it was clear and concise. we had to go outside again and present to a panel of three judges, and the top two presentations got to present to everybody.
the other LAT team got to present inside, but one of the UTS teams won. meh...not like any of us wanted to go on to the nationals...and then the internationals...we have lives for god's sake!!!!!! *ahem* either ways, it was great weather, really nice outside (except for the mosquitoes), and gave me something better to do other than stare at algeo/calc/physics hwk.
i actually got a nightmare last night about doing all the problems that i couldn't figure out yesterday! that's how much i was working on them!!!
Steph snoozed @ 26.4.03 |
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