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Test Your Water Wisdom!
1) What percentage of the Earth is covered with water?
a. 15%
b. 70%
c. 100%
d. None of the above.
2) During which part of the water cycle does rain, snow and hail fall?
a. Evaporation
b. Infiltration
c. Precipitation
d. Transpiration
3) True or False: People can live several weeks without food, but only a few days without water.
4) True or False: The average United States resident uses 10 gallons of water per day.
5) Which of these activities can save the most water each day?
a. Turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth
b. Taking five-minute showers
c. Turning off the water while you wash your car or bike
d. Fixing a leaky toilet
Check Out These Online Water Activities!
Calculate how much water it takes to grow a hamburger and other foods.
Find out how much water you use each day taking a shower, flushing the toilet and brushing your teeth?
Test your Water Sense with this game!
Guess how many baths you could get from a rainstorm.
Learn about the water cycle with this interactive picture.
Test your water cycle vocabulary with this quiz.
Explore what happens to water after it goes down your drain by playing From Here to There.
Find out how water is cleaned in a water treatment plant.
Take a virtual tour of the H2O House and find out how you can save water at home and outside!
Play the Tip Tank and Mission: H2O games.
Featured Activity: Look for Leaks
Leaks around your home can waste thousands of gallons of water per year! Dripping faucets and leaky toilets are common, and can waste water even when no one is using them. Toilet leaks are often “silent” and can be hard to find. Here’s how to find out if your toilet has a leak:
What You’ll Need
- A toilet
- A small bottle of red food coloring
- An adult to help you
What To Do
- Have an adult help you lift off the top of the toilet tank and carefully set it aside.
- Squeeze 12 drops of red food coloring into the tank and wait 15 minutes. Do not flush during this time. (While you’re waiting, you can check to see if there are dripping faucets in your home. Tell an adult if you find one.)
- If red coloring shows up in the toilet bowl, that means water is leaking from the tank. Ask an adult to fix it or call a plumber. Be sure to flush the toilet immediately after this experiment to avoid staining the tank.
If you do find a dripping faucet in your home, here’s a calculator to figure out how much water it wastes.
Brain Buster
Imagine if every home on your street or apartment in your building leaked one gallon of water per week. How much water would be wasted after one year? Here’s how to find the answer:
- Count the number of houses on your street or apartments in your building;
- Multiply by 52 (there are 52 weeks in one year) to get the total number of gallons that would be wasted.
Thanks to DC WASA for this fun experiment and calculation!
Top image courtesy of sandiego.gov; bottom image courtesy of nih.gov.
Learn fun facts about water!
Where is Earth’s Water?
- 96.5% is in the oceans
- 1.7% is frozen in ice caps, glaciers and snow
- 0.78% is in the ground
- 0.013% is in lakes and rivers
- 0.001% is in the atmosphere
- 0.0001% is in animals and plants
- Salt (or saline) water is water that contains salt; freshwater does not contain salt.
- Over the course of 100 years, an average water molecule spends 98 years in the ocean, 20 months as ice, 2 weeks in lakes and rivers and less than one week in the atmosphere.
- About 70% of our body weight is water! Water makes up 83% of our blood, 70% of our brain and 90% of our lungs.
- A tomato, a cucumber and lettuce are about 95% water; an apple, a pineapple and an ear of corn are about 80% water.
- The average person living in the United States uses 100 gallons of water per day – that’s like 100 milk jugs full! Most of this water is used for flushing the toilet and watering lawns and gardens.
- Energy (like electricity, oil and natural gas) heats water for washing and runs appliances that use water. So, when you save water, you also save energy.
- If you shut off the water while you brush your teeth, you can save up to 8 gallons of water every time!
Photo courtesy of Utah.gov.
How will you Be Water Wise?
Learn More
- Where in the World is Water?
- What is the Clean Water Act?
- More about the Water Cycle
- What’s a Freshwater Ecosystem?
- How Can Kids Protect Groundwater?
- The Story of Drinking Water
- Non-point Source Pollution page for middle school students
- Water Quality: Why test water?
- Water Quality Fact Sheet: How do you test if water is clean?
Satellite image of Earth. Photo courtesy of National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Save Water Outdoors
- Help your parents xeriscape your yard:
- Plant plants that are native to your region (adapted to your weather and climate) and don’t need a lot of water to survive.
- Put mulch around your plants to help keep moisture in the soil.
