Watery Earth- Lesson 5

Questions

1. Do people really struggle to find clean drinking water?
2. What percentage of the Earth's water is salt, and what percent is fresh?
3. What percent of the Earth's fresh water is in the air, ground, surface, and ice?
   

Answers

1. Yes they do. 780 million people don't have access to clean water. That's 2 1/2 times the population of the USA. 345 million people in Africa don't have water. That is almost half of the amount of people who don't have clean water.
2. I think that the percentage of salt water is 42% and the fresh water percentage is 58%.
3. I think the percentage of fresh water in the air is 22%, the percentage of fresh water in the ground is 28%, the percentage of fresh water on the surface of the earth is 30%, and I think the percentage of fresh water in the ice is 20%.
   

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• Earth's water is 97.24% salt water.
• The amount of fresh water in the air is 0.001%
• The amount of fresh water on the surface is 0.01%
• The amount of fresh water in the ground is 0.61%.
• The amount of fresh water in the ice is 2.14%
  

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Reflection

I was so surprised that 97.24% of the Earth's water is salt water. I was so sure that more than half of the Earth's water was fresh/ I just thought that because of the amount of lakes, rivers, streams, and so much other stuff that the amount of fresh water would be much higher. The real percentage of the Earth's fresh water is 2.761%. Even though there are a lot of oceans and oceans are very, very salty, I still thought that fresh water would be a higher percent. Glaciers, ice caps, lakes, rivers and tons of other stuff, water in the air, ground, on the surface, and in the ice all are fresh water but the percentage is still 2.761%. I was shocked. My predictions were really off but I did learn a lot in this lesson.