What is Water?
Water is a substance composed of the chemical elements hydrogen and oxygen. It exists in gaseous, liquid, and solid states. Water is one of the most plentiful and essential compounds. As a tasteless and odorless liquid at room temperature, it has the important ability to dissolve many other substances. In fact, the versatility of water as a solvent is essential to living organisms.
How Do We Use Water In Our Lives?
- Agricultural: The use of agricultural water makes it possible to grow fruits and vegetables and raise livestock, which is a main part of our diet. Agricultural water is used for irrigation, pesticide and fertilizer applications, crop cooling (for example, light irrigation), and frost control. According to the United States Geological Survey, water used for irrigation accounts for nearly 65 percent of the world’s freshwater withdrawals.
- Industrial: Manufacturing and other industries use water during the production process for either creating their products or cooling equipment used in creating their products. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), industrial water is used for fabricating, processing, washing, diluting, cooling, or transporting a product.
- Medical: Water has many uses as a tool in the medical field, being used to prepare food for medical patients and to sterilize materials for procedures. It plays a very important part in the healthcare field, being used for washing surgical equipment, as well as for hydrotherapy for patients. Water prevents the risk of infection when treating ill patients and ensures cleanliness and assists in finding cures for patients and new diseases. It can be used in treating people with body dysfunctions, to minimize the risk of infection and controlling the bacteria that enters their body.
- Recreation: Some recreational activities take place in or on the water, such as swimming, boating, fishing, whitewater rafting, and surfing. Other activities are enhanced by being close to water, such as hiking, nature viewing, and hunting waterfowl.
- Household: Domestic water use is water used for indoor and outdoor household purposes — all the things you do at home: drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, brushing your teeth, watering the garden, and even washing the dog.
- Energy: In most power plants, water cools the steam that spins the electricity-generating turbines. Refining transportation fuels requires water, as does producing fuels — for example, mining coal, extracting petroleum, or growing crops for biofuels. Most power plants generate heat from their fuel (by burning coal or natural gas, for example, or by maintaining a fission reaction), and use that heat to boil water, produce steam, and turn turbines. Water is also used during various stages of energy-related resource extraction, processing, and waste disposal.
What Are The Problems With Water?
The main problem with water is our reliability on it. If there is ever a water shortage, people’s everyday lives take a drastic change. When waters run dry, people can’t get enough to drink, wash, or feed crops, and economic decline may occur. In addition, inadequate sanitation — a problem for 2.4 billion people worldwide — can lead to deadly diarrheal diseases, including cholera and typhoid fever, and other water-borne illnesses. Not all water can be safe to drink. According to the World Health Organization, 10% of all drinking water contains lead. Exposure to high levels of lead may cause anemia, weakness, and kidney and brain damage.
What Should We Do?
There are some simple steps that we can do to not only conserve our water but to also make sure that our water is safe for consumption. Approximately, 3,575,000 people die from drinking unsafe or “dirty” water. To avoid this, keeping waterways unpolluted can help. Many waterways are polluted with trash, plastic, and other metals. As water rushes past these things, it takes loose particles along with it (Many metals such as tin, lead, copper, etc.) Some of these metals can be beneficial but some can be harmful. For the poor, getting filtered water is not an option, so doing these things can really help take 3,575,000 to 3,000,000 and hopefully eventually 0. Another thing that we can do is not unnecessarily waste our water. Leaving the water on while brushing our teeth, using the dishwasher all the time.
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