A Closer Look at Oil and Energy Consumption
Students explore oil productionCopyright Agência Brasil. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_platform_P-51_%28Brazil%29.jpg
Students analyze international oil consumption and production data. They make several graphs to organize the data and draw conclusions about the overall use of oil in the world.
Engineers of all disciplines use data as a tool. Organizing data into tables and graphs helps them better understand problems and formulate solutions. For example, engineers often analyze data to understand energy consumption around the world; they put this data into graphs to analyze it visually. From examining data, engineers may: learn which problems impact the most people, notice patterns and trends, clearly communicate with others, forecast future demands, etc.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Describe the consumption and production of oil and energy in the U.S.
- Create and interpret pie and bar graphs, including practice in plotting and ranking data.
- Understand the role of engineering to create new technologies for the production and consumption of oil and alternative energy sources