Biodiversity Loss or Poverty?

I can bang out 50 pages on either. If you just want to go with the easiest poverty would be easier.

However, note that teachers/instructors/professors will often grade you worse if they have read your paper 100 times. You have a better chance of having a fresh paper with biodiversity.

Personally, I would go with all the bathroom bullshit we have going on here. It is new and they probably haven’t read a paper about it yet.

In general, and if there are no strong other reasons to do otherwise, I’d say you should go with the topic that is more interesting to you. Always write about things you care about, when you can. It makes it easier, is more interesting, and makes for a more interesting read and generally better grade, since you’ll tend to have something to say, as long as you can stick to critical thinking rather than saying unsupported opinions.

My goodness.. please do. I’ll pay you @johnpowell
Alright, to make sure I’m understanding you; I may have better results if I go with biodiversity so long as it’s something new or fresh. Something they haven’t paid too much attention to? Heck, I may as well go with it. It helps with @Zaku and their response on choosing a topic of interest to me. Poverty is an important topic, but as I mentioned in the prompt, I’m leaning more towards biodiversity. Might as well.
Thank you for your responses. Let’s do this.

I think you could do well with either topic, so don’t worry about making the “right” choice.

My personal preference would be biodiversity, because there are a huge number of topics you could choose.

Here are a couple of ideas around biodiversity:

How scientists are working to preserve biodiversity with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

How farmers discovered the importance of biodiversity centuries ago and use crop rotation for healthier farms, and how it is even useful in backyard gardens.

The Wikipedia Crop Rotation says it’s even mentioned in the Bible.

I appreciate your response @Call_Me_Jay
Thank you! I’ll be getting to work on this biodiversity topic now. Everyone have a good rest of your day/night!

If you go the biodiversity route the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a good place to start. And then you can go into Monsanto. Hundreds of pages in that mess.

Edit :: Or what the guy above said.

Welcome to Fluther.

People have libraries filled with entire books on either topic. If your topic is so broad (and vague) as “poverty” or “loss of biodiversity” – with no more qualification than that – then writing five pages would not even constitute a decent foreword or introduction to either topic. “Putting out five pages on poverty” would be … a pointless exercise in bloviation. You would end up probably writing “poverty bad” in five insufferable pages of jargon, adjectives, synonyms and filler words, and produce (and receive) absolutely no benefit from the process.

That’s not what writing is about. Not what it should be about, anyway. You need to learn something about some detailed aspect of your subject that interests you (after you have thought about and written some kind of decent “thesis summary statement” about what question you intend to research and answer), then do the research, organize your notes and citations, outline an argument and then create and write the argument to follow the outline and prove your point – or, perhaps, lead you to a conclusion that you did not expect, which might point the way to further study and research. Finally, you would include a bibliography of your sources, organized according to whatever style manual you’re using. (This may be more than is called for if you’re just expected to write five pages, but this is the way short essays become theses, dissertations, books and careers. It’s how scholarship is done.)

What is needed first is “focus”. For example, on poverty:
– How have humans historically raised themselves from a “natural” state of poverty?
– Why don’t we all live in poverty, as most humans have done for tens of thousands of years?
– Why do some people choose to live in poverty?
– What are some government policies that perversely increase the poverty that they claim to fight?
– What are the differences in people who come from similarly impoverished backgrounds, yet achieve wildly divergent outcomes?
– How much of a factor is age (or ethnicity, or national origin, or gender, or education or whatever other differentiator you want to choose) in predicting poverty?
– What are the effects of poverty on people’s lives?

You can narrow focus in “biodiversity loss” in the same type of way. You need to narrow your focus to make this a research paper, which will help you to learn how to do the research in the first place, and then to write about it, quote and cite your sources, footnote, and otherwise write, rewrite, edit and present your paper as a “work of scholarship” instead of simple word vomit to meet some minimal requirements for a term paper – which would mean nothing at all.

Since you’re only expected to do five pages, then you should have a quite narrow focus indeed. Any one of the suggested topics could be a book. (And probably has, for all I know.)

For a different approach, why not write a paper on whether or not poverty is necessary for our society to function?