Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra features stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework, or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write an 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: China Opens World's Largest Dam, 6/18/03
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june03/dam_6-18.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Where is China? What do you know about the people who live there?

2. What do you know about rivers? Describe some of the seasonal changes that occur in rivers.

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What significant event occurred in China in 1998?

In 1998, in some of the worst flooding in recent years, more than 2,000 people died and almost 14 million were left homeless. By the end of the rainy season, the rising waters had impacted some 240 million Chinese, close to the population of the entire United States.

2. Who first envisioned a solution to the Yangtze River problem?

As far back as 1919 Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, envisioned a dam that would control this chronic flooding, as well as harness the power of the historically unpredictable 3,700 mile-long Yangtze River, the third-largest river in the world.

3. What do Chinese leaders hope to accomplish by building the Three Gorges Dam?

Chinese leaders claim that the dam will prevent the chronic flooding of the Yangtze as well as generate income for China's interior provinces through the sale of electricity and the ability of large 10,000-ton ocean vessels to travel a thousand miles inland to the city of Chongqing. Chinese leaders see the dam as a key to the modernization of China and as a symbol of the power of China.

4. Why are some critical of the dam project?

Critics claim that a much smaller project could have accomplished the same goals at a much smaller cost to the environment and people living in the region.

5. What significant event happened at the Three Gorges Dam this week?

On Monday the area of the Yangtze River affected by the dam opened to shipping in the first passenger test run of the world's largest hydroelectric project. Shipping had been closed on the river since April 10.

 

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think the Three Gorges Dam project is a good idea or do you agree with critics of the project? Do the positive aspects of the dam outweigh the negative aspects? Justify your answer with facts from the story as well as further research.

2. Research the lives of people who have been directly impacted by the Three Gorges Dam project, both positively and negatively. Choose one and write a creative essay from his or her perspective. How has this project changed his or her life?