Water - 51 Interesting facts - FactoPedia Universe

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1. Water in New York City would cost you ten times less than water in Nairobi.

2. There are more countries where half the population does not have access to clean water than those with clean water for all.

3. The cost of having poor water is estimated to be at $260 billion globally. The lack of clean water causes sanitation, disease and nutrition issues.

4. On the continent of Africa people spend 40 billion hours getting clean water (and not from the tap).

5. The majority of the world’s population lives in areas that have the least amount of water. How many people is that? Calculate 85% of the current world population and you will have an idea.

6. Figuring out the average cost of water coming from main utilities to homes in the US is easy. The penny will get you 5 gallons of water.

7. You can cut corners on food, and even go without it for a month, but don’t expect to live out the week without water.

8. Pipes burst during cold weather because any water in them will expand by 9% in volume when it freezes.

9. This may surprise you to find out, but there is the exact same amount of water on the Earth as there was almost a million years ago – but how much is used has risen dramatically in the past 100 years.

10. The water mains delivering your penny 5 gallons will also leak out almost a full gallon before it reaches your home.

11. Americans flush their toilets each day to the tune of 5.7 billion gallons of water.

12. Want to save money? Buy one 99 cent bottle of spring water at the store and then refill it from the tap. You can do this over 1,700 times before you will have used the same cost of water in a new bottle.

13. The average human being uses 12 gallons a day to cook, bathe, drink and toilet.

14. Every time you breathe out you exhale water too. By the end of the day you have breathed out about a cup.

15. The rise of water use by 2025 stands to put countries in severe straits. The use is expected to go up by 50% in developed areas.

16. This means that by 2025, half the world’s population will have difficulty getting enough clean water for cooking, drinking and other uses.

17. Washing the dishes by hand uses an average of 20 gallons, but doing one load of dishes in a good dishwasher will only use just over 4 gallons of water.

18. Using water for outdoor chores can average 180 gallons a day. The sad part is that 90 of those gallons are wasted. They either evaporate or are used to over water plants.

19. A cup of tea is twice as efficient to make as a cup of coffee, which uses twice as much water.

20. Even the meats we eat have a water cost, chicken or goat require the least amount of water to raise for food – while pork and beef require the most.

21. Wars have been fought over water since the beginning of time with 256 conflicts recorded in human history.

22. It’s true; sometimes hot water can freeze faster than cold water.

23. Humans aren’t the only ones dependent on fresh water, but plants and animals are too.

24. Need fresh water? The best place to get it is in Antarctica where over 90% of the Earth’s supply of fresh water is located.

25. 97 percent of the water available on Earth is salty. Only 0.03 percent of world’s fresh water is found in rivers, lakes, ponds, streams and swamps. The rest is trapped in glaciers or is in the ground.

26. For every person in the industrialized world, 10 gallons per day is lost due to leaks.

27. Pools are water hogs with the average sized pool needing 22,000 gallons of water.

28. It may take almost 70 gallons of clean water to fill a bathtub, far more water used than the average 8 minute shower – 17.2 gallons.

29. A 700 mile round-trip by plane is not going to help the environment much. While you may be saving on carbon emissions you will be using over 9,000 gallons of H2O.

30. In the last century a pattern has developed that shows that water use rates double (and nearly triple) the rate of growth of the world’s population.

31. While there is plenty of water on Earth, very little of it is usable to support human life. It is estimated that about 0.007% of the Earth’s water resources are potable.

32. About 70.9% of the Earth’s surface is covered with water. Without water the Earth’s temperature wouldn’t be regulated.

33. Swimming pools release about a 1,000 gallons of water into the atmosphere through evaporation. That may be good for air water levels, but they still have to be refilled.

34. Using alternative fuels doesn’t look so good when you compare how much corn ethanol uses water compared to gasoline. One gallon of the ethanol needs 170 gallons of water to be made. For gasoline the water cost is just 5 gallons per gallon of fuel.

35. In the US only 40% of our freshwater is used for farming, the rest goes for potable (drinkable use). This is why the US has one of the lowest disease rates from contaminated water.

36. China is water starved, over 65% of all of their freshwater has to go to farming, that leaves far less than what is needed to provide safe water for people.

37. In some countries, freshwater is used mostly for farming. This can lead to higher levels of illness from contaminated water for human use.

38. Even with low water use toilets they still do too much water. We could save the equivalent of a ½ mile by ½ mile pool of water that was 8 feet deep if we all flushed one less time a day.

39. If saving 85 billion gallons of water a day in the US sounds like a good idea, you’ll be even more surprised at how it would be done. If everyone took a shower that was one minute shorter that’s how much we’d save.

40. There is a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving Day – including water. To get dinner for 8, with all the trimmings, to the table takes almost 43,000 gallons of water. That could fill an Olympic swimming pool.

41. Water is more common than dirt. It is the most prevalent substance on earth in all its forms – fresh, salt and frozen.

42. All those old glaciers on those mountains are more than just pretty to look at; states like Washington draw more than 470 million gallons of water each summer from them. This is also why snowfall in those ski resort areas should be important to everyone. It replenishes the surface of the glaciers.

43. The human body is mostly water. It makes up 66 percent of the fluid content of the body along with the blood and lymph fluid system too.

44. While you always hear that you should drink 8 glasses of water a day there is no real reason for that. No scientific study has established a daily amount. Instead, certain physical signs of hydration are used to determine what you need such as the color of your urine and fatigue.

45. Yes, drinking too much water is just as dangerous as not drinking enough. Water intoxication is fatal and occurs when you drink too much too fast.

46. The atmosphere that surrounds the Earth holds more fresh water than all the rivers, lakes and reservoirs combined. When there is damage to that atmosphere, or it becomes polluted – there is less fresh water available.

47. You always hear about all the H20 in the Earth’s atmosphere and many scientists talk about how to tap into this during a drought, but if all that water did fall to the ground at the same time there wouldn’t be any kind of flood. All the water would at most put an inch of water everywhere in the world.

48. In just over 7 years the average American family will use 750,000 gallons of water in their home. That is the same amount that goes over Niagara Falls in about a second. That doesn’t mean that we have a lot of water to spare, it means as our population grows we will eventually deplete that resource.

49. If you want to give back some water to the atmosphere then plant an acre of corn. One acre has a daily evaporation rate of water equal to 4,000 gallons of water.

50. Over 80% of all the crops grown on Earth for us to eat and to feed the animals that we also eat is watered by rain. This is why rainfall amounts are so important, and droughts so scary. If there isn’t enough rainfall, the crops don’t grow and food prices rise.

51. 748 million people in the world do not have access to an improved source of drinking water.