Natural Resources

What Are The Different Uses Of Water

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What Are The Different Uses Of Water

The uses of water can be broadly divided into agricultural, domestic, and industrial uses. The major portion of water in India is used in agriculture, as India is mainly an agricultural country. Besides being essential for life, water is used for many other purposes. In India, about 70% of the total water available is used for agriculture, 20-22% by industries, and only 8% is used for personal or domestic needs. Let us learn more about the various uses of water.

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Percentage use of water

3 Major Uses of Water

Agricultural
Our country depends a lot on agriculture. Farmers rely on water to sustain their agricultural crops, e.g., wheat, paddy, etc. Many a times, rainfall is not sufficient to water these crops, and farmers have to use artificial watering systems, referred to as irrigation. Nearly 60% of the Indian population depends on agriculture for their living, and uses nearly 90% of all water for irrigation. Irrigation systems are necessary because the monsoons are unpredictable and in regions where cultivation completely depends on the rain, no rain can result in reduced yields or even total crop failure.

What Are The Different Uses Of Water 2Domestic
We need water to drink. Water that is suitable for drinking is called potable water. We also need water to bathe, wash clothes and dishes, clean our house, and to water plants. It also regulates the climate of a place and provides homes to many animals. Water required for household use is called domestic water. It is required for a variety of purposes such as drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, watering plants, etc. We generally get water in our homes in one of the following two ways. It is either delivered by the municipal water distribution system, or we extract it from an underground source through a motor-driven tube well. Apart from these uses, water is also used for transportation and recreation.

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The water distribution and water treatment system in a city

In cities, municipal water treatment plants supply homes with treated water that matches drinking water standards. In rural areas, however, over 80% of the domestic water comes from underground sources. In areas where water is scarce or where wells, ponds, and rivers dry up in summers, people have to travel long distances to fetch water for their daily needs.

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Industrial
Industry depends on water at all levels of production. It is used as a raw material, a solvent, a coolant, a transport agent, and for generating electricity. Due to rapid industrial development, the demand for water in this area has increased in the past several years. Industrial needs Factories use a large amount of water every day—as raw material, for cleaning, heating, cooling, generating electricity (e.g., water turbines), etc. The amount of required depends on the kind and size of the factory, and water.

What Are The Different Forms Of Water

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Different Forms Of Water On Earth

Water is a natural resource that is vital to the presence of life on Earth. Water exists in abundance on our planet Earth. However, only a very small fraction of it is fit for human consumption. Let us first understand the distribution of water on Earth. Study the pie chart given below.
Where is most of the water on Earth found?

About three-fourth of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. That is why it is also called the water planet. But do you know how much water is readily available for use? Most of the water (about 97%) is in the seas and oceans as salt water. This water is too salty to be used for drinking and irrigation. Thus, only a tiny fraction (about 3%) of the Earth’s water is available to us as freshwater. Out of this, 2.997% is locked up in the mountains or glaciers or is buried so deep under that it costs too much to extract. So, only about 0.003% of the fresh water is easily available to us in the form of groundwater, river, lake, stream, soil moisture, and water vapour.

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Diagrammatic representation of water on Earth

Most of the water that exists on Earth is in the seas and oceans. Sea and ocean water is highly salty and hence unfit for drinking. Most of the fresh water is frozen in the glaciers and in the polar ice caps, and is thus not readily available. Only a small fraction of fresh water is readily available for use. Therefore, all of us must make an effort to use water judiciously.

FORMS OF WATER

In nature, water exists in three states. It could be in the form of liquid (e.g., rain, river, sea), solid (e.g., ice, snow, hail), or gas (e.g., water vapour).

You can heat water over a stove to convert it into vapour. What happens if you leave water in an uncovered vessel on a summer afternoon outside your house? After a few hours, you will find that the level of water in the vessel has decreased. This is because a lot of it would have escaped into the atmosphere in the form of water vapour. The process by which a liquid is converted to its vapour is called evaporation.

What about the reverse process? The process by which the vapour of a substance is converted to its liquidform is called condensation. Water vapour is also added into the air by the leaves of plants, through the process of transpiration. Evaporation and condensation of water take place on a very large scale on the surface of the Earth and its atmosphere. These processes play a key role in cloud formation and rain.

