What would happen if..? (2nd Conditional)

You are going to practise the 2nd conditional by

• discussing some imaginary situations
• reading some texts and doing some comprehension activities  featuring conditionals

Note; Conditionals can be revised here  Conditionals 1 and 2


1) Introduction

Look at the presentation and answer the questions in pairs or groups. Click to go to each new question.

If... 2nd conditional from David Mainwood

2) Discuss

What do you think?

1. What would happen if you stopped sleeping?
2. If the ice caps melted, would it flood Earth?
3. What would happen if you were locked in an airtight room? How long would you survive?
4. What would happen if a large meteorite hit the Earth?

3) Reading / Webquest

Read the questions for each text and then find the answers

1) What would happen if you stopped sleeping?

Look at these questions

1. What happens if you don't get enough sleep?
2. What are the 3 theories of why we sleep?
3. What do you think happens after three days of no sleep
4. What would happen if you were forced to stay awake?

Now read here to find the answers

To answer this, we need to look at some basics about sleep. The amount you need depends on your age. A newborn baby might sleep 20 hours a day while a 4-year old might need only 12 hours. The average for 10-year-olds is 10 hours a day and most adults seem to need seven to nine hours of sleep a night. And the average senior citizen can often get by with just six or seven hours a day. Whatever amount you need, you know you feel great after a good night of sleep. But, why is that? Does anything important happen during sleep? Yes, scientists have found that two key things happen during sleep: growth hormone in children is secreted and chemicals important to the immune system are secreted. If you don't get enough sleep, you're more prone to disease, and a child's growth can be stunted by sleep deprivation.

Beyond the immune system and growth hormone factors, no one really knows why it is that we sleep, but there are all kinds of theories, including the following. For one, sleep gives the body a chance to repair muscles and other tissues, replace aging or dead cells. Also, sleep gives the brain a chance to organize and archive memories (dreaming is probably a part of that process). Furthermore, sleep may be a way of recharging the brain. And finally, in very early times, sleep made sense in that people couldn't really do anything in the dark anyway, so they might as well "turn off" and save the energy.

A good way to understand why you sleep is to look at what happens when we don't get enough. If you've ever pulled an all-nighter, you know that missing one night of sleep isn't fatal. A person will generally be irritable during the next day and will become tired easily or will be totally wired because of adrenalin. If a person misses two nights of sleep, it gets worse. Concentration is difficult and attention span falls by the wayside. Mistakes increase. After three days, a person will start to hallucinate and clear thinking is impossible. With continued wakefulness, a person can lose grasp on reality. A person who gets just a few hours of sleep per night can experience many of the same problems over time.

It only takes three days of sleep deprivation to cause a person to hallucinate. Obviously, if you were to go for a longer period of time, the symptoms would worsen and in time, would most likely prove fatal. Rats forced to stay awake continuously will eventually die, proving that sleep is definitely essential. So, unless you were being forced to stay awake, you'd probably fall asleep before something as drastic as death could happen.

It's interesting to know that some people can function on very little sleep if necessary. A portion of a Navy SEAL's rigorous training program is a good example of this phenomenon. During a particularly rigorous week of training, the trainees must engage in highly physical activities for about six days - all of their hard work is accomplished on about four hours of sleep for the entire week!

From http://express.howstuffworks.com/ask-mb-stop-sleep.htm

2) If the ice caps melted, would it flood Earth?

Read the text below. Fill in the gaps with these sentences endings;

a) sea levels would not be affected.
b) it wouldn't flood all the Earth.
c) it would add another 20 feet to the oceans.
d) all of these cities would be under water.
e) sea levels around the world would rise about 200 feet.




Full text here http://express.howstuffworks.com/ask-mb-ice-melt.htm

3) What would happen if you were locked in an airtight room? How long would you survive?

Read the text to find the answer 

In order to answer this question, we need to figure out how much oxygen you actually use in a normal day. First, let's assume that you're sitting in a chair, just hanging out. Maybe you're watching TV. You are not panicking, and you are not exercising. You might take 10 to 12 breaths per minute. That means that you will inhale and exhale seven to eight liters of air (about one-fourth of a cubic foot) every minute.
You could actually measure this yourself by holding a garbage bag in your hand and exhaling each breath into it. A typical white garbage bag that you find in the kitchen holds 50 liters or so. It would take you five to ten minutes to fill it full of air, depending on how big you are, and what you are doing. If you do the math, you can see that in a day you breathe something like 11,000 liters of air. That's roughly 200 garbage bags full of air, or 388 cubic feet of air.

Now, what if someone were to completely seal your bedroom with plastic and lock you inside. How long would you last? A typical bedroom is roughly 12 feet by 12 feet by 8 feet. That is 1,152 cubic feet or 32,621 liters. It would take you three days to inhale and exhale 1,152 cubic feet of air. However, that does not mean that you would actually be able to live in your sealed room for three days.

If you could somehow use your room as a giant "air tank" -- so you only breathed the air in it once -- that would be one thing. This is what people do when they go scuba diving. They breathe air out of their tank and then exhale it into the water. But you're not just breathing in - you're breathing out into the room, too.

Since you are sitting inside a sealed room, you have two problems. The first problem comes because you are breathing out carbon dioxide with every breath. You are "polluting" the room with carbon dioxide. The other problem is that, with each breath, you are consuming oxygen. So the amount of carbon dioxide in the room is rising with every breath, and the amount of oxygen is falling.

When the person first locks you in the room, about 21% of the air in your room is oxygen. The rest is nitrogen. There is hardly any carbon dioxide at all in the room (0.05% or less). Now you take a breath. What goes in is 21% oxygen and 0% carbon dioxide. What comes out is 16% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide. Once you get to the point where the room's total oxygen falls to 19% and the carbon dioxide level reaches 2%, you're in trouble. Not only are you getting less oxygen, but you're now also taking in carbon dioxide, which is actually a poison.

Therefore, in reality, you will only last a day and a half or so. Then your body will begin having problems. So, you had better start working on finding a way out of that room! 

From http://express.howstuffworks.com/ask-mb-oxygen.htm


Read again. Match the numbers and sentences in the exercise below.

4) Finally (very), what would happen if a 500km asteroid hit the Earth?

• Would we survive?
• What would happen to the oceans?
• What would happen to life on Earth?

Watch the video and find out. Turn the captions on and read the subtitles.






More practice
More here  http://express.howstuffworks.com/ask-marshall.htm
What other interesting facts can you find?

Can you make any more questions with what would happen if..?
Ask the questions and give answers.

Go here for more conditionals practice  Conditionals 1 and 2


Printable exercises here



Answers for Ex1 and Ex4 highlight below

Ex1

1. You're more prone to disease, and a child's growth can be stunted by sleep deprivation.
2.    A) Sleep gives the body a chance to repair muscles and other tissues and replace aging or dead cells.   B) Sleep gives the brain a chance to organize and archive memories (dreaming is probably a part of that process).   C) Sleep may be a way of recharging the brain.
3. A person will start to hallucinate and clear thinking is impossible. With continued wakefulness, a person can lose grasp on reality.
4. You'd probably fall asleep before something as drastic as death could happen.

Ex 4 

Life would not survive and the oceans would be vaporized