The study of environmental radioactivity is a topic which is not usually included in physics
courses in Brazilian and Latin American universities. Consequently, high-school teachers
are not able to show experimentally or discuss with their students the effects of exposure to
terrestrial radiation. This paper presents a laboratory experiment in a teaching
programme on the physics of ionizing radiation. It is based on the evaluation of the
background radiation levels from areas with high concentrations of natural or artificial
radionuclides in the soil. A brief analysis of the theory behind the technique and a
description of some measurements, including their interpretations, are presented.
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