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A. Agriculture
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- New varieties of farm plants and animals have been engineered by manipulating their genetic instructions to produce new characteristics.
- Government sometimes intervenes in matching agricultural supply to demand in an attempt to ensure a stable, high-quality, and inexpensive food supply.
- Agricultural technology requires tradeoffs between increased production and environmental harm and between efficient production and social values.
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B. Materials and Manufacturing
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Manufacturing processes have been changed by improved tools and techniques based on more thorough scientific understanding, increases in the forces that can be applied and the temperatures that can be reached, and the availability of electronic controls that make operations occur more rapidly and consistently.
- Waste management includes considerations of quantity, safety, degradability, and cost.
- Scientific research identifies new materials and new uses of known materials.
- Increased knowledge of the molecular structure of materials helps in the design and synthesis of new materials for special purposes.
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C. Energy Sources and Use
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- A central factor in technological change has been how hot a fire could be made.
- At present, all fuels have advantages and disadvantages so that society must consider the tradeoffs among them.
- Nuclear reactions release energy without the combustion products of burning fuels, but the radioactivity of fuels and by-products poses other risks, which may last for thousands of years.
- Industrialization brings an increased demand for and use of energy.
- Decisions to slow the depletion of energy sources through efficient technology can be made at many levels, from personal to national, and they always involve tradeoffs of economic costs and social values.
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D. Communication
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Almost any information can be transformed into electrical signals.
- The quality of communication is determined by the strength of the signal in relation to the noise that tends to obscure it.
- As technologies that provide privacy in communication improve, so do those for invading privacy.
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E. Information Processing
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Computer modeling explores the logical consequences of a set of instructions and a set of data.
- Redundancy can reduce errors in storing or processing information but increases costs.
- Miniaturization of information-processing hardware can increase processing speed and portability, reduce energy use, and lower cost.
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F. Health Technology
By the end of 12th grade, students should know that:
- Owing to the large amount of information that computers can process, they are playing an increasingly larger role in medicine.
- Almost all body substances and functions have daily or longer cycles.
- Knowledge of genetics is opening whole new fields of health care.
- Inoculations use weakened germs (or parts of them) to stimulate the body's immune system to react.
- Knowledge of molecular structure and interactions aids in synthesizing new drugs and predicting their effects.
- The diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders are improving but not as rapidly as for physical health.
- Biotechnology has contributed to health improvement in many ways, but its cost and application have led to a variety of controversial social and ethical issues.
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