WHY I CHOSE CHINESE POLLUTION AS MY TOPIC
Keeping our earth a clean and healthy environment has always been a big part of my life. Growing up in a small liberal town, going to a Unitarian Universalist church, and having a "Discovering Public Works Day" in which the whole school would venture over to the local recycling plant and enjoy the paper and plastic festivities found strewn about the facility. From this I learned that we only have one earth, and we need to protect it the best we can. So, while at the beach or taking a stroll around the local pond, I would pick up trash and recycle or discard it, in the appropriate bins of course. Since then, recycling and helping nature has been a big part of my family. To jump back to the present, a little while before choosing a topic, I was looking around our school campus during lunch and saw several peers abandoning their trash as the bell struck 12:49. This got me thinking about pollution in other countries as well as our own, considering I had to choose a topic before the deadline crept up on me. On the day of the hypothesis due date, I turned in my question at 6 am when I woke up, and had it approved by the start of the period. Throughout the project I thought I had a generally good thesis as I rarely made any changes other than some specificities that would benefit the overall flow in my paper, but other than that the thesis I chose was concise and achieved what I wanted to say in as little as possible. "So far, this mass shutdown of factories has elevated China’s air quality to great heights and sparked several reforms in minimizing air pollution and other environmental traumas."
Whenever I do research papers I tend to create an outline and include a) what I need b) what I think would sound interesting stylistically for the portion and c) what information would go where. When I started taking notes without direction it seemed daunting and a bit overwhelming due to the sheer amount of sources present on the several online databases as well as the world wide web. So, after school, I went home, scrapped my notes, and started on an outline that would benefit my thinking process as well as positively impacting the overall layout of the paper. Doing this allowed me to find relevant data as well as formulate exactly what I wanted to say. The first time I gathered notes together, I had them on a Google Document and, as a Google Doc is not an organized notecard but more of a scrapbook of copy-paste, I had to start from scratch. This benefited me in the long run due to me accessing my inner voice and allowing me to voice my opinion and thought into my argumentative essay.
A surprise I encountered during my quest for knowledge during this fact finding fiasco was that coal was still being used to heat China. No, not that coal is being used to generate electricity or being converted into other energy sources, but that coal is being lit on fire in homes in order to heat houses, and this is in 2017. China, on par with Capitalist America economically, is still using coal for heat. This fact absolutely blew my mind as the thought of coal burning for heat in apartment buildings and skyscrapers sounds like a complete juxtaposition of primitive and modern technology. As for every other fact that I found, it was all mostly predictable: "Pollution is bad," "Air quality is increasing because China stopped air pollution," and etc.
As for new developments that have recently occurred after the fact, I had already covered them. The Ministry of Environmental Protection had provided a list of reforms being continued and introduced in 2018 and I had covered the important and relevant sources. Still, I'm glad that China is finally doing something to improve their air quality, and learning more about the topic has made me all the more thrilled to see the day where China achieves its goals of becoming a beautiful and green country once again.
Whenever I do research papers I tend to create an outline and include a) what I need b) what I think would sound interesting stylistically for the portion and c) what information would go where. When I started taking notes without direction it seemed daunting and a bit overwhelming due to the sheer amount of sources present on the several online databases as well as the world wide web. So, after school, I went home, scrapped my notes, and started on an outline that would benefit my thinking process as well as positively impacting the overall layout of the paper. Doing this allowed me to find relevant data as well as formulate exactly what I wanted to say. The first time I gathered notes together, I had them on a Google Document and, as a Google Doc is not an organized notecard but more of a scrapbook of copy-paste, I had to start from scratch. This benefited me in the long run due to me accessing my inner voice and allowing me to voice my opinion and thought into my argumentative essay.
A surprise I encountered during my quest for knowledge during this fact finding fiasco was that coal was still being used to heat China. No, not that coal is being used to generate electricity or being converted into other energy sources, but that coal is being lit on fire in homes in order to heat houses, and this is in 2017. China, on par with Capitalist America economically, is still using coal for heat. This fact absolutely blew my mind as the thought of coal burning for heat in apartment buildings and skyscrapers sounds like a complete juxtaposition of primitive and modern technology. As for every other fact that I found, it was all mostly predictable: "Pollution is bad," "Air quality is increasing because China stopped air pollution," and etc.
As for new developments that have recently occurred after the fact, I had already covered them. The Ministry of Environmental Protection had provided a list of reforms being continued and introduced in 2018 and I had covered the important and relevant sources. Still, I'm glad that China is finally doing something to improve their air quality, and learning more about the topic has made me all the more thrilled to see the day where China achieves its goals of becoming a beautiful and green country once again.
Heading from "Smog in developing countries"