你不知道的有关水的20件事

20 things you don't know about the water

1 Water is everywhere—there are 332,500,000 cubic miles of it on the earth’s surface.
 But less than 1 percent of it is fresh and accessible, even when you include bottled water.

水无处不在，地球表面有3.325亿立方英里的水资源，但即使包括瓶装水在内，也只有不到1%是可以获取的淡水。
2 And “fresh” can be a relative term. Before 2009, federal regulators did not require water
bottlers to remove E. coli.

“新鲜的”是一种相对的称谓，在2009年以前，联邦管理部门没有要求装瓶机去除大肠杆菌。
3 Actually, E. coli doesn’t sound so bad. In 1999 the Natural Resources Defense Council found that one
brand of spring water came from a well in an industrial parking lot near a hazardous waste dump.

实际上，大肠杆菌听起来还不是最坏的，1999年自然资源保护委员会发现一种品牌矿泉水竟产自于一个工业园区的有害物质丢弃处。
4 Cheers! The new Water Recovery System on the International Space Station recycles 93 percent of
astronauts’ perspiration and urine, turning it back into drinking water.

太棒了！国际空间站的新型水循环利用系统可以将宇航员93%的尿液和汗液转化成饮用水。

下面的请自己翻译，抱歉......

5 Kurdish villages in northern Iraq are using a portable version of the NASA system to purify water
 from streams and rivers, courtesy of the relief group Concern for Kids.

6 Ice is a lattice of tetrahedrally bonded molecules that contain a lot of empty space. That’s why it floats.

7 Even after ice melts, some of those tetrahedrons almost always remain, like tiny ice
cubes 100 molecules wide. So every glass of water, no matter what its temperature, comes on the rocks.

8 You can make your own water by mixing hydrogen and oxygen in a container and adding a spark.
 Unfortunately, that is the formula that destroyed the Hindenburg.

9 Scientists have a less explosive recipe for extracting energy from hydrogen and oxygen.
Strip away electrons from some hydrogen molecules, add oxygen molecules with too
many electrons, and bingo! You get an electric current. That’s what happens in a fuel cell.

10 Good gardeners know not to water plants during the day. Droplets clinging to the leaves can act
 as little magnifying glasses, focusing sunlight and causing the plants to burn.

11 Hair on your skin can hold water droplets too. A hairy leg may get sunburned more
quickly than a shaved one.

12 Vicious cycle: Water in the stratosphere contributes to the current warming of the earth’s
atmosphere. That in turn may increase the severity of tropical cyclones, which throw more
water into the stratosphere. That’s the theory, anyway.

13 The slower rate of warming in the past decade mightbe due to a 10 percent
drop in stratospheric water. Cause: unknown.

14 Although many doctors tell patients to drink eight glasses of water a day, there is no scientific
evidence to support this advice.

15 The misinformation might have come from a 1945 report recommending that Americans
consume about “1 milliliter of water for each calorie of food,” which amounts to 8 or 10 cups
a day. But the report added that much of that water comes from food—a nuance many
people apparently missed.

16 Call waterholics anonymous: Drinking significantly more water than is needed can cause
“water intoxication” and lead to fatal cerebral and pulmonary edema. Amateur marathon runners
have died this way.

17 Scientists at Oregon State University have identified vast reservoirs of water beneath
the ocean floor. In fact, there may be more water under the oceans than in them.

18 Without water, ocean crust would not sink back into the earth’s mantle. There would be no plate
 tectonics, and our planet would probably be a lot like Venus: hellish and inert.

19 At the other end of the wetness scale, planet GJ 1214b, which orbits a red dwarf star,
may be almost entirely water.

20 Recent evidence suggests that when the solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago, comets had liquid
cores. If so, life may have started in a comet.