Question 17
Describe a community problem related to a sustainability issue. Explain how engineers have used their knowledge to develop a solution for this problem and how the solution has reduced the environmental impact to provide two benefits for the community involved.
The answer runs from problem to knowledge to solution to impact to benefits, one mark at each stop
This is QCAA’s own example, the efficient cookstove. Watch an open fire inside a home turn into an enclosed stove, then watch the timber pile and the smoke shrink.
The knowledge and the solution are two separate marks, and so is the environmental impact. Only the last two stops are benefits to people.
Build the answer one sentence at a time and watch the marks
Tap a sentence to add it to your answer, and tap it again to take it out. The marking guide ticks each dot point your answer earns. The 2026 syllabus allows up to 150 words per question, so the counter keeps you honest.
Nothing written yet. Start with the problem.
Work through the solution one mark at a time
Write your own sentence for each step before you reveal it. The quoted wording is QCAA’s sample response, which uses timber-burning stoves in India.
Describe a real community and what is going wrong, and make the sustainability issue visible.
“Stoves in developing countries, such as India, use biomass such as timber as a fuel. Burning timber has been detrimental to the environment by contributing to poor air quality.”
- fuel consumption
- use of contemporary heat-efficient materials
- design that reduces smoke output
- fauna habitat
- or other suitable response consistent with a reasonable understanding.
Marker: describes a relevant community problem related to a relevant sustainability issue
Name the engineering knowledge the engineers used. Here it is materials.
“Engineers have used their knowledge of ‘high-tech’ alloys and ceramics…”
Marker: explains how engineers have … used relevant knowledge
Say what the knowledge produced. Knowledge without a solution, or a solution with no knowledge behind it, earns one of these two marks and not the other.
“…to develop low-cost appropriate stove solutions.”
Marker: explains how engineers have … to develop a solution
Explain how the solution is kinder to the environment. The sample uses efficiency and smoke.
“They have improved the burning efficiency of the stoves by up to 50% by using metal alloys in their construction, reducing size, and using heat-efficient ceramics and effective designs, which reduce smoke output by up to 95%.”
- deforestation
- poor air quality
- global warming
- or other suitable response consistent with a reasonable understanding.
You do not need percentages. They are QCAA’s figures for the stoves in its sample, and a plain “burns less timber and gives off less smoke” makes the same point.
Marker: explains how the solution … reduced environmental impact
Now the people. The sample’s first benefit is health.
“Reducing the mass of timber that is burned has long-term and short-term community benefits, including improving air quality, which has associated benefits for people’s respiratory health…”
- low-cost, heat-efficient stove
- improved health benefits
- reduced need to collect and store biofuels
- or other suitable response consistent with a reasonable understanding.
Marker: explains how the solution … provided a relevant community benefit
The sample closes with a second benefit that reaches beyond the household.
“…and reducing the effects of burning timber on global warming.”
This one is close to an environmental impact, and global warming is listed under environmental impacts in the Notes. A benefit from the community list, such as less fuel to collect and store, is the safer second benefit.
Stoves in developing countries, such as India, use biomass such as timber as a fuel. Burning timber has been detrimental to the environment by contributing to poor air quality.
Engineers have used their knowledge of ‘high-tech’ alloys and ceramics to develop low-cost appropriate stove solutions. They have improved the burning efficiency of the stoves by up to 50% by using metal alloys in their construction, reducing size, and using heat-efficient ceramics and effective designs, which reduce smoke output by up to 95%.
Reducing the mass of timber that is burned has long-term and short-term community benefits, including improving air quality, which has associated benefits for people’s respiratory health, and reducing the effects of burning timber on global warming.
Marker: explains how the solution … provided another relevant community benefit
Each phrase of the question gave you something
There is no scenario, so you bring the problem, the solution and the benefits yourself, and the six elements have to connect into one chain. QCAA did not publish a band for this question. It reads as complex familiar because it is the community-synthesis question you can rehearse, with more moving parts than a recall question but none of the unseen stimulus of 2024 and 2025.
If I had to guess where you might lose marks, it would be the one phrase that hides two marks: “used their knowledge to develop a solution”. Name the knowledge and name the solution, in separate words. The other leak is letting the environmental impact stand in for a benefit, as the sample comes close to doing with global warming. Since 2024 the question has named the domains (materials science, mechanics and control technology), so for 2026 practise this shape alongside 2024 Question 16 and 2025 Question 15.
Only mark this done when you could do it without help. Reading the solution does not count.
Question wording, any figures and marking-guide steps are from the 2021 QCAA Engineering external assessment, © State of Queensland (QCAA) 2021, licensed under CC BY 4.0, and have been adapted, except where a third-party source is named. Tangent Tuition is not affiliated with the QCAA.
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