Water Resources & Chemistry Experiment

To ensure health needs, The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends 11.5 cups (2.7 liters) a day for women; 15.5 cups (3.7 liters) a day for men (Armstrong & Johnson, 2018).

We may live in a happy country and not worry about bathing or drinking water for a while. In fact, hundreds of millions of people in the world still do not have direct access to drinking water. The video on the left will present the current situation in countries where water is scarce.

Only 3% of the water on Earth is freshwater, but all life on land ultimately depends on it. Think about those of our daily activities that need to be related to water.

In this video, Paul Andersen explains how water is unequally distributed around the globe through the hydrologic cycles. Seawater is everywhere, but without expensive desalination, it would be useless.

Think back to a time when you experienced a brief water outage? Where else can we get water from turning on the tap no longer gives us access to drinking water? Here is a scientific water filtration experiment where you can collect a cup of rainwater, river water, and seawater from nature and find a material to filter them—for example, sand, coffee, paper, cloth, activated carbon, etc.

By experimenting, we work very hard to filter the water, and we may end up with a clear and transparent liquid. However, filtering water to achieve Canadian Drinking Water Quality is much more difficult than that. If you have a microscope, you will likely find that our filtered water contains microorganisms, parasites, harmful chemicals, etc.