The Water Cycle
I am learning to inform my audience through an explanation.
By Peter
When you take a drink, do you ever stop to wonder where water came from or how it came to be? Maybe you drank water that cavemen drank millions of years ago? Maybe it could be from a plant! Maybe it came from the water cycle! The definition of a cycle is a series of events or steps that are repeated over and over. The water cycle is really simple anyone could understand it (except babies). 97 percent of water on earth is salt water, leaving the other 3 percent fresh water. The only problem is with freshwater, is that we can only drink 1 percent of the freshwater because either the water is groundwater or it’s ice. The water cycle consists of the three main stages, evaporation, condensation and precipitation. When precipitation ends, the water cycle will restart all over again. The first stage is evaporation.
When you look at your clothes on the clothesline, it may seem wet, but after a while, all the water’s gone off the clothes! This is because the sun evaporated the water off the clothes. It’s the same with the water cycle. The sun will heat up the water and the atoms in the water will move super fast, then the water steams up. And when all the steam is gone, it already has turned into vapour, which you cannot see. The sun will evaporate the water from the plant, but that has another name called transpiration. The heat from the sun will transpirate the water from the plant into steam and into vapor. The vapour now leads us to the next step of the water cycle, condensation.
The next step leading on from evaporation is condensation. An example of condensation is a hot shower. Since the water from the shower is already hot, the hot water will evaporate itself and when it meets the surface of the cold mirror, the mirror will become blurry. This also happens with the water cycle. When the water vapour has risen into the atmosphere, it reaches its dew point and starts to cool down and turn into very tiny water droplets. As the tiny water droplets fill the cloud, the cloud grows darker. The dark clouds leads us to the last step of the water cycle, precipitation.
The last step of the water cycle is precipitation. As the cloud grows darker, it fills up to its maximum limit of water droplets, causing it to rain. Rain state of matter being a liquid.. It can also fall as snow or hail this is its solid form, mist and fog in gas form. Rain that falls to earth that collects together forming a body of water is called collection. But if water falls onto soil, it may seep into the soil and become groundwater. And water that falls onto land, could take another route to a source of water. This is called surface runoff. And if the water falls into a moving stream, that is called streamflow.
In conclusion, the water cycle is something that we cannot live without. Every step is needed for the water cycle, or the water cycle will cease to exist. Evaporation turns and heats the water into steam, condensation, turning the vapour into clouds, and precipitation water falling back onto the ground or a water source. We should take more care of our water and should not pollute the water or else we wouldn’t have water.
