Generate Ideas

Your teacher will divide you into teams comprising four to six students to answer questions about hurricanes and certain waterborne diseases.  Use the resources listed under "Multiple Perspectives" to help you find the answers.  When you have finished, your team will share your answers and ideas with the other students in the class.  This exercise is intended to find out what you already know and identify critical gaps in your knowledge on the topic.

Essential Questions

1. How does water move through different reservoirs in the hydrologic cycle?
2. What is a hurricane?  What type of weather is associated with a hurricane?
3. What factors influence the strength or intensity of hurricanes?
4. How do warm oceans fuel hurricanes?
5. Hurricanes act as safety valves, moving hot air from the lower to the upper atmosphere and from the tropics to regions of higher latitude.  How does this process serve to balance Earth’s climate, and how is it related to the hydrologic cycle?
6. What are the benefits and potentially disastrous consequences of hurricane strikes, including non-weather events?
7. What are waterborne diseases?  Insect vectors?
8. Mosquitoes carry a wide range of infectious diseases that can be a threat to human health.  Following hurricanes, mosquitoes can breed in available standing water.  What are some of the diseases that mosquitoes spread in the United States?
9. What is meant by disaster preparedness?
10. How can Texans best prepare for hurricanes and their aftermath?