The Little things that count…
A fraction of 1 per cent of drinkable tap water is actually drunk.
It takes half a gallon of water to cook a pot of rice, and a gallon to wash the pot.
You need 100 drops of water to fill a teaspoon.
The biggest domestic water consumer is the toilet — 2.2 gallons for every flush. Around 32 per cent of our drinking water is flushed down the toilet.
Just one part oil per million parts water will make drinking water smell and taste funny. One gallon of petrol can contaminate 750,000 gallons of water.
If you could weigh all the water that fell on a single acre of land during a one inch rainfall it would weigh 113 tons — that is 226,000 pounds.
The amount of water on earth has remained the same since the planet was created some 4,500 million years ago.
Without clouds and the rest of the earth’s atmosphere to act as a blanket, our planet would swing to wild extremes — scorching hot where the sun beats down by day, and bitterly cold at night, much like the airless Moon.
Courtesy: Academy of Mountain Environmics,Dehradun.
Editor’s note (July 2026): The last line originally gave two exact temperatures for an Earth with no atmosphere. Those numbers were incorrect. We have replaced them with what would really happen: blazing hot days and freezing cold nights, much like the airless Moon.
Word treasure
- acre
- — a unit of land measurement
- constituents
- — parts or elements that make something
- gallon
- — a unit of liquid measurement
- million
- — one followed by six zeros, a very large number
