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This is a Clilstore unit. You can link all words to dictionaries.

States of matter 2. The water

On earth everything is made up of matter. It’s everything around us, heavy rocks are made of matter and even things we can’t see like air are made of matter; even your friend are made of matter. If it takes up space then is matter.

Matter is made up of atoms and molecules which are too tiny to see unless you have a very strong microscope they are like tiny little building blocks that make up everything around us to give up an idea, there are almost ten octillion water molecules in a single drop of rain, that’s a lot of zeros. Matter can be any size; it can be the size of a rocket as huge as a mountain or as tiny as a grain of sand; different objects have different amount of molecules and atoms. The kinds of atoms and molecules in matter make something shiny, make something heavy and hard, and makes some things light and soft.

There are three main states all kinds of matter: solid liquid or gas

A solid is something that holds its shape. Solids can be hard like a toaster, a pencil or a cricket bat, or they can be soft rubber toy or a piece of clay. A solid means that the atoms are packed in really close together so they can’t move which means the object holds its shape.

A liquid on the other hand will always change its shape. It change its shape to fit the shape of the container it’s put in, a liquid can flow which means it can be poured. So if you pour water in to a fish bowl, it moves to become the shape of the fish bowl. Liquids up sometimes thick like honey or thin like water but no matter what they’ll always flow. Atoms in a liquid can move around but they’ll stay together.

A gas like a liquid takes the shape of the container it’s in but will also spread out to fill the container when a balloon fills with water, the water fills up the bottom first, but when you fill it with a gas, the gas fills the whole balloon.

Sometimes matter can change states, usually by changing its temperature. If you heat ice cream, it will melt and turn to a liquid, if you make the ice cream cool again it will then turn back to a solid.

Water is unique because is the only thing on earth that naturally occurs in all three states, as a solid, as a liquid and as a gas; and it can change states quite easily. Water in its most common as a liquid, covers about seventy percent of the planet. It also has no taste, smell or colour. Water constantly changes states in nature, in very cold places like the mountains the water freezes into ice and snow; the sun then warms the frozen water causing it to melt to liquid water; as the sun continues to hit it, the water begins to evaporate. In warmer places the sun heats up the world of faster causing the water to evaporate more quickly. The warmer the environment the quicker the water will evaporate

Heat from the sun warms the water, this turns the liquid water into a gas or water vapor which rises into the air; this is known as evaporation. As the water vapor moves up higher and higher into the sky, it starts to cool down turning back into tiny droplets of liquid water; this is known as condensation and is what causes clouds to form. As these droplets of water joined together to become bigger drops they become too heavy to stay in the air and fall back down to earth as rain hail or snow this is known as precipitation.

Hail and snow are water as a solid but they won’t stay this way once the ground they’ll eventually warm and melt and turn back into a liquid. This water is then evaporated up by the sun and this goes on and on. In nature the way water keeps changing states is called the water cycle; rain is part of the water cycle and from it we collect water to drink and use in our homes.

Please remember: love every drop

Clilstore Exercises

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