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Forms of water

All the three states of water are also present in our natural environment at any given time.
Solid: Glaciers, icebergs, snow, hail, frost, and ice crystals in the clouds are solid forms of water.
Liquid: Rain, dew, and clouds are water droplets or liquid forms of water. Liquid water also covers three-quarters of the surface of the Earth in the form of lakes, rivers, and oceans.
Gaseous: Water vapour, fog, steam, and clouds are gaseous forms of water. Water exists in all the three states because water can change its state very easily in a range of temperatures, i.e., between 0°C (ice) and 100°C (vapour). This change also takes place on its own in our environment forming a cycle which we know as the water cycle.

WATER CYCLE
Water droplets in the clouds keep bumping against one another, and sometimes stick to form bigger drops. When these drops become too heavy to float in the air, they drop down back to the Earth as rain. The water that comes down as rain, in time, evaporates and goes up to form clouds again. This leads to form a cycle, known as the water cycle. It is also called the hydrological cycle. Water cycle is the cyclic movement of water from the atmosphere to the Earth and back to the atmosphere through various processes.

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Water Cycle

CLOUD FORMATION
When the temperature of air increases, it expands (i.e., its particles move away from one another). This makes the air lighter and it rises in the atmosphere, taking water vapour with it. As the air rises, it begins to cool. The water vapour condenses on dust particles present in the atmosphere to form millions of tiny droplets. Tiny ice crystals will be formed instead if it is very cold. This cluster of tiny water droplets floating in air is what we call a cloud.

Activity

Aim: To observe condensation of water.
Materials needed: A glass or metal tumbler, ice-cold water and a handkerchief
Method:

  1. Take the tumbler and wipe it dry, both inside and outside.
  2. Pour ice-cold water into the tumbler.
  3. Wait for sometime and see what happens to the outer surface of the tumbler.

Observation: You will find that the outer surface of the tumbler becomes foggy with water droplets on it.
Conclusion: This is because water vapour in the atmosphere condenses on the cold surface of the tumbler.

Aim: To demonstrate condensation of steam.
Materials needed: A vessel with boiling water and a metal lid.
Method:

    1. Ask an adult to boil some water in a vessel and carefully place the vessel on a table.
    2. Hold the lid on top of the vessel so that the steam coming from the water touches it.

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Observation: After a short while, you will find that the side of the lid facing the steam will have droplets of water.
Conclusion: This is because steam from the water condenses on the metal lid. The same can be done by holding a spoon over a steaming cup of water, tea, or coffee.

What Are The Uses Of Forests

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Top 10 Uses Of Forests

  • Forests play a major role in our life. Early humans gathered food and were dependent on forests for all their basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.
    We depend on forests for several or various other things directly or indirectly.
  • Forests prevent soil erosion and floods. Roots of trees bind the soil particles together and prevent the soil from being washed or blown away.
  • Trees help to regulate the climate of a place. They absorb water from the ground through their roots, and then release some of it as water vapour. In this way, they manage to keep the surrounding air cool. By raising the water vapour content of the atmosphere, trees are responsible for bringing the rains, too. Trees also help in keeping a check on global warming by using carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas for photosynthesis.What Are The Uses Of Forests 1
  • Some trees, such as coconuts and palms, help to break strong winds in coastal areas. They act as shields or windbreakers against incoming storms or strong tidal waves.
  • We get timber from more than a thousand species of trees such as sal, mahogany, teak, and rosewood. Several timber- based industries such as those of plywood, sawmills, paper and pulp, and cardboards are all dependent on these trees. We get firewood from trees.
  • We get several nuts and spices from plants ‘ growing in forests.
  • Plants such as neem, eucalyptus, and amla (Indian gooseberry) are used to make several Ayurvedic medicines. Cinchona trees provide quinine, which is an important medicine for treating malaria. Many varieties of grasses such as lemon grass, vanilla, kewra, and khus are the sources of several kinds of essential oils. Sandalwood, eucalyptus, and pine also give us oil, which can be extracted from these trees.
  • Forests are a source of resins (used to make varnish and paint), latex (used to make rubber), bamboo (useful as fodder, and serves as an important raw material for the manufacture of paper and pulp, basket and other small-scale industries), and cane (used to make walking sticks, furniture, baskets, picture frames, screens, and mats).

Forests Help In Purifying Air

Forests play a vital role in releasing huge amounts of oxygen into the air. Forests are rich in plants and animals. All plants and animals breathe in air to survive. Green plants take in atmospheric carbon dioxide to manufacture their own food (photosynthesis) and release oxygen as a by-product. Forests also serve as a sink for carbon dioxide obtained in the following ways: given out by plants and animals during respiration, produced by burning coal and petroleum, given out as a result of volcanoes and other natural disasters. Thus, forests help to balance the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forests, especially rainforests, are referred to as the ‘lungs’ of the Earth.

