Effect to Cause – FIND THIS PATTERN!

A text that moves in an Effect to Cause pattern is easier to find because, usually, in the first paragraph, you will find the Effect and the rest of the text leads to a discussion of causes or speculation of causes.

1. Water Scarcity

There are four billion people worldwide who are affected by severe water scarcity for at least one month a year. That is the conclusion of the University of Twente Professor of Water Management, Arjen Hoekstra, after many years of extensive research. This alarming figure is much higher than was previously thought. His ground-breaking research was published in Science Advances.

Professor Hoekstra’s team is the first research group in the world to identify people’s water footprint from month to month and compare it to the monthly availability of water. “Up to now, this type of research concentrated solely on the scarcity of water on an annual basis and had only been carried out in the largest river basins,” says Hoekstra.

He defines severe water scarcity as the depletion of water in a certain area. “Groundwater levels are falling, lakes are drying up, less water is flowing in rivers, and water supplies for industry and farmers are threatened. In this research, we established the maximum sustainable ‘water footprint’ for every location on earth, and then looked at actual water consumption. If the latter is much greater than what is sustainable, then there can be said to be severe water scarcity.” Until now, it had always been assumed in the scientific community that 2 to 3 billion people were affected by severe water scarcity. “Previous research looked at the availability of water on an annual basis, but that paints a more rosy and misleading picture because water scarcity occurs during the dry period of the year,” explains Hoekstra. In his research, he describes for each place the number of months in a year that people are affected by severe water scarcity. That varies from zero to twelve months per year.

University of Twente. (2016, February 15). Four billion people affected by severe water scarcity. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/water_scarcity.htm

Possible Answer: New research suggests more than 2 to 3 billion people are affected by water scarcity monthly because more water than is sustainable is being drawn from the ground, lakes, and rivers. (31 words)

Cause: levels of groundwater, lakes, and rivers are going down

Effect: water scarcity

Sentence Structure: Complex sentence IC DC (dependent clause begins with because)