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The Importance of Water

By Talia N  akayama

I can’t wait for social studies today! Yesterday we learned how much fresh drinking water is available on the planet. To start we estimated how much we thought there was, and our estimations were from 10% to 70%. We worked in groups to make a graph of our estimates. We were surprised that only 0.003% of the world’s water is drinkable! Here are some facts about water:

• 3% of Earth’s water is fresh water; 97% is salt water.

   

• 20% of that is non-frozen; 80% of the fresh water is frozen in polar ice and glaciers.

• 0.5% of that fresh water is available for drinking; the other 99.5% is polluted, trapped in soil, too far below the ground, etc.

After all these calculations we discussed the importance of water and why there are places in the world where people don’t have accessible drinking water. We also learned that Americans use 70-80 gallons of water per person per day to bathe, wash clothes, flush toilets, water plants, drink, wash dishes, etc. In Ghana people use 7-8 gallons of water per person per day, and many have to walk quite a distance to get their water. This afternoon we are going to carry a bucket of water for half a mile to see what it would be like to not have running water. Next week I’ll let you know what it was like.

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