Due Thursday at 10 pm
Learning Goals: Student will be able to
- Answer basic questions about how a scholarly article is structured.
- Interpret numerical data in the article to draw historical conclusions.
- Identify potentially useful context and corroboration details from an article.
- Effectively work in a team to answer questions.
- Successfully manage a common file system to ensure effective teamwork.
Introduction
This assignment teaches you to read a scholarly journal article. We are using the article Chen, Y., Syvitski, J. P., Gao, S., Overeem, I., & Kettner, A. J. (2012). "Socio-economic impacts on flooding: a 4000-year history of the Yellow River, China." Ambio, 41(7), 682–698.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3472015/
You will use the same steps to read a scholarly article in any field, so this lesson is useful for whatever major and career your choose.
I am asking you to answer questions in sentence format. Once you are experience using scholarly articles, you’ll answer many of these questions in your head, but for this exercise I want to ensure students demonstrate their understanding of all the parts of the article.
Review the entire article, scrolling through it, before answering questions.
Questions- Please answer in complete sentences.
- Who are the authors of this article?
- Where do the author’s work?
- What are their qualifications (degrees, jobs, publication of other articles) to write about Chinese river history?
- When was this article published?
- The article begins with an Abstract: what is an Abstract and how is it useful?
- Download the article (down arrow that says "Download PDF": how long is it in paper pages?
- How does the Conclusion differ from the Abstract?
- Define each of the Keywords in a sentence: Co-evolution, Flood history, Human activities, Positive feedback loop, Yellow River
- Based on Figure 1, what does the size of the circle indicate?
- Based on Figure 1, did the Northern or Southern Yellow River courses have greater frequency of floods?
- What are the two seas the Yellow River has flown into?
- Based on Figure 2, how many different main courses has the Yellow River taken since no later than the 8th century?
- Using figure 3, the X axis shows time (years). What does the Y axis show in Figure 3.a?
- During what "Major Dynasties" in the period after year 1 AD does China appear to have the longest "Prosperous Period?" (Figure 3c)
- The article refers to "km^2" as in "The Loess Plateau in the middle river region comprises 0.28 million km2" What does km^2 mean?
- What does the following sentence mean, in your own words:"Though there is no quantitative record of sediment loads of the Yellow River through historical times, most researchers note that large variations occurred due to time varying human impacts."()
- For Table 1, how many breaches of the river were there during the 5th Century BCE through 70AD?
- What are two named primary sources used to study the history of the Yellow River?
- What were the "dominant driving forces of the flood history of the Yellow River?"
- What human-made water features influenced the evolution of the Yellow River?
- How many sources are included for this article?
- What other contect or corroborration information would you want to better understand this article? Explain three information items.
- Write a paragraph of 100-200 words on how information from this article could be used in your final research report for your team as related to a novel, video game, disaster response, or clothing brand.