What are the Physical Resources and Explain the Role of Air

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What are the Physical Resources and Explain the Role of Air

The materials present in natural environment & useful to living organism are called natural resources.

Natural Resources can be classified into two groups.

  1. Physical resources : E.g, Air, water, soil, minerals, coal etc.
  2. Biological resources :  E.g. Microorganisms, plants & animals.

The Breath of life : Air
Air is a mixture of gases which is odourless, tasteless & invisible. Air also holds water vapour & dust particles.

Atmosphere :
The envelop of air that surrounds the earth is called Atmosphere.

Role of atmosphere in climate control  :
Air is a bad conductor of heat. It act as a protective blanket for the living organisms to exist in the following way –

  1. Atmosphere prevent the sudden increase in temperature during the day hours. During night it slow down the escape of heat into the outer space. Thereby preventing excessive cooling during night.
  2. The ozone shield of atmosphere absorb most of the harmful UV radiations coming from the sun.  The excessive heat & sun rays are reffected back into the outer space by dust particles.

Movement of Air :
Heating of air occur due to reradiation of solar radiations by the land & water bodies. In fact, when the solar radiation fall on the earth, some are absorbed & majority of these are reflected back or reradiated by the land & water bodies. These solar radiations heat up the atmosphere from below. As a result, convection currents are set up in the air. But since the land gets heated faster than the water, the air over land also gets heated faster than the air over water bodies. Hot air on land rises upwards thereby producing an area of the low air pressure. Air from region of high pressure will move towards this region of low pressure producing breez or wind.

Rain :
The air carrying water vapour also get heated. This hot air rises up in the atmosphere carrying water vapour with it. As the air rises. it expands & cool. This cooling cause the water vapour to condense in the form of tiny droplets. Suspended particles of dust & other materials act as nuclei to facilitate the process of condensation of water around them. A collection of tiny droplets of water appear in the form of ‘clouds’. These droplets of water slowly grown bigger by the condensation of more water droplets.
When the droplets have grown big & heavy they fall down in the form of ‘rain’.

Water
Water is one of the basic necessities of life. It is an inexhaustible natural resource which is liquid between 0ºC and 100ºC. We need water for various activites such as drinking, cooking of food, bathing and washing. It is also needed for irrigation of crop in agriculature, as an essential requirement in industries, and for navigation.
Water plays a vital role in the metabolic reactions taking place within the organism’s body. It acts as a universal solvent, providing a medium for the chemical reactions to occur. In fact, all the chemical reactions that occur within body cells involve substances that are dissolved in water. Substances are also transported from one part of the body to the other in dissolved form.
97.5% of the water on the planet earth is found in seas and oceans as saline water and is not available to us for use directly. Only 2.5% of the total water resources of the world consist of fresh water. Majority of it (about 2%) is found frozen in the ice-caps at the two poles and on snow-covered mountains. Remaining (0.6% of the total) is available to support terrestrial life. Majority (90%) of this fresh water is found underground as ground water and only 10% occurs as surface water in lakes, ponds, streams, rivers etc. Limited amount of fresh water is available to us as a renewable souce through water cycle but its distribution is uneven.

Soil
The top surface layer of this exposed, solid part of crust containing weathered minerals and humus and capable of supporting plant growth is called soil.

Soil Formation
The process of soil formation is so slow that the soil is regarded as a non-renewable resource.
Pedogenesis
It is the process of formation of soil from rocky earth’s crust. It involves following two processes:
Weathering
Decomposition of organic matter and subsequent humification and mineralization.
Main factors that influence the formation of soil from the rocks are –

  1. Temperature variations due to radiactions of the sun.
  2. Rain water
  3. Winds
  4. Living organisms

What are Natural Resources

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What are Natural Resources 

Natural resources
Natural resources are nonliving and living components of nature which are being used or have the potential of being used by human beings for meeting their requirements of food, fodder, shelter, clothing, articles of use and recreation.

Inexhausitble resources :
Inexhausitble resources are those resources which occur in such abundance that they are unlikely to get exhausted with time, e.g., water, air, solar energy.

Exhaustible Resources :
Exhaustible resources are resources which are likely to diminish and get exhausted with continuous exploitation.

Exhuastible resources of two types :

  1. Renewable Resources :
    Renewable resources are exhaustible resources that are being replenished naturally and are, therefore, likely to remain available if they are not used beyond their renewability, e.g., forests, wildlife, soil.
  2. Nonrenewable Resources :
    Nonrenewable resources are those resources which are likely to get exhausted with continued use because of lack of regeneration, e.g., fossil fuel.