Natural resource management is the focus of this Grade 6 Science worksheet, where students examine how people use air, water, soil, and energy—and how communities can meet human needs while protecting the environment. Through practical scenarios involving water waste, efficient appliances, soil erosion, and water treatment, students compare possible solutions and consider the evidence needed to recommend responsible resource-management choices.

Compare Solutions, Not Just Their Benefits

The reading passage introduces three important approaches to managing natural resources: conservation, efficiency improvements, and technology. Students explore how conservation reduces unnecessary use, how efficiency provides the same service with fewer resources, and how technologies such as water-treatment systems and renewable energy systems can help address resource challenges.

The worksheet also highlights trade-offs. A technology may improve water quality or reduce fuel use, yet still involve costs, require materials, or affect nearby habitats. Students are encouraged to consider who is affected by a decision and why no single solution is best for every community. This makes the resource relevant to environmental science lessons that connect human needs with the responsible use of Earth's resources.

Skills Students Practise

• Resource dependence: explain why clean water, healthy soil, air, and energy are important for daily life, farming, homes, and transportation.
• Conservation and efficiency: distinguish between reducing unnecessary resource use and providing the same service with fewer resources.
• Environmental problem-solving: consider responses to water leaks, electricity use, soil erosion, and water-quality concerns.
• Evidence-based decisions: identify useful observations or test results, weigh benefits against limitations, and support a practical recommendation.

Students work through multiple-choice questions, true-or-false statements, short-answer explanations, a labeled diagram activity, a categorization task, and a short-note activity. These tasks ask students to apply resource-management ideas to specific situations, including choosing ways to reduce classroom electricity use and comparing a water-leak repair plan with a new water-treatment system.

What Comes with the Resource

• A printable Grade 6 Science worksheet on managing resources for people and environments.
• A separate PDF answer key for reviewing responses.
• Student Notes lines at the bottom of the worksheet for recording key ideas.
• A Teacher Guide within the Answer Key PDF, with Learning Objectives, Teaching Tips, Discussion Questions, and Common Mistakes.

Bring Resource Decisions into Science Lessons

Use this natural resources worksheet when teaching Earth systems and resource use, for independent practice after a lesson, or as a review of environmental decision-making. It can also prompt class discussion about local resource challenges: students can compare possible actions, identify evidence that would help evaluate them, and explain how a choice might affect people and the surrounding environment.

Designed for the Texas Science 6 topic of Earth Systems, Space Cycles and Resources, this resource combines foundational vocabulary with realistic decisions and evidence-based reasoning. The separate answer key and teacher guidance make it easier to check student work and prepare follow-up discussion without creating those supporting materials separately.