Shannon Schriber, age 11, of Stone Mountain, Ga., for her question:
HOW MUCH WATER SHOULD WE DRINK DAILY?
There isn't a plant, animal or human being on earth that could stay alive without water. All of life's processes, from the taking in of food to getting rid of wastes, requires water. But water for many is needed for more than just staying alive: it is needed to keep our homes functioning and to keep our factories and manufacturing plants in operation.
Every living thing is made up mostly of water. A human's body, for example, is about 65 percent water. A potato is 80 percent water and a tomato is about 95 percent water.
Man must have water in order to live. It would be possible for a man to continue to live without food for more than a month. But he couldn't go for much more than a week without water. If he loses more than 20 percent of his body's normal water content, a man will die.
Every single day, a man must take in about two and a half quarts of water. This doesn't have to be in the form of water or beverages but can be in the form of food which contains water.
It takes about 70 gallons of water every day to keep the average human being going. That's a lot of water.
It takes about three gallons of water to flush a toilet, for example, and it takes between 30 and 40 gallons of the wet stuff to fill a bathtub. If you use a shower, it takes at least five gallons of water for each minute you bathe.
When you wash your dinner dishes, you end up using about 10 gallons of water. And when you run your automatic washing machine, you can count on about 30 gallons of water being used.
It takes a lot of water to keep things running outside the home, too. For example, about 115 gallons of water must 4e used to grow enough wheat to bake just one loaf of bread.
Something like 110 billion gallons of water must be used every single day in the United States just to irrigate the nation's fields. This would be enough water to fill a lake five miles long and one mile wide to a depth of 100 feet.
It takes about 270 tons of water to make just one ton of steel and about 250 tons of water to make a single ton of paper.
Factories in the United States use about 140 billion gallons of water every day from wells, rivers or lakes. This is about 52 percent of all the water used in the country.
Although industry uses a great deal of water, only about two percent of it is consumed. Most of the water used for cooling is piped back to the rivers or lakes from which it is taken.