- Wash your bike or car with a bucket and sponge instead of a hose. If you do use a hose, turn it off when you are not rinsing.
- Sweep your driveway, garage or sidewalk with a broom instead of using a hose.
- Help your parents water your yard in the early morning or evening – the cool parts of the day. Watering in the hot sun can cause water to evaporate before plants have a chance to drink it!
- Try not to use pesticides or excess fertilizers on your yard and garden, since rain water can carry them into local streams and rivers, where they can harm the environment.
- Print out the Use Water Wisely Outdoors activity book for more tips and games!
A stream in Iowa. Photo by Lynn Betts, courtesy of Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Save Water in Your Home and School
- Use only as much water as you need, and try not to leave water running when you’re not using it.
- Check faucets for leaks, and ask an adult to fix any you find.
- At home, check your shower and toilet for leaks, and tell your parents if you find one.
- Take a shower instead of taking a bath. Try timing your shower with a clock to keep it under 5 minutes!
- If you like drinking cold water, keep a pitcher of water in the refrigerator instead of running the faucet until it gets cold.
- When you go to school, bring along a reusable glass or steel water bottle instead of buying water in plastic bottles. In many instances, bottled water is actually tap water! Plastic bottles can cause pollution if they are thrown away, so if you do use one, try to recycle it.
Dripping faucet. Photo courtesy of Utah Division of Water Resources, utah.gov.
Other Ways to Be Water Wise
- Plant a tree for National Arbor Day! Trees help absorb and filter storm water, making it cleaner for lakes and streams.
- Print out the Give Water a Hand action guide for youth, and plan a water conservation project with friends or classmates!
- Check out this list of 100 more things you can do.
Check out these online tools to learn about water and how to save it!
Cool Answers to Puzzling Questions
- Are raindrops salty?
- What is hydrology?
- What is a watershed?
- Why is the ocean salty?
- What is acid rain?
Photo by Tim McCabe, courtesy of Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Other Cool Tools
- Water Education Posters for middle school students
- What Do You Know About H2O? activity book
- What would you do if you were a mayor and your town had a water crisis? Voice your opinion.
- How much of your state is wet?
- Green Reading List, including water-themed books
Videos & Animations
This video is about Arizona students who measured the amount of water their school uses. They tested how much water their handwashing stations waste when no one is using them. Now, they are writing a proposal to encourage the school to save, or conserve, water!
- Tap Water or Bottled Water? See what students and teachers think.
- Protect Our Water: a video made by kids
- Be in the Know About H2O – video tips from The Weather Channel
- Water Cycle animation
- Raindrop Road Trip: what happens to rain when it drains?
- Got Water? Where does your water come from? Join Ken, a hydrogeologist, and learn all about groundwater.
- The New York City Water Story – follow water on its journey through the city
Quiz Answers
1) b. About 30% of the Earth’s surface is covered in land – the seven continents – but 70% is covered with water. Most of this water is salt water, found in oceans. The rest is fresh water (water with no salt), which is found in icecaps, glaciers, lakes, rivers, streams, in animals and plants and under the ground. Only less than 1% of all water on Earth is usable to humans.
2) c. Water cycles around and around – the water you drink today might be the same water that dinosaurs drank millions of years ago! It changes form from liquid to gas through evaporation, condenses into clouds and precipitates down as rain, snow and hail. Some of it infiltrates through soil and becomes groundwater. Water absorbed by plants might be released as a gas back into the atmosphere through a process called transpiration.
3) True. All living things need water to live. Our bodies are 70% water – it makes up 83% of our blood, 70% of our brain, and 90% of our lungs! We should drink six to eight glasses of water each day and eat plenty of fruits and vegetables (which also contain water) to stay healthy.
4) False. The average U.S. citizen uses 100 gallons of water per day! Most of this water is used for flushing the toilet and watering lawns and gardens. Other activities like drinking water, taking a shower and brushing your teeth use water too.
5) d. A leaky toilet can waste about 200 gallons of water every day, so fixing it saves a lot of water! You can save 150 gallons of water by turning off the hose in between rinses while you help to wash your family car, and up to 30 gallons a day by taking five-minute showers. The average bathroom faucet uses 2 gallons of water per minute – shutting off the water while you brush your teeth every morning and evening can save up to 8 gallons a day! Conserving water is important all year long, and you can help. How will you be water wise today?
