Flat-lay of WA ore samples — nickel, lithium, gold — beside copper wire, a lithium-ion battery and a disassembled smartphone, with the five-step chain from extraction to everyday use
Year 7 · Unit 02 of 05

From the Ground to Your Hand

How does something buried underground end up in your pocket?

Economics made physical. One commodity is traced end-to-end so that opportunity cost, the circular flow and business ownership are discovered inside a real chain rather than defined on a slide.

The five lessons

A smartphone fully disassembled with every component laid out, surrounded by the raw ore specimens its materials come from — copper, gold, nickel and quartz
01
The Phone Teardown
What is actually inside a device; commodity origins traced to source regions (several to WA); how changing consumer tastes and preferences — the next phone, the next battery — drive what businesses produce and what gets mined.
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The supply chain laid out as objects: exploration map and ore sample, excavator and ore, processing plant and copper ingots, container ship, circuit board, and finished phone — with six stage cards from exploration to consumer
02
The Chain
Supply-chain stages — exploration, extraction, processing, shipping, manufacture — the jobs standing at each, and how businesses set the price at every step and adjust it as demand changes.
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A mine site office desk mid-decision: pit map, labour roster, equipment quote, water allocation chart and a limited budget table with committed and remaining funds, calculator and notes under red dust
03
Opportunity Cost at the Mine Gate
Why opportunity cost exists when limited resources are allocated; students make allocation decisions with consequences.
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The two-sector circular flow as a WA scene: a household and local market on one side, a mine operation on the other, joined by a glowing loop — workers and money flowing one way, goods and wages the other
04
Round and Round: The Circular Flow
The two-sector circular flow model built from WA examples: households and businesses, money and product.
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Five panels of business scale: a lone prospector panning, a family mining operation at a shed, a mid-sized private operation with trucks, an industrial processing plant at dusk, and a vast open pit beside a global shipping port
05
Who Owns the Chain?
Different types of business ownership, from sole-trader prospector to listed company; students place real WA businesses on the spectrum. Summative map completed.
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Students produce

A complete supply-chain map of one commodity, with every job annotated.

Industry connection

Worker profile video: a role most students have never heard of.

Summative task · Supply Chain Map

A complete visual chain for one commodity, from WA deposit to consumer device, with every stage and every job annotated.

Curriculum alignment — the exact wording

This unit teaches the following mandated content, quoted verbatim from the revised Western Australian Curriculum.

Economics · Consumers and businesses + Innovation and enterprise

“Why opportunity cost exists when decisions are made to allocate limited resources to meet unlimited needs and wants”

“The interdependence between households and businesses using the two-sector circular flow model”

“How businesses respond to the changing tastes and preferences of consumers”

“How businesses set prices for a product and how they might adjust the price according to changes in demand”

“Different types of business ownership”

Source: SCSA, Humanities and Social Sciences — Scope and sequence of the mandated curriculum content, P–10, For implementation in 2026.

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