Academic Article Samples
Excerpts from Academic Articles and Essays
‘From both a social and economical standpoint, this is a significant hindrance in society that could be easily improved by reducing average working hours from 8 hours a day to 6. This decrease in hours spent at work will result in an increase of productivity, and lead to more effective time management, with more enthusiastic workers due to adequate time spent away from work responsibilities. A 2019 study showed workers average only 2 hours and 48 minutes a day on productive tasks, while a paper from 2017 demonstrating the correlation between working hours and productivity showed that added fatigue from working longer hours negatively affects productivity. A working week of 30 hours could be implemented in almost the same way a 40 hour working week is, with a stronger focus on prioritising tasks of greater importance. As the Harvard Business Review points out in ‘The Case for the 6 hour Workday’, the Pareto principle suggests, ‘20% of your tasks will create about 80% of the value, so it’s about focusing on those high-value tasks.’
‘Soil degradation decreases the productivity of soil which is a serious threat to food security in the Sahel. R. Lal writes that it is hard to determine exactly how much soil erosion impacts soil productivity but estimates that productivity lost due to past erosion is about 6.6% and predicts that if the current rate of degradation is continued losses in the 21st century will be approximately 14.5% in sub-Saharan Africa (Lal, 2001). In the paper “Climate Change and Variability in the Sahel Region: Impacts and Adaptation Strategies in the Agricultural Sector'' the authors used an analysis of climate sensitivity for agriculture finding that two Sahelian nations, Chad and Niger, could lose nearly all their agriculture that depends on rain by 2100. They go on to say that if temperatures rise by 1-2.75 degrees C that cereal harvest in Mali could be 15-19% lower than present by 2030, according to a recent simulation exercise. This will cause food prices to double. Reduced agricultural production and increased food prices brings the risk of hunger from 34 percent to roughly 70 percent of the Malian population by 2030 (quoted in Kandji et al). This lower production is happening as the population is increasing. The author of “The nature, causes and consequences of desertification in the dry lands of Africa'' says that during the past thirty years the population has doubled and is expanding at a rate of about 3% a year, which translates into 21 million more people to feed every year (Dokum, 1998). Much of this population growth is in the Sahel region. When one considers that the soil productivity is decreasing while the population is increasing it is easy to see that this is a significant problem for the Sahelian population. The region's other major industry, livestock herding, is also being threatened by desertification.’